Hamlet poses for the film maker a problem very different from – and much more difficult than – the histories of Henry V and Richard III. The structures of history – even the dramatic structuring of history – can be articulated to varying degrees through the relationship of men to things, of ideas to the concrete world and of motives to actions, without conscious distortion. But of all the plays of Shakespeare, Hamlet is least of all a play which readily enlists spatial detail and the world of objects for its major thematic developments.

There is a castle, there are swords, there is a crown and there is poison. But much of the thematic centre of Hamlet is removed from the means of life and death into the area of their respective values and significance. With the abstract kernel of the play so concentrated in the symbolic value of the objects recounted, the film director has very little spatial material to work with. Robert Duffy, who has written a perceptive and intelligently favourable account of the film in placing it against other Hamlet films, notes the claustrophobic nature of the play and the lack of spatial variety which the action of the play affords as a major adaptive problem for film: