berally cuts out large sections of the play which are significant to its meaning, while throwing in others at his own volition, such as the opening during which we are privy to King Hamlet’s funeral. Perhaps recognizing the limitations of Gibson, Zeffirelli thought the entire movie needed “dumbed-down” so those in the audience with a similar level of intellectual skills or literary background would “get it.” While few in the audience would have trouble “getting” this Hamlet, Zeffirelli’s liberal doses of edits and additions cause it to stray so far away from what is in the original text as to make one wonder about the ego of the filmmaker and his penchant for reading more into the text than is present. Nowhere are these heavy-handed manipulations more frustrating and inexplicable to someone familiar with the play than in the climactic scene between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude (played by Glenn Close). Close is an actress of a higher caliber than Gibson and she delivers Shakespearean verse as well as most Americans who try, but this cannot save the carnal, beyond-Oedipal-conflict interpretations of the scenes between she and Gibson as Hamlet.
After the play-within-a-play scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he arranges to visit his mother in her chambers. This scene is one of the most significant in the p
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