“Frailty, thy name is woman!”: The Oedipus complex and the feminine in Hamlet film adaptations, 1948-2009

When Laurence Olivier contemplated filming an adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet, it was with an understanding that the crux of the story was a Prince who could not make up his mind. However, after an encounter with Ernest Jones, a student of Sigmund Freud and an acclaimed psychoanalyst in his own right, Olivier identified a different trajectory based on the Oedipus complex. First coined by Freud, the Oedipus complex describes a theory of how a young boy unconsciously wishes to kill his father and sexually possess his mother in his stage of gender differentiation towards independence and adulthood. Olivier transformed Hamlet into a man who was driven by this very desire and crafted a film in 1948 that became the benchmark for future adaptations. As a byproduct of this new Oedipal approach, the character of Queen Gertrude became little more than a sexually inappropriate woman who betrays her son, former husband, and kingdom. This characterization of Gertrude, both throughout the decade and in her representation, has reduced her agency and made her into an embodiment of the problems that plague the court of Denmark. Throughout this thesis, six directors’ adaptations of Hamlet are examined to showcase an ongoing pattern in the degradation of the Queen’s character: Laurence Olivier (1948), Tony Richardson (1969), Franco Zeffirelli (1990), Kenneth Branagh (1996), Michael Almereyda (2000), and Gregory Doran (2009). Olivier, in using the Oedipus complex, creates a film that embodied the fear of excess femininity. Richardson, in his adaptation, displaces the Oedipus complex onto Ophelia and Laertes, and through this use, embodies the fear of uncontrollable female sexuality invading male spaces. Zeffirelli heightens the Oedipus complex, turning Gertrude into a hysterical woman who causes literal madness in Hamlet due to her sexuality. Branagh attempts to move away from the sexualization of the Oedipus complex, and in some ways returns a degree of agency to Gertrude; however, Branagh’s film ends up highlighting how the basis of the theory is founded on misogyny. Almereyda’s adaptation moves the courts of Denmark to modern New York, where women become fetishized tokens to be exchanged by men to gain power in a male-dominated capitalist world. This pattern of women being sexualized, demonized, and silenced is disrupted by Doran’s film, which reinstates Gertrude as a character in her own right and begins to move away from the rigid hold the Oedipus complex has on Hamlet adaptations. Despite creating new versions of Hamlet, the films under discussion were all influenced, to varying degrees, by the concept of the Oedipus complex. Specifically, the films reflect the male anxiety rooted in the roles of women that existed at the time of filming. Olivier, through the incorporation of the Oedipus complex, gives audiences and critics their desired explanation for the behaviour of the Prince, but the consequence is a reduction in agency for the character of Gertrude. Only through Doran’s return to a more complex Hamlet, without a definitive Oedipal model to understand the Prince, is Gertrude able to become more than a simple reflection of the men in her life. By addressing popular culture’s interpretation of Gertrude, my thesis offers not just a feminist critique but a broader, timely analysis of the ways in which Shakespearean adaptations reflect the culture in which they are produced. Keywords: Adaptation, Shakespeare, Hamlet, Film, Freud, Oedipus, Feminist Analysis

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