“Impersonality” in Shakespeare’s Hamletand Its Modern Adaptation in BBC Hamlet

Abstract

If one is to inherit a theatrical text to let it survive throughout time, there is a twofold task to be committed: in Roland Barthes’s terms, preserving its studium and at the same time devising its new punctum; in other words, maintaining consistency of the work without seriously ravaging it on one hand, and on the other, ingeniously appreciating the work to save it from repeated reception without any peculiar variation. In the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince Hamlet as a character with inward personality has been a punctum since the seventeenth century. However, now that such concepts as the unconscious or psychology have become so familiar a concept to the contemporary, Hamlet’s personality is hardly effective as a punctum. Alternately, the concept of impersonality in Hamlet is now new to us, hence a new punctum of the play. In this perspective, the foundational story of Hamlet is not the tragic drama itself, but rather the positionality of the prince Hamlet in Elsinore, that is, personality versus impersonality. Gregory Doran’s Hamlet (2009), produced by BBC in collaboration with Royal Shakespeare Company, provides an example of alternate reading of Hamlet by suggesting surveillance technology as the embodiment of impersonality in the play.