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.

Shakespeare GeekDad (A Geeklet Story)

~ duane ~ 4 Comments

Why I love what I do:

When putting my 4yr old to bed he informed me that we would be playing “a guessing game.” Normally this is a superhero guessing game, which consists of him saying things like “I’m thinking of a good guy who wears blue and red with an S on his chest,” and I have to guess Superman. Anyway, tonight he says, “A Shakespeare guessing game.”

“Oh, honey, we can’t play that,” I tell him. “You don’t know enough Shakespeare characters. I can tell you a Shakespeare story, though.” I’m thinking I’ll tell him a quick version of Midsummer or something equally 4yr-old-going-to-bed-safe.

So I tuck him into bed, curl up next to him, and ask what story he wants. He tells me, “A story with Hamlet, and Shakespeare…”

“…wait, you want Shakespeare *in* the story?”

“Yes. And… what else characters did Shakespeare write?”

“Well,” I say, realizing now that I’m going to have to improvise, “There was Oberon King of the Fairies, and Puck his faithful assistant.”

“Ok,” he decides, “A story with Hamlet, Shakespeare, Oberon and Puck.”

Oh, wonderful.

“And in the story, Hamlet has to say ‘To be or not to be.’ Twice.”

Great. So, we begin…

“Once upon a time there lived a prince named Hamlet. Hamlet was very sad, moping around the castle all day, because this new king – King Claudius – had taken over the thrown. Hamlet’s dad used to be king, but King Claudius threw him in the dungeon and made himself king. Hamlet was not very happy about this, but you just don’t walk up to a king and say Hey dude, that’s not cool – because if you do that, then he throws you in the dungeon too.

So, Hamlet is out walking the castle grounds trying to decide what do when he bumps into William Shakespeare. “Who art thou?” Hamlet asks.

“I am Shakespeare,” Shakespeare said. “I wrote this story.”

“Well then if thou didst write mine story,” said Hamlet, “Tell me how to get rid of King Claudius and put my dad back on the throne!”

Pulling a pen and paper from his pocket, Shakespeare began to write.

*Poof*

Out of nowhere appeared Oberon, King of the Fairies, and his faithful servant Puck.

“TO BE OR NOT TO BE!” exclaimed Hamlet. “WHO ART THOU?”

“I am Oberon, King of the Fairies,” said Oberon, King of the Fairies. “And this is my faithful assistant, Puck.”

“Dost thou know how to rid my kingdom of evil King Claudius?”

Oberon thought for a moment, then whispered in Puck’s ear.

*ZOOM* In a blink, Puck was gone. Faster than Flash. Almost as fast as Superman.

And, just like that, *ZOOM* he was back again, holding a purple flower.

“TO BE OR NOT TO BE AGAIN!” cried Hamlet, “Where didst thou go so fast?”

Oberon handed the purple flower to Hamlet. “This flower,” said Oberon, “Is quite magical. Have your King Claudius merely smell it, and he will fall into a deep sleep. Once he is sleeping, you can take him far away from the kingdom and restore your father to the throne.”

Taking the flower, Hamlet went back into the castle. He first bumped into his mother, Gertrude. “Hamlet!” she said, opening her arms to hug him, “You look so much happier today! What a beautiful flower, may I smell it?”

“No!” said Hamlet. “I…ummm….got it for King Claudius.”

“That’s very nice of you,” said Hamlet’s mother. “The king is in his office.”

Sure enough, Hamlet found Claudius in his office huddled over his paperwork. “What?” asked Claudius, when he saw Hamlet. Claudius didn’t trust Hamlet very much.

“Brought you a flower!” said Hamlet. “Smell it.”

“Not right now,” said Claudius, “Just leave it on the desk.”

Leaving it on the desk, Hamlet left. Claudius returned to his paperwork. Soon, though, Claudius raised his arms to stretch and take a little break. Spying the flower, he picked it up to smell it.

*THUNK* He fell asleep so hard and so fast that his head smacked right into the paperwork he’d just been working on.

Once they could hear him snoring, Hamlet snuck into Claudius’ office with his friend Horatio. Together they brought Claudius’ sleeping form outside, tossed him over a horse’s back, and set the horse walking on the road out of Denmark. He was never heard from again.

With King Claudius safely out of the picture, Hamlet went down to the dungeon and unlocked his father, who was restored to the throne. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.

Top Shakespeare Costumes for Halloween

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

Ok, ok, I want to play too. Over the last week or so I’ve seen lists for tv shows, family movies, horror movies – everything to get you in the Halloween mood. But what about our little corner of the world? Doesn’t Shakespeare have anything to get us into the Halloween Spirit? Here’s my contribution:

Twelfth Night

You’re a girl? Dress up like a boy. You’re a boy? Dress up like a girl dressing up like a boy. Twelfth Night’s main character spends the whole play in costume. We discovered, a few months back, that she’s not even called by her real name until the very end of the play!

