Olivier, Hamlet, and Freud

Abstract

That Laurence Olivier was influenced by Freud in his 1947 film of Hamlet is well known.' It is hard to miss the suggestion of Oedipal malaise in the erotic scenes between Olivier and Eileen Herlie as Gertrude, the phallic symbolism of rapier and dagger as Olivier presents them, and other indications of a robust and enthusiastic interest in psychoanalysis. It is more difficult to specify exactly how the film uses psychological ideas, and to say what it achieves by doing so. The present essay attempts a reassessment of the psychological dimension of the film, making use of several new or overlooked resources. Olivier's autobiography, Confessions of an Actor,2 provides a helpful account of the director's consultation with Ernest Jones regarding Hamlet. Freud himself had written briefly on Hamlet,3 and Jones, a prominent British psychoanalyst, had expanded Freud's suggestions into a full-scale interpretation of the play in an article first published in 1910 that was to undergo several revisions and republications, finally appearing in 1949 as Hamlet and Oedipus.4 Olivier's remarks indicate how the director understood the Freudian approach to Hamlet and establish that his use of it in the film was intentional. But the Confessions throw light on the film in more subtle ways as well. Olivier's life story is full of Shakespearean allusions: quotes, misquotes, conscious and unconscious parallels. Echoes of Hamlet are particularly frequent, and reveal how central this text was in Olivier's conception of himself and in his construction of an autobiographical persona. Finally, the Confessions offer a candid account of the psychological tensions, Oedipal and other, of Olivier's early life in ways that are relevant to his work on the Hamlet film. In fact, as I shall suggest, Olivier's treatment of the Oedipal theme in Hamlet was influenced as much by his own early memories as it was by contact with Jones. Both the elaborate visual symbolism of the film and its emphasis on the main character's alternation between passivity and grandiosity bear a close relation to early sections of the autobiography. Several aspects of Olivier's address to psychological issues in Hamlet do not conform to the Freud/Jones view, but are illuminated by other psychoanalytic texts. Oedipal conflict in the film often has a passive character, and, though Freud elaborated a theory of the negative Oedipus complex, in which conflict is resolved by a feminine or passive submission to the father,5 he never applied this theory to Shakespeare's play. For other aspects of the film we must turn to