Derivative Works / Hamlet

A list of media based on Hamlet.

Many of the film versions of the play, plus several others (nine total), are compared and contrasted in this neat little article.

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Original works:

• Gesta Danorum (second half of the 12th century) by Danish monk Saxo Grammaticus. The legend of Amleth in it served as basis for the play, making Hamlet itself an adaptation/derivative work. Some works based on Hamlet have tried to harken back to the legend.
• The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1599-1601), play by English playwright William Shakespeare.

Adaptations and derivative works:

Film - Animated

• The Lion King (1994) is a rather loose adaptation by Disney. Barring the "Everybody Dies" Ending, obviously.

Film - Live Action

• Hamlet (1900), a two-minute early film from France, originally titled Le Duel de Hamlet, showed the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, and may be the first filmed adaptation of the play. As this production starred Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, this means the first movie Hamlet was a Gender Flipped version.
• Hamlet (1948), starring and directed by Laurence Olivier. Remains the only filmed Shakespeare to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. A heavily cut version (excluding such characters as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern entirely), with a murky Gothic aesthetic, and a prominent Freudian leaning (the actress playing Gertrude was eleven years younger than Olivier).
• The Bad Sleep Well (1960) by Akira Kurosawa, a much looser Film Noir version of the story (especially compared to Kurosawa's other adaptations of the Bard) set in the corporate culture of postwar Japan.
• Hamlet (1964), Soviet Russian film directed by Grigori Kozintsev, starring Innokenty Smoktunovsky and scored by Dmitri Shostakovich. It uses Scenery Porn to "oust period stylization and express the essentials"; it's also more political than Olivier's version, probably reflecting its post-Joseph Stalin production. Despite lacking original text and being heavily truncated it was critically very well-received, but it's never been televised in the United States.
• Hamlet (1969), directed by Tony Richardson. Shot on a modest budget with minimalist sets, featuring Nicol Williamson as Hamlet, Anthony Hopkins as Claudius, and Marianne Faithfull as Gertrude.
• Strange Brew (1983), a Bob and Doug MacKenzie adventure. Max von Sydow has taken control of Elsinore Brewery after killing his brother. Hamlet is actually a girl. Bob and Doug are essentially good-guy versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Oh, and there's a horde of Mind Controlled hockey players, one of whom is Horatio. It's Canadian. Don't ask.
• Hamlet (1990), starring Mel Gibson and directed by Franco Zeffirelli. This is heavily cut and rearranged and probably even more Freudian than the Olivier version. However, Gibson was praised for playing a youthful, energetic Hamlet. It also starred Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia, Glenn Close as Gertrude and Alan Bates as Claudius.
• Prince of Jutland (1994), is a mashup of Shakespeare's Hamlet and the original Saxo Grammaticus tale, set in Viking-age Denmark and starring Christian Bale as Amled.
• Hamlet 2, a 2008 film about creating a sequel to Hamlet.
• Hamlet (1996), starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh. This is a highly lavish, cinematic full-text^note with the exception of a few transposed lines, and thus clocking in at around 246 minutes long version set in the 1800s, which includes BRIAN BLESSED (as the Ghost) and a Falling Chandelier of Doom. With Kate Winslet as Ophelia. Oh, and Robin Williams as Osric, and Billy Crystal as the gravedigger.^note The All-Star Cast also includes Julie Christie as Gertrude, Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, Gérard Depardieu as Reynaldo, Charlton Heston as the King of the play, Richard Attenborough as the English Ambassador, and Dame Judi Dench and Sir John Gielgud as Hecuba and Priam of Troy. It's essentially Hamlet as an Epic Movie. Not financially successful, but critically acclaimed with some even calling it the greatest onscreen adaptation of Shakespeare. Was nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay (which led to a lot of jokes in theatrical circles on who technically wrote the script). This adaptation is significant among film buffs for being the last visual narrative production shot entirely on 70 millimeter film for 16 years, before the 2012 film The Master.
• Hamlet (2000), directed by Michael Almereyda and starring Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan. Claudius is the CEO of Denmark Corp., and Hamlet is a disaffected film student. The characters still use the Shakespearean text despite the Setting Update.
• Legend of the Black Scorpion (2006), a wuxia film which is basically Hamlet IN FEUDAL CHINA! The most interesting difference is that the Gertrude stand-in is the stepmother of the Hamlet stand-in, and is actually the woman he was in love with before his father stole her away. She's also a lot more of a Magnificent Bastard.
• Ophelia (2019) is an adaptation of the play told through a perspective flip with the titular character, portrayed by Daisy Ridley.
• The Northman (2023) by Robert Eggers is more based on the original legend of Amleth, but still borrows a number of elements to Shakespeare.

