Critical Survey

The story of Shakespeare's Nordic play is also, inevitably, one of cultural exchanges before, during and after the early modern period. From its origins in Nordic tradition to its re-introduction in the Nordic countries through Shakespeare's play, the story of Hamlet from the Middle Ages to the present is inextricably bound up with Nordic history and culture. In tracing some of these links, this special issue develops our recent work on the early dissemination of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries, focusing here on that most Nordic of plays, Hamlet. Although there is already a great deal of criticism on Hamlet in various national or regional contexts, very little of this has focused on the Nordic countries.¹ It is therefore fitting, we believe, to provide a necessarily brief outline of the rich and varied history that Shakespeare's play has had in Northern Europe.

This article discusses the clowning element of a German version of Hamlet believed to date back to the time of Shakespeare. Der bestrafte Brudermord is noted as an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy which incorporates a lot more low comedy than any extant version of Hamlet and provides opportunity for contemplating the reason why Hamlet has no explicit clown character. The article focuses especially on a character appearing very briefly in the German play, a rustic buffoon called Jens, and his affinity with the rustics and comic servants of other Shakespeare plays and other Elizabethan plays. It is particularly asserted that this role shows signs of the involvement of the clown Will Kemp at some stage of the writing of Hamlet, or of touring continental Europe with an adaptation of it that puts the clowning element at the forefront.

Hamlet opens on a question – ‘Who's there?’ – asked by a sentinel of Elsinore Castle. In the Swedish regional theatre company Västanå Teater's 1996 adaptation of the play, the question kept returning, and it became symbolic of the production's focus on the uncertain and seemingly mysterious movements of political power. This article explores how changes to plot and text worked together with various forms of stylisation to present a society in which strict hierarchies of class, age and gender operated in tenson with Machiavellian corruption and theatrical seeming. Borrowing localised aesthetic expressions from several traditions and cultures (Norwegian/Nordic, Icelandic, East-Asian, Italian/European), the production adapted Hamlet to speak to local concerns, while simultaneously highlighting themes and issues present in the play.

The protagonist of Jenny Andreasson's autobiographical novel Teatern (2022) is a young female director whose feminist production of Hamlet at the Swedish national stage fails to have its planned premiere. While the novel makes a point of describing the misogynist structures behind this failure, the present article suggests that class structures and precarity are the main reasons behind it. The financial difficulties of the theatre generate a clear discrepancy between cultural capital – embodied by Shakespeare's canonical play – and economic. The resulting precarious work situation is reflected in the protagonist's yearning for stability, in her recurring assertions of class privileges vis-à-vis her co-workers and in her increasing sense of alienation from both them and her own work. While not strictly paraphrasing Shakespeare's play, the protagonist invokes parallels to both Hamlet and Ophelia, and Teatern, instead of locating these parallels in an ‘existential’ reading of Shakespeare's play, anchors the theme of alienation in the economic and social strictures of the theatre institution.

This article analyses the first female Hamlet in the Nordic countries, Elli Tompuri (1880–1962). Early in her career Tompuri made a name for herself at the Finnish National Theatre, but later, in part due to her radical politics, was unable to find permanent employment at any established theatre so she began touring with her own company, putting on Hamlet in 1913. The article traces Tompuri's inspirations and thoughts about the play, before analysing the major themes raised in the reviews. On one hand, reviewers noted with some pride the national significance of the first female Hamlet. On the other hand, Tompuri's status as a New Woman, an actor-director-manager making her own way, generated a wide range of opinions, from outrage that a woman would attempt the part to admiration of Tompuri's genius and intelligence, often within a single review.

This article gives a brief account of the two-hundred-year-old performance history of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle; this is followed by a discussion of Gertrude as portrayed in nine English or English-speaking Hamlets at Elsinore, beginning with Olivier and the Old Vic in 1937 and concluding with Cape Town Theatre Company eighty-five years later, in 2022. The article discusses different aspects of how Gertrude (as seen through the prism of these particular Hamlet productions) has been portrayed on stage, drawing attention to the fact that, particularly in productions with a star actor in the title role, Gertrude has often been neglected, ignored or marginalised by the director, or else objectified and sexualised for the benefit of the audience: aged down, dumbed down or otherwise commodified.

Shakespeare's Hamlet has been retold in children's versions several times in Sweden in recent years. It was the subject of the first episode of the children's television programme På teatern [At the Theatre], written and directed by Christina Nilsson for SVT in 2001–2002, where Shakespearean actors meet their child or grandchild backstage after a performance to tell and partly enact the story of the play. In 2005–2006, Lotta Grut wrote the plays Lille Hamlett och spöket [Little Hamlett and the Ghost] and Offelia kom igen! [Offelia Come Again!] for the theatre company Unga Roma. In these fairy-tale versions, the children Hamlet and Ophelia are confronted with death, grief, anger, oppression and erasure. This article argues that the På teatern episode is an adaptation of Hamlet while Grut's two plays are appropriations.