Since the first production of Shakespeare's Hamlet at the tum of the seventeenth century, the play has attracted performers, fascinated audiences, and stimulated scholarly discussion and debate - a form of immortality which has been further perpetuated from the twentieth century onward by film versions of the play.¹ The attitudes of literary critics and theater reviewers toward Shakespeare productions, however, remain widely divergent. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, for example, observe, "In the last fifty years, the play' s iconic status has led to countless attempts to adapt, rethink, debunk and vandalize it."² The judgment implied by the word "vandalize" suggests the continuing divide between "high" and "popular" cultures, and draws attention to the issues potentially arising when a canonical text is appropriated and newly interpreted.³