Beyond Epic: Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet and the Meta-Narrative Functions of Classical Hollywood Genre

In a filmed Shakespeare career that has spanned over twenty years, Kenneth Branagh has always conceived of his mission as a popularizing one, bringing Shakespeare to those who may not otherwise encounter the work, and making the plays accessible and easily comprehensible. In this way, Branagh's filmic practice is distinct from aggressively postmodern stylists like Baz Luhrmann or Julie Taymor in that his approach to the Shakespearean source text is motivated by a reliance on genre styles derived from the Classical Hollywood cinema.1 As Samuel Crowl has observed, "Branagh's route beyond Olivier, as a British-trained Shakespearean who makes films, lies in his infatuation with popular film culture, with what we have come to call 'Hollywood'" ("Flamboyant Realist" 224). Indeed, in evaluating his own directorial approach, Branagh confesses that he is "absolutely unembarrassed" by the frequent reliance on Hollywood devices that defines his style (Crowl, The Films of Kenneth Branagh 170). Throughout his films, Branagh employs conventions of film genre as markers through the terrain of the Shakespearean text, terrain that is otherwise unfamiliar to the majority of his intended popular audience. These generic references and structures serve a meta-narrative function: as elements of the films' narrative discourse, they "frame" the source text, bringing with them a network of intertextual codes that render the source easily assimilable, and thus help to direct audience response. The generic appeal in Branagh's films is one that has seemed to grow progressively, becoming increasingly critical to his Shakespearean adaptation as his career has evolved. For instance, Branagh's debut film, Henry V, is the least classically generic of all his films, relying primarily on intertextual and generic references to more contemporary styles, like the action genre and the Vietnam War film. Much Ado About Nothing closely accords to the norms of the screwball comedy, a generic correspondence derived primarily from the Shakespearean text. Love's Labour's Lost presents a pinnacle in Branagh's conceptual and generic development, wholly subordinating the logic and authority of the Shakespearean source text to the demands of the classical Hollywood musical. Branagh's films, then, are critically intertextual in that the norms of generic production mediate the Shakespearean text; in this way, his Shakespeare films challenge traditional notions of adaptation in that they appeal to multiple (not solely textual) forms of authority. In the context of Branagh's entire Shakespearean canon, Hamlet is significant for a densely layered approach to genre that moves his storytelling beyond stage tragedy: the film employs three different, yet intricately interconnected, genres to metanarrate the Shakespearean text - all genres characterized, significandy, by a sense of excess. Here, Branagh's generic approach is expansive, deploying devices drawn from the historical epic as a frame-, further, the film incorporates domestic melodrama at its heart, and a horror-show encounter at its core. In some instances, Branagh uses generic tropes to reveal textual traits, thereby allowing film style to reinforce the already horrific and melodramatic qualities of the Shakespearean text; however, in his importation of the historical epic, he imposes a generic frame absent from the text. This essay examines the multiple generic modes that meta-narrate Branagh's film, and maps the ways in which Hamlet reveals the theoretical and critical constructs that govern each genre style. Hamlet's Epic Frame2 While critics of the Classical Hollywood epic film have rarely agreed on an absolute definition of the genre, they have nonetheless enumerated a distinct set of epic traits, chief among which is the relationship of the Hollywood epic to history.3 Indeed, in much film criticism, "epic" and "historical epic" are synonymous, indicating that one is inconceivable without the other. …