The Right to Beauty

Writer and college student Alicia Manno reviews the costume design in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet, from the The Royal Shakespeare Company and presented on screen by BBC

As friends and family who know me too well are aware, I consider myself something of a fashion history fanatic, scouring the internet daily for scathing reviews of Disney princess costume design and lively discourse on nineteenth-century corsetry. So imagine my horror when at 49 minutes and 5 seconds in the 2009 Gregory Doran adaptation of Hamlet, a chummy Guildenstern appears on screen in a sturdy pair of light wash bootcut jeans, exchanging forced laughs with his faithful compadre Rosencrantz, who has been expertly clad in a brown leather jacket. It did not occur to me how strapped for cash the British Broadcasting Network must be until, in a moment of pure terror at Prince Hamlet’s apparent madness, Ophelia appears on screen, completely matching the tone of the play and Shakespeare’s unwavering vision, in an ill-fitting sundress from the GAP and ballet flats that can’t help but scream, “I am the heiress of Danish royalty.” These dubious fashion choices, alongside a monochromatic black set adorned with austere chandeliers, culminate in what ends up looking more like a daytime soap opera than a veiled critique of Elizabethan politics and an expression of existential dread in a world seemingly ruled by fate.

But why raise such a fuss purely over aesthetics? Surely David Tennant’s impassioned “to be or not to be” speech is effective enough to distract audiences from the graphic T-shirt with ten-pack abs printed onto it that he is wearing for the duration of his soliloquy. Surely Patrick Stewart’s inimitable performance as King Claudius, when he is made audience to a reenactment of his own foul crime, keeps the viewer’s mind from wandering to the fact that the players are dressed in quasi-Elizabethan fashion while the entire pack of royals’ dress is modern. If the audience is perplexed by such artistic decisions, it’s likely due to the fact that the costume and set designers of the film are equally confused about what time period they seem to be portraying. Indeed the Royal Shakespeare Company, under whose discretion the 2008 play, as well as the 2009 film, were produced, makes clear the directorial vision of the adaptation on its website, where it admits to the goal of bringing Hamlet “to life for many audience members new to Shakespeare by director Gregory Doran's clear storytelling and familiar modern setting.” They even highlight the modern fashion choices in the subheading of their article on Gregory Doran’s adaptation, writing, “David Tennant played Hamlet as an agitated T-shirt and parka-wearing wreck in a world where the players never escape observation.” Clearly, whatever fashion choices were elected by the adaptation’s costume designers, they were made with a deliberate eye toward modernization, seemingly out of a desire to make the play more accessible to modern viewers who feel locked out of the highly academic world of Shakespeare—a noble endeavor, indeed, but one that ultimately cost them the annoyance of me feeling compelled to write this incredibly long-winded review.

Now, I don’t want to seem like too much of a stickler when it comes to historical accuracy. It’s perfectly understandable that the costume designers of this adaptation wanted to modernize the play a bit. Like anyone adapting a book or play to film, they decided to take creative liberties: after all, Hamlet has been adapted on stage and on screen so many times that it’s difficult to envision a truly original interpretation. That’s why it’s worth applauding the creators of this adaptation for their use of CCTV monitors in heightening the mood of suspicion and secrecy that permeates the play. It’s also worth praising set designer Robert Jones’ conscious decision to build the set around a “mirrored world,” which denotes a drama wherein the struggle to see the self and others clearly is central. Plus, it would be impossible to write a review of this adaptation that doesn’t acknowledge the truly impressive performances by every actor in the film, each of whom brought to their characters fascinating new psychological and dramatic readings, proving the truth of Oscar Wilde’s observation, “There is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet...There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.”

And this is an important point to emphasize: there is no such thing as the definitive Hamlet, no one interpretation or adaptation that is more correct than the others. There are only different takes on the play, so what directors choose to do with the raw material of the story is what matters. Gregory Doran is the critic who uses Shakespeare’s verses as a starting point for his own artistic impulse, as are the actors who bring Doran’s vision to life. But bringing to the stage a modernized version of Hamlet doesn’t mean the fashion and set design have to be boring. It doesn’t have to mean watering down the context of the play just to make it palatable to the casual twenty-first century viewer. Too often, “modernizing” a story is taken to mean removing nuance, making the setting exceedingly nondescript, and turning to this century’s good yet menacing friend minimalism. Even hits like Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice and 2020’s wildly popular regency drama Bridgerton fall short when they go out of their way to appeal to modern audiences—as the humor and economic nuance of Jane Austen’s original novel are lost in Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, and Bridgerton (offensive post-racial society cop-outs aside) opts for shameless sex appeal in the place of anything resembling consistency or accuracy.

But the main offense of Gregory Doran’s Hamlet is its penchant for minimalism in both costume and set design, a choice to make the film as inoffensive and broadly popular as possible (an assumption I make, perhaps, unfairly but that is common enough in today’s film industry to warrant a response regardless). The modern sensibility is to simplify, to make elegant and discrete so as to appeal to everyone, completely removing anything resembling individualism or novelty in the process. My issue with the visuals of Doran’s Hamlet is therefore not that I simply don’t like the aesthetic interpretation of the story but that it vies for mass approval by not daring to be anything at all. It chooses inoffensiveness over style. In this, it encapsulates what our modern, mass-consumer market has done to art. It chooses not to be beautiful, electing instead to be nothing at all. (For what is there without beauty except for a great void?) It calls to mind the same market-tested aesthetic that makes every NBC drama so utterly degrading to the viewer. That is, it lacks any aesthetic at all.

