The most striking scenes showcasing the main characters’ madness in Doran’s film provoke dissimilar reactions from the supporting characters who witness them.

Why, Doran asks, are men afforded more latitude in madness? Furthermore, Doran dilutes the textual divide between the extremities of Ophelia’s and Hamlet’s insanities, forcing his audience to ask why the characters in the play move much more quickly to check Ophelia’s behavior, yet allowing Hamlet’s antics to continue unabated to the point of manslaughter. Doran’s enhanced emphasis on Hamlet’s madness transcends the typical intensification that occurs when a work is adapted from page to screen, manifesting Doran’s choice to encourage his contemporary audience to interrogate the standards society uses to determine sanity. Tennant has tools at his disposal that mere words on a page cannot convey - the potential for sustained, unblinking eye contact with his audience, gestures, facial expressions, and being able to say one thing but convey another through his body language. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the confrontational quality Tennant lends to the prince’s mental angst. In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, Tate Britain, London. Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet April 29, 2019

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