I've never understood those who insist that Shakespeare's plays were written by an aristocrat like the Earl of Oxford. Only a man who lived life on the edge could have written the way Shakespeare did; it's difficult to imagine an upper-class twit writing "Hamlet" or "King Lear." Perhaps it's easier for people in eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union to understand Shakespeare than Americans; in many ways, living conditions there are much closer to Elizabethan England than anything we can imagine. Like Shakespeare, they have had to endure tyrannical governments, social injustice, religious persecutions, and other ordeals the more prosperous West scarcely remembers. Grigori Kozintsev's "Gamlet" illustrates this thesis. Here is a no-frills "Hamlet," in beautiful black-and-white, with a brilliant score by Dmitri Shostakovich and an exceptional cast. It's not surprising that Innokenti Smoktunovsky (Hamlet) was a holocaust survivor: pain is etched on his face, and for once Hamlet's suffering doesn't seem put on. Anastasia Vertinskaya is lovely as a tiny, fragile Ophelia, and Elsa Radzin is stunning as the queen. This is a surprisingly traditional Hamlet, free of trendy modernistic interpretation, almost nineteenth-century in its use of period detail. It's almost the kind of "Hamlet" one might have seen in the days of Edwin Booth or Sir Henry Irving; only Vertinskaya's beehive hairdo gives it away as having been made in the 1960s.
