July 19th: Afternoon Session on Gertrude and Scene Analysis

​Shannon Johnson
English Department
Valley High School
West Des Moines, IA

Everybody’s a Critic: Analyzing Multiple Versions of a Scene
 
“It was MUURRRRDEERRRR!!”
 
I can still hear my former student’s eerie tone as he made his case during a final Hamlet discussion. That class was particularly caught up in the many unanswered questions of the play. Was Hamlet’s madness more than an act? Did he really love Ophelia? Why did Gertrude really marry Claudius? Why is Gertrude able to provide such a detailed description of Ophelia’s death? However, the question that often creates the most buzz among my students is this one: What does Gertrude know and when does she know it?  I, too, love that question, so my interest piqued when Scott posed that exact question and said an upcoming lesson would allow us to explore it even further.
 
Scott brought five versions of the final Hamlet scene from five different directors (Cimolino, Branagh, Doran, Almereyda, and Gade) and asked us to watch how each version presented alternative answers to the Gertrude question. What did Gertrude really know and how much did she know before this scene began?  Based on the film’s choices, what was the director trying to suggest about Gertrude’s role in Hamlet?

[Note from Scott--I use pictures of my dog Windsor to separate different clips in compilations. :) ]

Beyond monitoring Gertrude’s role in the scene, participants rotated through five critic roles, taking on a different critic specialty for each version and recording observations per these directions:

●     Screenwriter: Closely follow the original text and note omissions, additions, pauses, stressed words, and rearrangements.

●     Cinematographer: Note and describe camera movement and angles, lighting, etc. While it is not your official job, consider editing as well.

●     Sound Editor: Listen for all music, background sounds, sound F/X, etc. Turn away from the screen to do this.

●   Set and Costume Designer: Note and describe sets, costumes, props, etc., paying particular attention to colors, and symbols.

●     Actor: Note and describe specific aspects of the performance, especially accents, subtext, and emphasis of certain words or lines.
 
When I use clips in class, I naturally lean in to the screenwriter and actor roles, focusing on which lines of a scene make the cut (or don’t) and how acting choices bring a specific interpretation of the text to life. However, giving attention to the other three roles helped us see just how much was going on in a specific clip to shape the interpretation. Even better, we weren’t overwhelmed by trying to individually observe just how much was going on in each clip. By distributing the critic roles, we could each narrow our focus, notice more details in a specific area, and have far more observations to share in our large group discussion. Depending on the version, Gertrude could be a clueless victim, a willing conspirator, or—as my former student argued—a calculating murderer.
 
A slam-dunk lesson staple has always been watching clips from different productions and comparing how the choices shape our understanding of a scene. Students are often surprised by the many possible takes on a character or setting. I usually ask students the following questions: What did you notice? What surprised you? Which version best matched your interpretation of the text?  While those questions yield plenty of discussion points, asking future students to take on a specific critical specialty will generate more focused observations about the performance choices and provide a new way to explore that popular Gertrude question.