Category: Hamlet

Hamlet endures due to its complex characters, psychological depth, and exploration of universal themes such as death, revenge, and the human condition. Its enduring popularity is also attributed to its poetic language, memorable quotes, and its influence on literature, film, and popular culture. Hamlet’s themes and characters continue to be studied and adapted in various forms, making it one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently performed plays. Its timeless appeal lies in its ability to speak to audiences across generations, cultures, and languages, and its place as a cornerstone of Western literature.

Browse the text of Hamlet entire play here.

Why I Love My Shakespeare Life

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

This post brought to you by three or four glasses of cabernet sauvignon, so put it in its appropriate context.

We had company this evening, one of the dads came over to watch the baseball game while his daughter (and mine) were off at their first middle school dance, and the moms were off at some other mom’s house.  So eventually the guests depart, the game is over, and we’re left to clean up.

I realize that the television has stopped showing baseball and is now showing some old dude with a bushy beard talking to some other guys in poofy clothes. I run to the kitchen and grab my wife by the face while she is mopping.  “Henry IV Part 2!” I squeal at her.  “Do you have any idea how happy Shakespeare makes me?!”

“Who is that?” asks my 7yr old son.

“That is Prince Hal who at the end of the movie is King Henry,” I tell him.  “It is a very sad scene, one of the saddest scenes in all of Shakespeare, and it is awesome. It is one of my favorites.”

“Why is it sad?” he asks.

“Well,” I tell him, “Pretend that I am the king. That would make you the prince, right?  That means that one day you’re going to be the king.  Well, until then, you are just out hanging around with your friends, partying, doing crazy stuff, you know, like friends do.  And then one day you find out that the king, that’s me, has died, and that means that you’re the king now. And your best friend is all, ‘Oh, cool, you’re the king, we are going to do awesome stuff together!’ and you turn to him and you say, “We’re not friends anymore.”

“Why can’t I be friends with my friend anymore?” he asks.

“Because you’re the king now, and the king has very important responsibilities, and he’s not allowed to hang out with regular people and do crazy wild things like he’s been doing.  It’s very sad, and his friend knows it’s sad, and the king knows it’s sad, but they both know that it has to be that way.”

With that I race to the remote control and start bringing up my copy of Chimes at Midnight.

At this point my son begins to cry.  “I don’t want to see it if it’s sad!” he wails.  Despite my overwhelming desire to jump right to that scene, I resist and go help my wife clean the kitchen.  “I’ve shown you that scene, right?” I ask her.  I then begin reciting the scene.  “My jove, my king!  Speak to me, my heart!   I know thee not, old man…..so, so sad.  And so amazing.  Have I shown you that scene yet? You know I’m going to.”

My son is apparently now on a Shakespeare kick.  “I want to see where somebody says To be or not to be,” he tells me.  Being a Shakespeare Geek I happen to have Richard Burton’s Hamlet ripped and ready to go, and move to start it.  But then I realize that he’s already vetoed the sad stuff, and it’s not like Hamlet is a laugh riot.  So I ask him whether he wants to see To be or not to be, or if he wants to see one of the funny ones. He tells me he wants to see one of the funny ones.

Can do!  I fire up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Taming of the Shrew. Here’s how I explain it to my boy.  “There’s this girl, Katherine, and she hates boys. She’s sworn that she’s never going to marry a boy because all boys stink. Well along comes this boy Petruchio, and he says I’m going to marry Katherine! And then they get into a whole big fight and she chucks things at his head, and it’s really funny.”

So there we sit, my son and I, watching Taming of the Shrew.  I fast forward to the famous “wooing” scene, and I do play by play as it approaches.  “Ok, see in there? That’s Katherine, and she hates to be called Kate. She’s pitching a tantrum and breaking all of her stuff.  Petruchio is outside, and he knows he has to go in there and woo her, and he’s building up his courage, telling himself that no matter how much she yells, he’s just going to tell her that her voice sounds like an angel singing…”

And we go through the entire scene, my son asking questions and me doing my best to keep him interested.  “What is that pile of stuff she fell in?” That’s feathers, in the old days you had to make your own pillows.  She thinks she got away from him, but he’s not done chasing her yet. See? Here he comes again…

“She’s holding an apple, is she going to throw an apple at him?” Probably, yes.  Sure enough Richard Burton pops his head up through the trap door and she hurls a macintosh at him.

