Comparison of Three Versions of "Hamlet"

Paper Summary:

This paper compares the way three writers use adaptations of earlier texts to write their own versions of "Hamlet." The paper includes a comparison of Shakespeare's original "Hamlet", since he also based his version upon earlier Danish historical texts and stories written about Hamlet.

From the Paper:

"Shakespeare's Hamlet, Michael Almereyda's film adaptation of Shakespeare's text, and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which uses both characters and scenes from Shakespeare's play to create a new work, all offer radically different variations on the theme of Hamlet. While Almereyda edits Shakespeare's Hamlet down and changes its context and the medium of presentation in order to give the 400 year-old work a new millennial resonance, Stoppard almost uses Shakespeare's Hamlet as a sort of leitmotif in quilting a new mosaic work. Stoppard uses the familiar characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the pieces of the play in which those characters appear, but the rest of his work is clearly informed by a twentieth century sensibility his work is as influenced by Beckett's Waiting for Godot as it is by Elizabethan drama. These two adaptations are created through a conscious decision to place the new text in dialogue with Shakespeare's "master" text, which is the culturally dominant form of Hamlet. These other versions seek, however, to explore the very possibilities left unexplored by the master text, or else to explore the gaps and spaces that the master text has left open for creative contemplation in its devotion to the single path of narrative that Shakespeare chose."

More papers on Comparison of Three Versions of "Hamlet":

• Comparison Essay # 125496 : "Cinderella in Three Versions"
• Film Review # 32876 : "A Critical Analysis of Three Movies"
• Analytical Essay # 32872 : "Analysis of Three Advertisements"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: