Content area
Full Text
Hamlet contains more characters than Hamlet himself, as Margreta de Grazia has recently reminded us. We still need this reminder. While Ophelia has achieved iconic status as the tragically romantic and drowning figure of pre-Raphaelite paintings, Gertrude remains a cipher and, as J. Anthony Burton has noted, seems to be disappearing from screen adaptations of the play.1 In The Banquet (2006), director Feng Xiaogang and writers Qiu Gangjian and Sheng Heyu do something entirely new with these two inscrutable women, jumbling their storylines and presenting us with hybrids: a Gertrude who has many elements of Ophelia, and an Ophelia who dies Gertrude's death.2 In this version, Little Wan (Gertrude) becomes a tragic protagonist equaling and perhaps exceeding the stature and import of Wu Luan (Hamlet). The film follows Little Wans struggle to be satisfied with her decision to marry Emperor Li (Claudius) as she pines for, punishes, and protects Wu Luan, simultaneously taunting and torturing Qing (Ophelia).3
In this essay, I consider the result of building a Hamlet adaptation around Gertrude and evaluate how Wans character revises this most filmically marginalized of Shakespeare's women. I argue that Feng places Little Wan as the emotional center of his film. Consequently, he changes all the fault lines of desire in Hamlet, invoking the long critical history and representational tradition interested in the Oedipal tensions between Gertrude and Hamlet. The Banquet features the relationship between Claudius (Emperor Li) and Gertrude, which exists primarily in the wings of Shakespeare's play. Promoting their intimacy to center stage invites the audience repeatedly into Gertrude's closet, making the private spaces of Wan and Li's court more crucial than the private regions of Wu Luan's mind. Meanwhile, Wu Luan is presented as passive in the extreme, soliloquy-less, friendless, and stripped of the verbal vigor traditionally ascribed to Hamlet. In addition, Feng preserves the Ophelia character in Qing, who is rendered all the more tragic by her unending devotion to an abusive and disinterested Wu Luan. Refocusing the plot on Little Wans story of resistance to Wu Luan's story of loneliness, exhaustion, and sorrow, the film invites us to contemplate a Hamlet centered on an active, rather than passive or pensive, protagonist. Ambition and desire are Little Wan's weapons against Wu Luan's loneliness and...