The very title of the film liberates it from any responsibility to the original text. Bene assumes that we all know Hamlet’s story, so he feels no need to repeat it to us. Preferring to violate expectations by producing a neo-cubic collage of the figures and phantoms from the play that haunt him, Bene renders an illuminating version of Shakespeare’s most famous play through psychoanalysis, nudity, anachronistic cultural references, experimental theater and colored, multilayer montage. His kaleidoscopic mise-en-scène returns to Olivier’s in its theatricality and to Kozintsev’s in its concern with politics, but this film is filtered through a highly disturbed conscience. Bene aims to subvert Hamlet in an anti-naturalist detour until there is not much left of the original. Condensing and rewriting the five acts into an hour-long, Italian-speaking featurette, he expands the Oedipus conflict and heightens the acting style. For further provocation, he transforms the famous “To be or not to be” monologue into a brief “To have or not to have” line. Adaptation in Bene’s world is ultimately a vital device for Bacchanalian destruction.