Hamlet (1996 film)

Hamlet is a 1996 Shakespearean tragedy film adaptation of William Shakespeares play Hamlet, adapted for the screen and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the titular role as Prince Hamlet. The film also features Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Michael Maloney as Laertes, Richard Briers as Polonius, and Nicholas Farrell as Horatio. Other notable appearances include Robin Williams, Grard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, John Gielgud and Ken Dodd.

Aspects of the films staging are based on Adrian Nobles recent Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play, in which Branagh had played the title role.The film uses a conflated text based on the 1623 First Folio, with additions from the Second Quarto and amendments from other sources. According to a note appended to the published screenplay, The screenplay is based on the text of Hamlet as it appears in the First Folio the edition of Shakespeares plays collected by his theatrical associated Heminges and Condell and published in 1623 by a syndicate of booksellers. Nothing has been cut from this text, and some passages absent from it including the soliloquy How all occasions do inform against me have been supplied from the Second Quarto an edition of the play which exists in copies datedand 5. We have also incorporated some readings of words and phrases from this source and from other early printed texts, and in a few cases emendations from modern editors of the play. Thus in I, 4, in the passage from the Second Quarto about the dram of eale, we use an emendation from the Oxford edition of the Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 1988 doth all the noble substance overdaub rather than the originals of a doubt. ........

Source: Wikipedia