The Corruption (with scenes from John Bede’s Hamlet)
Introduction This became my 250th play, and it was not planned at all. About ten years ago I embarked in a fit of inspiration on a new translation of “Hamlet” more by fancy than with any serious intentions, but by the loss of a love relationship the inspiration was lost, and the project was discarded and forgotten. By a new production of “Hamlet” in a radically modern version, with Hamlet in necktie and blazer and with the gentlemen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in T-shirts, I got the impulse to retrieve the old project from its hiding-place and complete it. Among the oldest parts is act III scene 4, a downright operatic scene and rather controversial – deletions have been made. I can’t appreciate modernizations of classic plays and operas, simply because I think it ruins their realism. The best of all Hamlet movies remains the one with Laurence Olivier, since he without doubt succeeded best in reaching the Elizabethan realism, that must have dominated the original play. The story of Hamlet is found in the Danish medieval chronicles of Saxo
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