‘Dangerous and Rebel Prince’: A Television Adaptation of Hamlet in Late Francoist Spain

Summary

On 23 October 1970, Televisión Española broadcast what had been publicized as one of its important televised theatre productions: Hamlet, directed by Claudio Guerin, and starring Emilio Gutiérrez Caba. Spanish spectators were still living under General Franco's right-wing authoritarian regime, which since the end of the three-year civil war in 1939 had infused the country's cultural life with its fascist-inspired National Catholicism and its repression of dissidence. In such a historical context, a production of Hamlet – a play with an ‘obvious applicability to political practice in dictatorships’ – is bound to raise questions about its relationship with the political tensions of the time: was it appropriated by the dominant ideology (as when in Soviet-type regimes Hamlet was presented as a ‘fighter for social justice, almost a forerunner of socialism’)? did it remain apolitical (also a sort of submission to the authorities’ imperatives), or did it show the prince as a symbol of the intellectual's endurance or political resistance against a totalitarian state (as also common in the Soviet bloc)? How political this 1970 televised Hamlet was has not yet been explored in full. In this essay, I will seek to redress this situation by studying external and internal evidence for its political uses and effects. Comparing them with how political meanings are generated in other Hamlet productions, I will argue that, though not a heavily politicized version, Guerin's Hamlet did have a politically critical charge moulded in its artistic features and responding to its historical circumstances.