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Comparative Essay: Shaping Hamlet on the Silver Screen Two popular film renditions of Shakespeare’s great tragedy Hamlet present us with two very different interpretations of the title role. In the first act of each we come to know Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, played by Mel Gibson, as authentic, believable, never exaggerated and not altogether puzzling; in stark contrast, Kenneth Branagh directs and plays a Hamlet who is fantastic, larger than life, intensely tortured, and …

…question: where does the boundary lie between Hamlet’s external and internal world, between his conscious and unconscious mind? Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is intense and larger than life, as are many aspects of his cinematic interpretation. But because the interpretation is both consistent throughout the film and, more importantly, consistent with the larger than life but universal human themes explored by Shakespeare, it succeeds in ways that Zeffirelli’s Hamlet can only dream of.