Live-Action TV

• A 1961 German made-for-TV production starring Maximilian Schell as Hamlet (with Ricardo Montalbán dubbing Claudius into English). Schell had played the role on stage the previous year, with an interpretation that re-envisioned the play as a political allegory for Nazi Germany. Though the stage production was well-received, something was obviously lost in translation. This version was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and information on that episode can be found here.
• A 1964 filmed and broadcast Broadway production, directed by John Gielgud and with Richard Burton as Hamlet, Alfred Drake as Claudius, Hume Cronyn as Polonius and Eileen Herlie as Gertrude.
• A 1964 BBC production filmed on-location in Elsinore, and featuring Christopher Plummer as Hamlet, Michael Caine as Horatio, Robert Shaw as Claudius, and Donald Sutherland as Fortinbras.

• Hamlet (1980), BBC production starring Derek Jacobi and directed by Rodney Bennett. This is an almost full-text production, made as part of the BBC's complete Shakespeare series. Also notable for featuring Patrick Stewart as Claudius and Lalla Ward as Ophelia.
• Great Performances: A 1990 episode is a filmed version of the play starring Kevin Kline, mostly notable for featuring minimal sets and modern costuming.
• Hamlet, a filmed version of Gregory Doran's 2008 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company was released in 2009.
• Sons of Anarchy is another loose adaptation, set in modern day with an outlaw biker gang.

Literature

• A 2008 novella by Orson Scott Card where it turns out that Old King Hamlet was a pedophile and raped most of the male cast, turning them all into homosexuals and pedophiles. Also he came back as a spirit in order to make Hamlet do evil things so that he can rape him in hell for eternity.
• Scott G. F. Bailey's novel The Astrologer updates the action to the court of Christian IV in seventeenth-century Denmark.

• To Be or Not To Be: That Is the Adventure, a Choose-Your-Own Adventure adaptation of Hamlet by Ryan North.

• The Klingon Hamlet, or The Tragedy of Khamlet, Son of the Emperor of Qo'noS, a translation of the play into Klingon with faux-scholarly apparatus pointing out supposed evidence that the Klingon version is the original. Created by some fans after a line in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country where Gorkon states "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon". Other than the language, the story has some changes to match Klingon culture.

Theatre

• Asta Nielsen made her own version in the 20s, based off of a book called "The Secret of Hamlet", where Hamlet was a Sweet Polly Oliver raised to secure her mother's position on the throne.

• The German play Hamletmaschine by Heiner Müller, a celebrated surrealist adaptation of Hamlet which still enjoys frequent performances 30 years after it was written... despite being completely incomprehensible.

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A P.O.V. Sequel play later made into a film.

• A 2010 rock musical titled HAMLET!! by the all-women Japanese theatre troupe Takarazuka Revue, starring Ryuu Masaki as the Prince. The dialogue is a mixture of translated Shakespeare lines and original ones.
• Another Japanese musical adaptation was produced in 2020 by the 5 Guys Shakespeare project, with actors known for their roles in 2.5D Theatre, most notably the Musical Touken Ranbu series.
• Several operatic adaptations of the story have been made: one by Italian composer Franco Faccio in 1865 entitled "Amleto", one by French composer Ambroise Thomas in 1868, and one by Australian composer Brett Dean in 2017.

• Fat Ham, a modern retelling centering around a gay black man forced into the Hamlet role.

Video Games

• The adventure game Elsinore places players in the role of Ophelia, who reawakens after her canonical death and finds herself in a time loop, trying to uncover the conspiracy behind her murder and looking to prevent the tragic events of the play.

Web Original

• Several weird internet versions, including:
  • The text adventure.
  • The stick figure version
  • The Manga version —Currently incomplete (but up to Act III) and starring characters from the anime Slayers.
  • Gamelet, an in-production video game with a You Will Be Beethoven premise.
  • The Facebook news feed edition.
  • The Nico Nico Douga medley techo-musical version.
  • The Dick and Jane version.
  • The Mario Bros. version.
  • The skinhead version
  • "An Unweeded Garden", an essay on Hamlet compiled over sixteen years from errors in student essays.

Other

• An expansion of the MMORPG Mabinogi is switching from adapting Celtic Mythology to this. Whether it's gonna be one major patch or a series remains to be seen. It is now live on both Korean and NA servers. Still no word on whether or not it's a series or a patch, but the Celtic Mythology is still in force near the end of the Hamlet storyline.
• Parodied in Last Action Hero, casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet in Danny Madigan's imagination and turning him into The Ahnold. Hilarity Ensues.
• The Order of the Stick has a print-only book titled Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales, which contains an adaptation of Hamlet with the OOTS characters filling the major roles.
• Japanese idol group SKE48 did a production in April 2019, with a nine member cast including the ace of the group, Jurina Matsui, as the lead role for her first time in a stage play ever. While it follows the plot, the setting is changed to the "Kingdom of Sakae" in Nagoya, Japan. It also has three musical numbers.

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