34 - Kenneth Branagh's William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Hi! I just became a patron of this podcast and I really enjoyed this episode. I’d like to hear you talk about more Shakespeare movies, even if they’re good. You’re both very intelligent.

I think there's something hilarious and bleak about this becoming 'the teaching tool' for Hamlet in schools. Of course it would be, for treating the text as sacrosanct but that just reflects the problems with how Shakespeare is often taught; my experience was that - because you're ultimately being trained to write an essay response to a number of effectively preset questions - there's an emphasis on learning parts of the text of the play verbatim, able to recite and reproduce them, largely devoid of context. It was only when I started viewing the questions as invitations to engage with the text thematically that I was actually able to retain them because context links them together. That's sort of how I feel every time I look back on Brannagh's adaptation in the years since then - it's someone who was so obsessed with Doing Shakespeare, the actual story about a scared, depressed teenager called Hamlet became a secondary concern. Also yes I just did enjoy the simple pleasure of listening to two people rip into something they didn't like, thanks.