Hamlet (1996, Columbia/Castle Rock, dir. Kenneth
Branagh, 242 min, PG-13) is the full-blown movie rendition of Shakespeare�s
play about ambition, long enough for an intermission preceded by Hamlet�s
famous battlefield speech (quote) about honor. Often the film seems like a
high-class horror flick, and everyone swings from the chandeliers in the tragic
conclusion. The music score by Patrick Doyle is stirring, an rises to a tremendous climax at the end of
the closing credits. Hamlet's aspiration engages the audience even if his
desire for revenge, driven by what he thinks is absolute honor, seems misplaced
by modern standards of ethics.
The "play-within-a-play" ("The Murder of Gonzago" aka "The Mouse-trap") in Act II is a famous dramatic device (it starts with a pantomime preview), where Hamlet (Branagh himself) has the actors put on a play to fool Claudius (Derek Jacobi) into giving away his guilt. The famous "to be or not to be" follows. But the embedded play itself has motivational significance, and is an example today of what lawyers call "implicit content." It probably (because of the consequences that follow for the characters) provides a good example of why English common law regards a (false) unfavorable presentation of a recognizable, even though pseudonymous person, in a fictitious work, as defamatory. The "play-within-a-play" or "story-within-a-story" construct occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare and in literature (even in the recent film from India, 'Yatra'.
I read the play for a book report in high school senior English. In class we read 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear'.