Julius Caesar

Why just be any ghost, when you can be Great Caesar’s Ghost(*)? Don’t skimp on the knife wounds, or the blood. Lots and lots of blood. Or if you really want to wear a toga and don’t want to get blood all over it, dip your arms in the red stuff up to your elbows, then go as Brutus.

(*) Bonus points if you can actually convince somebody to dress up like J Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman movies, and then spend the night pointing at you and shouting that.

Hamlet

I knew Hamlet would make a good costume when my 4yr old spotted the idea on one of his cartoon shows. After random channel flipping he comes running into my office to tell me “Daddy, somebody on tv is dressed like Shakespeare!” Along comes the 6 and 8yr olds to tell me “Well, not Shakespeare – he’s dressed like Hamlet. He’s holding a skull and talking to it.”

Of course you could also go with Ophelia, although taking a quick jump in the pool before going out trick or treating might cause you to catch your death (ha!). Then again why not go as Hamlet’s father’s ghost? I’ll leave it up to reader imagination to depict how exactly you’d walk around wearing your beaver up.

Or you could do like I did, and go as Yorick.

The Tempest

A witch (although, granted, she doesn’t really make much of an appearance), a wizard, a sea monster, an airy spirit. Plenty of opportunity here to take a traditional Halloween costume and really run with it. If you want to get really creative, grab a partner and dress up as Stefano and Trinculo. I always described them as pirates to my kids, although “court jester” is probably more accurate.

Titus Andronicus

How can you not have fun dressing up like Titus? Put on a chef’s hat and bloody apron, carry a cleaver and a big stew pot. Throw a prop head in it, maybe a prop hand while you’re at it. Shakespeare’s goriest tragedy is often compared to a modern slasher movie, so why not just go completely over the top with it? Bring along your daughter. Don’t let her talk.

Macbeth

Ghosts make plenty of appearances in Shakespeare’s work, The Tempest and Midsummer are both loaded with magical goings on … but really, is there any play scarier than Macbeth? Dress up like a weird sister, dress up like Banquo’s ghost. Or maybe a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, covered in blood? For the really inside reference, go as Macduff – carry around Macbeth’s head.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Fairies are timeless, in more ways than one. If you need a couple’s idea, why not Titania and Oberon? I love the idea of an entire family dressing up as Midsummer, with the kids playing the roles of Cobweb, Mustardseed and the others. Or go in a completely different direction and make an ass of yourself, literally.

Have I forgotten any? You can always throw on your monk’s outfit and go as Friar Laurence (carry around a pickaxe, crowbar or some other tomb-opening implement for extra credit), or really grab any random “Elizabethan” or “Renaissance” costume from the local store and say that you’re the lead in As You Like It, Much Ado, or any of the other romantic comedies.

What else? Who’s got the creative ideas?

Calling Doctor Shakespeare! (Or maybe Dr. DeVere?)

~ duane ~ 7 Comments

Unfortunately the JAMA article linked in this Washington Post piece about Shakespeare’s medical knowledge is available only to AMA members, so I’m left linking a link of a link :(.

The article points to a piece from the “100 Years Ago” department that ponders how Shakespeare acquired his “extensive knowledge of medical matters.”  Deniers will, of course, tell you that this very sentence is prove that Stratford Will could not have written the plays because he was not a doctor, and we should be seeking out the medical professional who did write them.  (I heard that Oxford once successfully put a Band-Aid onto the pinky finger of his left hand, however.  So he’s still in the running.)

But Shakespeare did know his mental illnesses. The article notes that in his day, mentally ill people weren’t locked away in institutions. Shakespeare could train his powers of observation on people suffering all manner of mental disorders without going out of his way to encounter them.

It’s interesting to periodically step away and look at the words from this “100 years ago” perspective.  We’re so used to what Freud told us about Hamlet that we rarely stop to differentiate what Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been trying to say (because the very concepts did not exist yet), from what he really was trying to say that we’re not seeing because we fail to look at what he gave us from his own terms.  Would Shakespeare have had a name for the behaviors that he gave to Ophelia? Was he describing what he’d personally seen in someone else?

Since Freud comes so much re: Hamlet, I’ve often wondered what other modern psycho/socio creations we have today that Shakespeare might have been showing us, in his own way.  Does Hamlet, for example, go through the “five stages or grief”? Do any of his characters suffer from textbook schizophrenia?  In my review of Tennant’s Hamlet earlier today I deliberately made reference to Asperger’s (and, on Twitter, ADHD) to see if anybody with more knowledge of those subjects would pick up on the thread.

