Who Is Mel Gibson's Soliloquy

The Shakespearean soliloquy performed by Hamlet in Hamlet, “To Be or Not to Be,” provides a complicated text which actors may interpret and manipulate to fit their vision, incorporating props, costumes, sets, music, and camera angles. Actors combining these choices create different performances which audiences are free to further interpret. Mel Gibson’s version of the Hamlet’s soliloquy displays an obsession with death but not suicidal tendencies. Dressed darkly in a dimly lit scene, Hamlet enters a mausoleum where the white sarcophaguses are the only focal point, and he begins to speak, reflecting Hamlet’s questioning whether he should continue living or commit suicide. His crazed eyes open as he steps in front of a hollow space in the wall where a skeleton lies. Hamlet evinces an obsession with death as he gently lays his head next to the carved figure atop a tomb and genuinely converses with the occupant. At the same time, Gibson’s Hamlet is not convincingly suicidal, and when he sits and leans against the tomb, he shifts emotionally from fixated to distressed.

From a contemporary perspective, Olivier’s performance was the least convincingly suicidal because his movements seemed choreographed, and the music undermines the authenticity of his melancholy. Olivier uses a dagger to symbolically threaten his own life and represent his inaction when he drops the dagger into the ocean. After it falls, he hesitates and retreats, refraining from falling into the water after the dagger and furthering his inaction. While Olivier begins speaking the monologue aloud, he switches to an interior voice, contributing to the formal structure of the 1940’s production. From a modern perspective, Olivier’s Hamlet lacks emotion matching the melancholic