If you read a story (or see a film) and then somebody says, “Did you know that was based on Hamlet?” then what you’ll do is run it back over in your brain and spot all the spots where it wasn’t. Take for example Lion King, which I saw without even considering a Hamlet connection. Where’s the Ophelia character? Polonius? The relationship between Gertrude and Claudius? Some of them are stretched – are Timon and Poomba *really* supposed to be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Or is this a case where they said “Uncle kills father, son avenges” and then just made up the rest?
However – what if somebody tells you to read story X, because it’s based on Hamlet. Then you’ve got a whole different ball game. Such is the case with The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. This is not my review of that book, which will come when I finish it. Think of this as the intro material that would have padded my review when I finally did get around to it.
If you know you’re reading a Hamlet story, then every plot device, every new character, you find yourself saying “Who is that supposed to be? What’s happening here?” A grandfather? There’s no grandfather in Hamlet, he must not be relevant. Oh look a random hippie chick? That’s weird. Wonder if she’ll be Ophelia. It’s like a mystery story. When the dad dies – because we all know the dad dies, I hope – you get to sit there and wonder “How did he die? Did the brother do it? Will we learn that the brother did it? What’s the wife’s relationship to the brother?”
Hamlet shows us the dynamics of just about every family relationship – husbands and wives, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers (Claudius and King Hamlet), sisters (Laertes and Ophelia). It would be difficult to tell a family drama/tragedy and not be able to say “Oh, yeah, a little bit like Hamlet.” Rivalry between brothers? A son with an absent father figure and mother issues? Family members who don’t want the daughter to go with the man she chooses? All there.
We already know that this is done ad nauseam with Romeo and Juliet – every “they can’t be together, oh the tragedy!” love story ever written has made the comparison.
But are there others? Does anybody ever write an Othello story, or a Macbeth story?

Although modern moviegoers may know him now as Sabretooth from the X-Men movies, Liev Schreiber is actually an accomplished Shakespearean (which I personally learned when he was a guest on NPR). So when he was the invited guest at Yale University Theatre recently, interviewed by Dean of the Yale School of Drama, the conversation was not about Magneto and Wolverine:

He added that he attributes his success to rehearsals. Schreiber said he was initially intimidated by the ambiguous notion of success in theatre.

“In French, rehearsal is called repetition,” he emphasized. He added that it is important to repeat rehearsals until the actors know the verses “upside-down.”

Luckily, he said Shakespearean verses come much more easily to him than normal script.

“It’s like a nursery rhyme,” Schreiber said. “It’s so easy to just repeat and repeat and repeat.”

I appreciate the simplicity of that thought. It says that anyone can do it – but don’t fool yourself, it’s going to be hard work. He doesn’t say you have to repeat yourself a dozen times. You’ll have to repeat yourself hundreds of times.

UPDATED for spelling the man’s name right.  Thanks, Christine!

Introducing a new feature that will hopefully go out every Monday, where I summarize last week’s most interesting posts for those folks who may not be stopping by on a regular enough basis, and missing out when they scroll off the main page.
Last week started out slow, with nothing to write about Sunday, and even Monday little more than a personal anecdote about my 4yr old doing Hamlet while he brushes his teeth.
Tuesday didn’t herald much else, other than a revisit with the Alaska Bard-a-thon, a project that I first wrote about back in 2007 that is still going strong.
Wednesday, things started to pick up. I though that Eddie Izzard doing Christopher Walken doing Shakespeare would have been the big hit, but Bardfilm dropped a new list on us – Shakespeare Internet Initialisms – that absolutely eclipsed Mr. izzard. (To be fair, Bardfilm and I promoted the holy heck out of his post on Twitter, and dear Eddie had little to stand on other than the drawing power of Christopher Walken :)). Right in the middle I dropped in a quick post about how to interpret Stephano’s band of would be murderers in The Tempest, but I think my single got lost between those two big home runs.
Thursday had nothing exciting for us.
And then came Friday, where I unknowingly opened up a serious can of Othello worms, first by asking what exactly an “ancient” was and what that means about Iago and Othello’s relationship. That then led to the big controversy of the week about whether Othello really did sleep with Emilia, as well as some side discussion about how the age of a character (when Shakespeare doesn’t tell us) determines how you play it, which in turn led to some stories about actors’ favorite backstories.
And last but not least, don’t miss the final story of the week (which I posted late on Friday) about All The World’s An Ape, the theatre review blog authored by a 14yr old who is trying to see every Shakespeare play in the span of 2 years. He’s seen 28 of them already, including Al Pacino’s Merchant and Christopher Plummer’s Tempest. I’m seriously jealous!
There you have it. If you missed any, feel free to go back an have a look! Comments remain open, and via that Recent Comments widget in the blog sidebar people will see what you write, so don’t feel like the post has scrolled off therefore there’s no more reason to comment.
Also, feedback always welcome. Like this feature? Want it to change in some way? Is Monday a good day? I picked Monday morning because the only other logical time would be either a weekend day, or Friday. Weekends are no good because I’m generally busy with family, plus traffic is very low anyway and nobody’s going to see the recap posts. Friday would be good, but Friday’s also often a very busy post day (see Ape post at 11pm!) so if I tried to summarize the week during the day I’d inevitably miss something.

This looks interesting.

Shakespeare in Action, a Toronto-based theatre company that has been performing in schools for more than 20 years, will launch its virtual lab of Bard-themed activities Thursday. It includes an interactive program in which students are inserted into the scene of a play by reading the lines for the role of Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and the like, as they scroll along a computer monitor. Students will also be able to play Shakespeare mad libs, inserting new verbs and nouns into the nearly 500-year-old scripts, or practise eloquent insults such as, ‘Thou churlish fat-kidneyed codpiece.’

Stay tuned. I’ll have to check that out!