You know what just occurred to me?  I don’t recall seeing a single peanut in any of Shakespeare’s works.  Perhaps Shakespeare was suggesting that Hamlet was allergic?  More importantly could he have found a rhyme for “epi pen” while still getting the meter to come out right?

[Credit to vtelizabeth on Twitter for the Tweet which pointed me in this direction.]

Review : David Tennant as Hamlet, Nerd of Denmark

~ duane ~ 20 Comments

Ok, here we go!  The easiest way to review Hamlet, I’ve found, is to break it into three distinct reviews : the direction, the rest of the cast, and Hamlet himself.  Otherwise it’s just too hard to separate what David Tennant did with what he was given to work with. Let me just first say that watching Shakespeare on “live” TV as if it were some sort of major event was just awesome.  It was this wonderful combination of nostalgia (remember the days before DVR where if you got up to go to the bathroom you missed stuff?) with modern technology – I sat on Twitter and did play-by-play throughout most of the show.  Could I have DVR’d it?  Sure, and I did, kind  of — I was running maybe 45 minutes behind everybody else.  But it was important to me to watch it as live as I could, as if we were watching the Academy Awards or something.  I wanted to share the experience with my geeks.  Great time, and I look forward to what PBS has in store for us next time..

Continue reading “Review : David Tennant as Hamlet, Nerd of Denmark” →

Hamlet is 16. Discuss.

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

In my head, the words and works of Shakespeare are … how can I explain this …. they exist outside of time.  They are timeless, and I mean that in all senses of the word.

I could not tell you off the top of my head whether Merchant of Venice is technically supposed to happen in 1275, 1623 or 1941.  It is part of what I love.  It is what enables people to go to the well over and over and over again, keeping the essence while simultaneously changing everything.  If you tried to tell me that there is something about Hamlet that *must* take place in 1601, you’d ruin it for me.

So it is something of an eye-opener for me to stumble across a book like Steve Roth’s “Hamlet: The Undiscovered Country” where he very literally maps the action of Hamlet to actual calendar days, in the process rebuilding many core beliefs about the play.

I am not in the least kidding when I say that he discusses which of the action, for example, happens on a Monday.  More so, *what* Monday and why that is important, why Shakespeare chose it.

I first stumbled across Steve’s work on the “Hamlet is 30” topic, which we’ve discussed twice before.  It is his position that the well known “I have been sexton here, man and boy 30 years” – the primary evidence that Hamlet is 30 – is actually a misinterpretation.  He feels that the line actually reads “I (the gravedigger) have been sixteen here (i.e., have been at this job 16 years)…”  It is a bold position to take.  The secondary bit of evidence, that Yorick – who Hamlet played with as a child – died 23 years ago, is harder to contradict.  But Roth finds Q1 evidence that the line was originally 12 years, which would fall right in line.

As I said above, and as my regular readers probably know, this is not how I do it.  There’s a world of difference between just assuming that “some time” elapsed before the nunnery confrontation, and mapping that time out to a number of days, a time of year, everything.  The flowers that Ophelia picked (if she didn’t imagine them), were they in bloom at that time of year? The old king was supposedly sleeping in his orchard… how cold was it?  There are folks that eat that stuff up.  I’m willing to bet that there’s a handful of regular readers of my blog, in fact, who are all over it.

It’s often hard to make the case, and Roth knows that.  When he’s got details he makes his case clear.  When the case is a little weaker on fact, he’s not afraid to say “That sounds about right.”  In particular, Hamlet’s time with the pirates is particularly tricky to nail down. There are also times where I just don’t plain understand what calendar we’re supposed to be using.  The anachronism of “going back to Wittenberg” is oft-cited – it wasn’t there in Hamlet’s time, but would have been in Shakespeare’s time.  Ok, fair enough.  But much of Roth’s calendar calculation is done against the 1601 calendar, when Hamlet would have been *performed*, not when it took place.  Is that too much a convenience?  Did Hamlet really write in-jokes and references that would have been out of date a year later, much less 400?

Within all the calendar counting, though, there are still opportunities to learn new things (again, this is part of what I love).  For instance, this book brings up the idea that Hamlet’s harping on Gertrude not going to bed with Claudius is not because he’s got some Oedipal issues, but because (if Hamlet is 16, mind you), Gertrude is clearly still young enough to bear a child by Claudius.  A child that would be next in line to the throne, bumping Hamlet out of the picture.  Maybe that’s common knowledge, but I’d never thought of it.  And if Hamlet is 30, it’s more far fetched.

Roth’s book is small, barely 150 pages, and has its fair share of tables taking up space.  So it’s a quick read.  You don’t have to buy the “Hamlet is 16” premise to enjoy it either, though Roth certainly makes a good showing for his case.  This book would be a fine addition to the collection of any Hamlet geeks out there.