It’s possible that an earlier play of Hamlet - which is now lost, its author unknown, and referred to as the Ur-Hamlet - was another influence for Shakespeare’s play. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” Curiously, while the film’s first trailer emphasizes Amleth’s relentless determination via a smash-cut between young and old Amleth repeating his mantra, in the actual movie, the older Amleth delays his revenge, Hamlet-like, and must be reminded to fulfill his sworn vow by Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), this version’s analogue for Ophelia. While Shakespeare’s Hamlet spends several hours debating with himself whether and how he’ll actually kill his uncle, Eggers’s Amleth vows revenge immediately, repeatedly declaring this oath: “I will avenge you, father. The story is familiar: Prince Amleth (played as an adult by Alexander Skarsgård) vows revenge on his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) for killing his father King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) and kidnapping and marrying his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). Instead, Eggers goes back to the same source Shakespeare used - the legend of Amleth as it appears in The History of the Danes by medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus - and his film provides fascinating points of comparison to Shakespeare’s treatment of the same material.Īlexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Northman (2022) Now comes Robert Eggers’s The Northman, a film in conversation with Hamlet despite not actually being an adaptation of it. (This list doesn’t even include Hamlet’s influence on recent superhero movies and an 80-year-old wartime comedy.)
Hamlet may or may not be Shakespeare’s greatest play, but it’s arguably the one that takes up the largest space in our cultural imagination.
0 kommentar(er)