At one point I realize that my wife has gone up to get into her pajamas and is now just hanging around waiting for our eldest to get home from the dance.  “I’m watching Taming of the Shrew with my son!” I tell her. “And he is paying attention! I am so very, very happy! And hey this isn’t even like it’s just Shakespare, this is Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, this is a classic love story we’re talking about here!”

Meanwhile I get random questions, like “So if I was king, would I still be able to be best friends with David?”  “Absolutely,” I tell him, “The rules were different back then.  Hal’s friend Falstaff was kind of a bad guy.”

“Kind of?”

“Well…how can I explain it? Not like a bad bad guy, he was…..hmmm…”

“Medium.”

“Yeah, medium.  He was hanging out with guys that were medium.  And when you’re a  king you can’t hang out with those kind of people anymore.”

Eventually Petruchio catches Katherine, and I end that particular movie.  I ask if my son still wants to see to be or not to be, he tells me yes.  “Ok,” I tell him, “This is going to be cool. Because the man that was just playing Katherine’s boyfriend, who was chasing her all over the place?  Well, now he’s Hamlet.”

Just picture this, for a moment.  My 7yr old son is curled up under a blanket on the couch waiting for the To be or not to be scene.  I am standing in front of the television with a remote control in one hand and my phone in the other, where I have brought up the text of Hamlet and am now working back and forth to determine whether I’ve fast forwarded too far.  At last I hit the right moment, and pause it.  “Ok here we go!” I tell him.  “See that guy? That’s Claudius, the bad guy king.”

“Why is he a bad guy king?”

“Because he stole the throne from Hamlet.  And that guy there?  That’s Polonius. He works for the king, so he’s a bad guy too.  That girl? That’s Hamlet’s girlfriend.  Polonius has told her that she has to go to Hamlet and say that she doesn’t love him.”

“Why can’t she just say no?”

“Because that guy is her father. And when you were a girl back in Shakespeare’s time, when your father told you to do something, you had to do it, even if he was a bad guy and you didn’t want to.”

And with that, I was watching Richard Burton perform Hamlet while sitting on the couch with my son.  It was….bliss.

I explain to my son, “Now see you have to wait for the end, because this is a very important scene.  Ophelia, Hamlet’s girlfriend, is going to come up to Hamlet and give him back his presents and tell him that she doesn’t love him.”

“Why?”

“Well because her father told her she has to. Also, because she thinks he’s a little crazy, like everyone else does. Hamlet doesn’t know that, though. Hamlet thinks that she’s the only person left who understands that he’s only pretending.”

“Why is he pretending to be crazy?”

“So he can spy on the bad king. He thinks that the bad guy king cheated to win the throne, and Hamlet wants to win it back, so to do that he has to get close to the bad king to learn more about whether he is guilty, and he thinks that the way to do that is to pretend to be crazy so nobody will pay attention to him. Now,shhhh, here comes Ophelia…”

Funny thing? I don’t like the way they do this scene.  I race to my iPad and begin googling.

At this point, by the way, my daughter has arrived home and she is now off to bed, along with my wife. They are both calling down that my son needs to go to bed. I call back that he’ll be up in a minute.

I then bring up Kenneth Branagh’s rendition of this scene.  “Watch this,” I tell my son, “It is the same scene, only different people doing it.  When Ophelia gives the presents back I want you to watch Hamlet’s face.”  *play*  “Wait…..wait……..see? SEE? Right here, SEE?  He’s so happy to see her, he knows that she’s the only one that believes him…and then he realizes that she thinks he’s crazy too, and at first he is so sad, you can see how he’s almost going to cry…and now look how mad he gets….”

I then go on to show him the Derek Jacobi and Kevin Kline versions of the same scene, before deciding that he only wanted to hear To be or not to be, and having now heard it, all he wants to do is go to bed.

I finally shut it all down, and tell him how very happy it makes me to be able to watch Shakespeare with him. He tells me that he only wanted to hear somebody say to be or not to be and, having heard that, he’s fine with going to bed.

