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.

Tell me, what would you do with a book that attempts to capture the history of Hamlet? I’m talking all of it, from the original Amleth story all the way through to screen captures of Ethan Hawke moping about when Kyle MacLachlan watches in the background.

So it is with David Bevinton’s Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages
(Oxford University Press), which surprisingly still weighs in at just under 200 pages.  What do you say to that, Harold Bloom? 🙂

The author is not just tackling how the character of Hamlet has been portrayed over the years, either. He’s truly gone for a complete history of the play in every sense. There’s a diagram of the Swan Theatre, which has no trap door in the stage, and discussion about what this would have meant for a performance of Hamlet, which requires one.  How would Polonius have hidden behind the arras? Would he fall through it and back onto the stage, or would Hamlet have to pull back the curtain to see him? What does Hamlet do with the body when he drags it offstage? That’s all just in one early chapter. There’s depth like that on every page.

These issues may seem trivial, particularly to the theatre-folk in the crowd who have to deal with such details every performance. But this is not a lesson plan in how *you* might stage Hamlet, this is a history of how Hamlet *was* staged. That is what makes it fascinating. There are times you want the plays to be timeless, and there are times when you want to feel connected to their origins.

Jump forward to modern days and Bevington has something to say about all the most popular modern video interpretations. There’s a surprisingly lengthy and positive description of Mel Gibson’s version (which, according to Bevington, was always intended as an “action movie” Hamlet), and then a story about the disastrous timing of Kevin Kline’s production coming out the same year and basically getting lost on PBS, despite its emphasis on “superb performances” and “insightful interpretation”. Branagh’s, Tenant’s and event Ethan Hawke’s interpretation also get a fairly detailed examination.

I have to admit, books like this are intimidating to me. They are so densely packed with stuff that I just plain didn’t know that I can’t get through 3 pages without saying, “I could make a post out of that!”  Typically several times.  I know my style, and this is not the kind of book I sit and read and absorb end to end.  I can’t do it.  Instead I’ll grab it and flip to a random chapter, knowing that wherever I land I’ll learn something new and want to talk about it.

This is a great addition to my reference library, and I thank Oxford University Press for sending me a copy.