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analyzes Hamlet’s character and actions to explore his unconscious longings, which underlie the tragedy. In Freud’s reading, Hamlet’s reluctance to fulfill the Ghost’s demand to kill his uncle stems from his identification with the murderer, “the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized” (Freud 1974:4:265). Freud then relates Hamlet’s unconscious to Shakespeare’s through biographical speculation, positing that Shakespeare identified with both the Ghost in grieving for his lost son, Hamnet, and with Hamlet himself in mourning the loss of his father (265–66). In the second preface to the 1908 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud extends this analysis to himself, drawing a parallel between Hamlet’s bereavement and his own grief upon his father’s death (Freud 1974:4:xxvi).4 Despite this emphasis, the issue of mourning disappears in Freud’s discussion of the Oedipal triangle, just as it does in his reading of Hamlet alongside Oedipus Rex. Consequently, the Oedipal reading of Hamlet comes to replace the melancholic one (Lupton and Reinhard 1993:18–19, 26).

II Appropriations of psychoanalysis in filmed Hamlets

Interestingly, appropriations of psychoanalysis in the history of Hamlet on screen follow this same trajectory, a gradual move away from a melancholic interpretation to one that highlights the father-son Oedipal rivalry, which can be detected in the three representative, popular screen adaptations of Hamlet directed by Olivier, Zeffirelli, and Branagh. Olivier’s self-pronounced “Oedipal” Hamlet, though ostensibly based on Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus (1954; first published in 1949), can be read as a meditation on melancholy, one more in tune with Freud’s ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia” than with Jones’s elaborations on Freud’s Oedipal interpretation. Zeffirelli’s film, although it may appear at first glance to be oriented in a Freud/ Jones Oedipal interpretation, more closely resembles Lacan’s reading of Hamlet, which emphasizes the interplay of desire and signification (see Lupton and Reinhard 1993:82–83). It is Branagh’s Hamlet that emerges at the end of the twentieth century as the most fully Oedipalized version, in which the father-son conflict and the onset of the paternal law completely overtake the melancholic and the maternal that are evident in both Olivier’s and Zeffirelli’s versions.

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