And that’s precisely what he did. Me? I ran to my laptop to blog this whole evening, because it’s been one to remember.

 

My Interview with “Hamlet Supercut” Creator Geoff Klock

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Last week a good part of the Shakespeare fan universe was knocked on its collective Bottoms (see what I did there :)?) by the discovery of what’s best called a Hamlet Supercut – a 15 minute retelling of Hamlet made up entirely of 200+ movie and television references.  If you’ve not yet seen it, you’re in for a treat.  Warning, there’s a bit of NSFW dialogue so you might want to grab the headphones (more on that later):

Amazing, right?  Everybody I showed said the same thing.  I got a number of “I thought I knew a few references to add but he already had them!” and even one professor who said, “I teach this stuff for a living and I only knew about 60-70% of those!”

When the creator Geoff Klock introduced himself on Twitter I jumped at the chance to interview him by email.  I sent him half a dozen questions, all set to the tune of Hamlet quotes (hey I gotta show off my geek skills somewhere!), and he sent me back his answers.  Enjoy.

1) “What’s Shakespeare to you, or you to Shakespeare?” Tell us about yourself and the context for this project. We’ve all got “high school teacher” but what grade? Is this for honors/AP? Where in the world are you? How did the idea for this project come up and how long has it taken you?

I am actually not a high school teacher, though I have a lot in common with one. I teach at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which is open admissions. I teach the two term freshman writing course, and also film and Brit Lit 1, where I teach Hamlet. To get my students interested in Hamlet I started collecting clips quoting it. It got out of hand. At a show called Kevin Geeks Out in NYC I saw a guy do a mash up Christmas Carol. I thought “That’s what I will do with the clips!” It took years, but that feels misleading, since it only took a few minutes a day, and then a handful of days to put it all together. I was doing other stuff!

2) “Tell us about the method to your madness.” There’s obviously a ridiculous amount of overlapping between all the references where you have to decide which reference to use for which line, or whether to do a whole bunch of them strung together. Any method to how you decided which clip goes with which line?

I tried to go with the most entertaining / recognizable clip I could. Given a choice in one show between a line I already had (such as “To be or not to be”) and a more obscure one (such as “I’ll call
the king, father, Royal dane!”) I tried to go with the lesser known one. In some Platonic Ideal Universe I could build the whole play out of quotes, I imagined. Also I had to cut all references to Hamlet in music and each show only got one bite — a lot of folks want to know where the Star Trek “Conscience of King” episode is but for that generation of Trek I wanted Christopher Plummer as a Klingon. Cause, obviously.

3) “F-words, f-words, f-words.” I’ve already heard a few people comment that they’d love to show this to their students, but several of the quotes drop that big f-bomb that is know to set parents aroar. Any particular reason why you chose to leave those in (since they’re not Shakespeare’s text)? Did it even come up when you were making this?
If you are teaching high school you are doing the Lord’s work. I could not hack it at that job. And if you have that job you don’t want to lose it and I get that. But too often teachers present intelligence
to students as something antiseptic. We imply that to be smart they need to dress like J Crew ads, put away childish pleasures like Batman, and talk and write like goddamn news broadcasters. Then we are shocked that they do not want to learn. I have a doctorate from Oxford, I wear converse with suits, and the two things I love best in this fucking world are Hamlet and The X-Men, and my students know that. And honestly, while “fuck” may not be in the text, Hamlet says to Ophelia that he wants to lie in her lap. He clarifies that he means his head upon her lap, and then asks her if she thought he meant “country matters.” Are we to leave students, who are always a single click of their phones away from every manner of Hard Core Porn, with the impression that Shakespeare is above a pun on the word “cunt?” The Hamlet Mash Up demonstrates that intelligence can coexist with trash culture, and that both are kickass. Cf. any movie by Quentin Tarantino for a further lesson on this subject.


4) “I have entreated geeks along with me to watch the 15 minutes of this video.” You’ve already told me that you’ve got more than a dozen clips to add and that your goal is “all of them.” I told a friend that if this was two hours long I’d invite people over and serve popcorn. How long do you think you can make it, and still have it be a useful teaching tool?

