One of the most interesting, though perplexing, images in David Tennant (and Patrick Stewart and Penny Downie)'s Hamlet was this broken mirror. I recognized that it was probably an important symbol but I didn't bother trying to figure it out until today. I've come up with several theories now though. My favourite one connects to my general interest in Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, in the eyes of Popular Culture; Hamlet is one of the best remembered of Shakespeare's plays, but people remember it in very different ways and not always clearly.The Fractured Mirror could represent many different things, here are a few ideas.
The fractured image as a metaphor for how this adaptation used the official text. This film adaptation cut parts, and rearranged parts, and so while the overall feeling and affect reflects the spirit of the play, the details did not always stay the same.
The different facets are also a bit like the different viewpoints the movie shows (the security camera as objective witness, Hamlet's handheld camera as his point of view, a steady eyelevel view like you are in the room, and so forth) and there are a few shots where you see things in the broken mirror, all mulit-faceted and a bit odd.
The fractures as a representation of how our culture remembers Hamlet. Though Hamlet is one of the most obviously intellectual plays, certain lines have been remembered as separate from or only loosely connected to their context. The "To be or not to be" soliloquy has become fairly routinely parodied and some of the lines of Polonius that were ridiculous when he said them are repeated with a straight face such as, "Brevity is the soul of wit" (Act 2, scene 2, 90) or to say "method in the madness" which is a variation of Polonius's "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" (act 2, scene 2, 206). Certain images are also remembered, such as Hamlet with the skull and Ophelia's death.
The broken mirror as a metaphor for Hamlet's shattered sanity, family, and life. There's something broken in the state of Denmark. People debate whether Hamlet was really insane or not, but he at least acted insane. His family was certainly broken, and the his life and the lives of the people around him were also broken. Interestingly enough, Polonius's life ends with the breaking of the mirror in the film (since he was hiding behind it) and it's a shatterpoint for Ophelia and Laertes's lives too.The mirror as a reflection of life. The purpose of a play, according to Hamlet, is "to hold as 'twere the
mirror up to nature" (Act 3, scene 2, 17-24), but that doesn't mean that the reflection is perfect. A play that was too exact in mimicking the world around it would get into trouble, but as a fractured image it can show the truth in a less obvious way. You can find ideas and an understanding of Shakespeare's time and of life in general in Shakespeare's plays and in good adaptations of them. Hamlet is considered one his best and most intellectual plays, and its also the play that has found its way most thoroughly into popular culture as well as the high culture.