This is all especially frustrating given the abundantly beautiful source material that the director of any Hamlet production has to work with, both in terms of Elizabethan costumes that would have been worn in original Globe Theatre productions and in terms of historically accurate costumes that reflect what Danish royalty actually wore in the sixteenth century. And none of this is to say that creative liberties shouldn’t be taken to make these costumes more modern or to stylize the adaptation. On the contrary, such moves should be applauded, such as in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet adaptation, which settles into a lush Victorian style, replete with vibrant red coats that signify royalty and a Hamlet donning an “inky cloak” that perfectly reflects the great magnitude of the tragedy to follow. Importantly, the boldness of these costumes matches the tone of the drama, not distracting from but enhancing Shakespeare’s language. Even outside of the realm of Shakespeare are many impressive instances of historical costume modernization, such as Jacqueline Durran’s Oscar-winning costumes for the 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina. The genius of her costumes is that she combines period-accurate 1870s fashion with 1950s flourishes, culminating in unique pieces that enhance the story. Durran highlights this delicate balance when it comes to modernizing period drama fashion when she says in an interview for the New York Times, “Joe [the director] likes costumes to be believably of a period, but at the same time accessible to a modern audience.” It is the first part of this equation, the need to make costumes “believably of a period,” that Doran’s Hamlet neglects.

You may object, however, that it was not Doran’s goal at all to make his Hamlet believably of the sixteenth century, that he sought for complete modernization. If we accept this explanation, we must also set aside our musings about whether the political implications of the old Danish monarchy and the war can be fully appreciated when shoved into a modern setting. But, still, I ask: why erase from Shakespeare that which gives it its grand scale, its monumental drama? The feeling that we are watching something that happened long ago does not estrange us from the tragedy. No, it entrances us; it endows the entire play with a heightened sense of finality and magnitude. Frustratingly, Doran’s adaption not only unnecessarily vies for the affection of first-time Shakespeare audience members, but it sends the message that Shakespeare can only be relevant to modern audiences if its setting is simplified, if some of the grandeur and pageantry are removed. In other words, Shakespeare can only be enjoyed by modern audiences if part of what makes Shakespeare great is no longer present, because we cannot delight in the full scope of what previous generations delighted in. In this, the entire adaptation is like a concession that previous ages of humankind were altogether too distant from us for us to be able to appreciate them as is. They must be diluted in order for us to understand them. But this only estranges us from our ancestors, from the long sweep of humankind to which we belong. The beauty of Elizabethan fashion and architecture belongs to our century too—because beauty belongs to every century.

In fact, my entire difficulty with Doran’s Hamlet is one that comes in the defense of beauty. My real objection is not to Doran at all. It is to the broader practice of neglecting aesthetic pleasure—both in film and in society at large. Doran’s Hamlet is just one descendant in a long line of productions that favor sleek, unobtrusive visuals over novel, artful design choices. It, to me, signifies a move away from art in general in favor of art’s too-distant cousin entertainment. I’ve already mentioned the impulse to make visuals palatable to as many people as possible in order to ensure market success. And this is what I think makes the sanitized, minimalist aesthetic that is to blame for everything from the seductive appeal of Target’s interior decorations to the friendly and familiar images we consume on our TV screens. There is nothing artful or beautiful about the world we live in when all of our design choices are made for us by marketing majors who know a great deal too much about color psychology. It is dehumanizing in the profoundest sense to be denied our right to behold beautiful things at all times, things made for no reason other than that most pure and noble reverence for beauty. And that must be the standard to which we hold anything that earns the name “beautiful:” as the Aesthetes of the nineteenth century proposed, it must be made for its own sake. In other words, it must be art.

Yes, the realms of decoration, design, and fashion too should be artful. These are not considered to be lofty or masculine arts, but they are as important as all of the rest; for, wherever you go in civilization, you are always beholding what others have made. We are at the mercy of our surroundings, so nothing should be made without beauty in mind: no school, no prison, no article of clothing, no household appliance, no thing of pure utility should be without beauty. It is an immeasurable injustice that our commericialist society has made this not so, having molded everything to be the same. It must be said now and many times more: beauty is a human right—a right that belongs to all of the classes, that should be especially defended for the poor and the incarcerated person. It is the sensibility that endures across history, giving us the will to survive in times of suffering and the means of expressing divinity in times of leisure.

And why would anyone take that out of Shakespeare? Why would you not heighten the scale of the drama with a magnificent gown? Why would you not make the palace halls so elaborately designed that I cannot avert my eyes for even one second? It may be pointless to care so much about aesthetics, but I can think of nothing more human than to care, inexplicably, about that which does not matter at all. And that, to some extent, is what beauty is—an inexplicable love that endows our material world with something of the divine.

Alicia Manno is an undergraduate student of English and Chinese at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has interned for several literary magazines, including The Believer and Witness Magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, The Decadent Review, and Nevada Humanities.