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ues. The links forged between Heston as the white-bearded, “good Father”/Player, Blessed as the enormous Ghost, and Jacobi as the father-Claudius in Branagh’s version make it the most Oedipal of all Hamlets on screen, despite its director’s denials. The Father and the Name-of-the-Father completely dominate Branagh’s Hamlet, a film that resituates Shakespeare’s text in a new age of taboos and repression, symptoms, and traumas. This adaptation represses the maternal in Hamlet, featured in disparate ways in both Olivier’s and Zeffirelli’s films, and valorizes instead the paternal law and its dictates for normalcy through visual disavowals and displacements. Branagh’s Hamlet delivers more than it promises through its “complete text” of Shakespeare’s play; it reinscribes—in an unself-conscious and therefore insidious way—the dominant fiction of Freud’s family romance, along with its repressive ideology.
Notes
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I would like to thank Courtney Lehmann for her helpful commentary, particularly for her insights on “Hamlet-as-analyst” in Branagh’s Hamlet.
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For a more comprehensive discussion of Freud’s work on mourning and Hamlet, see Lupton and Reinhard 1993:11–33.
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Freud’s commentary on Hamlet was included as a footnote in the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, then as part of the text in later printings after 1914.
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Freud undercuts a biographical reading of Hamlet later on by denying Shakespearean authorship in a 1930 footnote.
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Jones makes only brief mentions of melancholy in his book, first in reference to earlier views of Hamlet’s delay (1954:74) and second in discussion of Hamlet’s suicidal impulse (100).
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Olivier never cites Freud as a source for his production (see Olivier 1982 and Donaldson 1990:32).
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For an extended explication of Lacan’s reading of Hamlet, see Z̆iz̆ek (1989:120–21).
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The psychoanalytic term “(m)Other”, conflating “mother’’ and “Other,” refers to the abstract concept of the mother as the primary Other against which the human subject must define itself. Separation from the mother is necessary before a human being can begin to see itself as a separate entity. From this initial break, the human subject constitutes its identity in relation to that which it is not, that which is the Other, or “not me.” Therefore, the mother, in a figurative sense, becomes the Other from which human identity is formed.
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