Blackwell Reference Online

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Released in 2000, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet has been well received as a coherent and persuasive transposition of the Shakespearean text into the milieu of urban postmodernity. Fast-paced, youth-oriented, and relentlessly contemporary, Almereyda's treatment is part of the wave of Shakespearean films, initiated by Baz Lurhmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), which have sundered the genre's long-standing affiliations to period costume drama and historical epic; in this instance, by setting the play in Manhattan, styling Ethan Hawke's Prince as an upper-middle-class dropout and amateur filmmaker, and rendering its action in terms of corporate intrigue and the micro-politics of the WASP post-nuclear family (see also Walker, Donaldson). Two innovations in particular interest me here. First, the domain of the film's action is neither military nor political but economic. Envisaging a metropolitan scene in which, in the context of American-led globalization, the classic European nation-state has become irrelevant and even meaningless, Almereyda makes Denmark over as the Denmark Corporation, a mysterious, smartly logoed transnational; an incarnation of business culture familiar from Wall Street (1987) and American Psycho (2000), it provides a comprehensible generic location for corruption, violence, and paranoid plotting, and for the protagonist's alienated impotence ... log in or subscribe to read full text