Michael Almereyda's Hamlet 2000 Play

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Recommended: The Tragedy of Hamlet

Analysis of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000)

Shakespeare’s original play version of the bedroom scene was right after the play within a play. Hamlet would storm into his mother, Gertrude’s room and tell her how offensive it is that she moved on to Claudius so quickly after the King had just passed. This whole time Polonius is eavesdropping on the conversation behind the tapestry. The ghost king is also eavesdropping on the event (Shakespere, 72). The evesdropping of Polonius leads to his death, and his death leads to the whole royal family’s death. In the 2000 version of Hamlet, Michael Almereyda uses set design and blocking of the bedroom scene to highlight the dangers of eavesdropping on both a personal and public level.

In Michael Almereyda’s …show more content…

At the end of the film, Hamlet too, gets shot to death. By shooting his reflection in the bedroom scene, Almereyda uses the mirror to reflect into the future of the film (Almereyda, 2000). This foreshadowing and the actual death of Hamlet sums up the theme of eavesdropping being dangerous.

This scene takes place in a room at Hotel Elsinore with lot of windows. Almereyda chose to use include large windows, because not only is it a reflective surface like the mirror, it shows that this situation is visible to the whole city. This is another means of eavesdropping, just a more public version. Public eavesdropping is a reoccurring theme in the Michael Almereyda version of Hamlet. Another example would be all the CCTV cameras that capture and relay this situation to the rest of the public.

In terms of blocking, Almereyda does some interesting things with Gertrude and the ghost king to demonstrate surveillance. When Hamlet and Gertrude begin to get feisty, Hamlet throws Gertrude on to the ground and pushes her face right into the mirrored door Polonius is standing behind. As we discussed earlier, that said mirror is no good in this scene. Almereyda uses this blocking to show the frustration from Hamlet about how even when he says “Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge; You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you”, his mother cant see the truth (72). Its almost

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