More than 15 minutes and it can’t be on YouTube. If you are not on YouTube you are not getting to all the people you can. Plus there is a tradition of the “15 minute Shakespeare” I want to stay in. It’s too long as it is. If I could start over I would just do To Be Or Not To Be.

5) “Well spoken, with good accent.” Several of the clips appear to be foreign language versions of Hamlet productions. Isn’t that cheating? If you open up that door couldn’t you do an entire video of nothing but versions of Hamlet from around the world? That’s really a different thing, isn’t it?

Are there a lot of foreign movies quoting Hamlet? I don’t know that many. If there are too many the foreign language ones will be the first thing cut in a next edition.

6) “I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i’ the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Does this only work for Hamlet, or could you set your sites on other Shakespeare works? What would your second choice be? Do you think it’s possible to find enough cultural references to, say, Midsummer Night’s Dream that you could make a similar video?


I am not doing any more of these. This was hard enough and I am clearly missing 15 things at least. I will keep this one as up to date if I can, maybe releasing an update a year or something. I tried to do it with MacBeth but MacBeth is not as sound-bite-y as Hamlet as so the clips had to be longer, and it was a mess. You could do one of Romeo and Juliet maybe but the whole thing would be pop culture characters saying “A rose by any other name” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art
thou Romeo.”

Thanks very much Geoff!  I apologize for assuming you were a high school teacher, I don’t know where I got that. Maybe somebody else will pick up the gauntlet and make another one of these, just as you suggest!

Hamlet’s Plan

~ duane ~ 9 Comments

Somebody help me walk through the timeline in Hamlet’s trip to England.

1) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been assigned the task of accompanying Hamlet to England.

2) R&G have in their possession a letter that says, “Dear King of England, please kill Hamlet.”

3) Neither Hamlet nor R&G know the contents of the letter.

4) Hamlet steals the letter, opens it, and learns what it says.  So he alters it (writes a new letter?)  suggesting that, instead, “the bearers should be put to death.”

5) The pirates attack, and Hamlet goes off with them  (to later be released).

6) R&G,  having lost Hamlet and never knowing what was in the letter in the first place, continue on to England and their ultimate demise.

So here’s my question.  Hamlet didn’t know the pirates were coming, right?  So then what was his plan with the altered letter?  Did he plan to go on to England and stand in front of the king when the letter was read, only to laugh at the expression on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s faces as they are hauled off to the chopping block?

The reason I ask is that I’m left wondering why he so almost gleefully sent them off to die, and whether there were other options.  When he rewrote the letter he assumed that he was basically a prisoner of Claudius’ mercenaries and that he would be brought all the way before the king of England.  Therefore he needed to alter the letter to say something different.  That makes sense.  Couldn’t he have had them imprisoned?  Or something else?

What do you think, does this act (and his subsequent dismissal of his guilt) show that Hamlet’s gone off the deep end at this point?  Remember that his treatment of Polonius wasn’t much better, dragging his corpse through the castle.  Is Hamlet just doing what it takes to survive?  Or is he killing everyone in his way (except the person he’s supposed to kill)?

Ghost Guy Hamlet

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a different spin on the Hamlet story – Hamlet (and his female pal Veronica Horatio) as modern-day ghost hunters.

It’s brand new so I’m not sure where it’s going to go, but I wanted to give a boost to some obvious Shakespeare geeks who are trying to do something a bit out of the ordinary.  Check it out, and subscribe so you can see how future episodes turn out!

Choose Your Own Hamlet

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Looks like somebody’s been reading this blog?  Last month I wrote about “Choose Your Own Shakespeare” novelizations, and on November 21 we got To Be Or Not To Be : The Adventure which is exactly that.

I don’t know how I feel when I see a project like this net $150k on Kickstarter.  Really?  It drives me a little nuts.  I’ve spoken to publishers about doing Shakespeare work and basically been told “Until you have 50k readers or a piece in the NY Times, your book isn’t going to sell.”  Somehow this project pulls in 4k backers and makes it happen?

Just jealous, I guess. 🙂  I do like and support the fact that he’s publishing through the non-profit service Breadpig, and donating all the proceeds to cancer research.  I have to back that.  Good man.