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The displaced body of desire: Sexuality in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet

LISA S.STARKS

The tragedy of Hamlet is the tragedy of desire.

(Jacques Lacan 1993)

Psychoanalytic theory and contemporary performances of Hamlet are inextricably linked. Beginning with Freud, psychoanalysis has appropriated the tragedy for its own theoretical ends, leaving its mark indelibly on the history of cultural and cinematic appropriations of Hamlet in the twentieth century.1 The tradition of Hamlet on screen necessarily emerges from this history, refiguring and recreating our current conceptions of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Beginning with Laurence Olivier’s influential screen adaptation (1948), these films chart the shifting connections between psychoanalysis and Hamlet that have underwritten popular and critical conceptions of the play. In contrast to directors who have openly positioned themselves within this psychoanalytic tradition, such as Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli (1991), Kenneth Branagh avoids any explicit reference to this inherited legacy in his 1996 cinematic epic Hamlet (1996a). Despite its resistance to psychoanalytic interpretation—or perhaps because of this resistance—Branagh’s Hamlet provides the most “Oedipal” of all filmed Hamlets, ironically replicating Freud’s own repression of the maternal through symptomatic denials and displacements in its representations of desire and sexuality.

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