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.

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)?

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!

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.

Over on the Shakespeare section of Reddit, a question came up that I’d never seen before:

Is Hamlet really telling the truth about what happened on the ship?

The submitter’s argument is basically that the story is too unbelievable.  Why would the pirate take Hamlet prisoner, and then taxi him back home?  Why would Rosencrantz and Guildenstern just sit back and let that happen, having been charged to get Hamlet to England?

The general consensus is that no, Hamlet’s not lying, and there’s enough evidence to prove that (both in the text and historically).

It’s fun to grab at a random angle like this every now and then, and re-examine bits of the play you might previously have been skimming over.  During the conversation I wondered, “Once they lost Hamlet, why did R&G bother continuing on to England, anyway?”  But then I remembered, their mission was to deliver that letter (which ended up being their execution order). They never knew that Hamlet was the primary reason for their trip.  It does make you wonder what they were thinking when they watched a pirate ship sail away with the prince, though.  “Oooooo!  Claudius is gonna be *pissed*!”

Don’t miss the later posts in the thread that focus on Shakespeare’s use of exposition, and just how big a deal it would be to have a character lie while doing that.  I personally like digging through the text, but that’s mostly because at any given time I can find and search texts, whereas the historical stuff?  I never know if there’s some book I’ve missed that completely negates everything I think I’ve just learned.