When my kids were young, I quickly learned about the Parents’ Guide section of IMDB. For any given movie or TV show, you can find out exactly what kind of sex and violence is in it and decide as a parent whether you want to watch it with your kids or have your kids watch it. Everybody’s got their own rules for that kind of thing. Kids come in all different ages and sensibilities.

I was mainly looking to rule out too much sex and violence. But that’s just my house. I wasn’t crazy about salty language, but I wouldn’t ban a movie from the house because of it. I used to laugh at how people would count the number of times that “g_ddamn” was used or “the lord’s name.” But I suppose fair’s fair, that’s important to some people, too. Then they started counting things like whether the bad guy smoked.

I never really thought of these as trigger warnings, but I guess that’s what they were. The difference is that the movie didn’t lead with them. I, as a parent, chose to seek them out. They don’t pop up in front of me before my movie starts like some EULA disclaimer when I’m installing software. “This movie contains people smoking. Check here to confirm that you’re not offended by this.”

You perhaps see where I’m going with this. The Globe has doubled down hard on trigger warnings lately, including:

•  ‘depictions of war, self-harm and suicide, stage blood and weapons including knives.’
• ‘language of violence, sexual references, misogyny, and racism’.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13642267/globe-theatre-trigger-warning-shakespeare-antony-cleopatra.html

I’m with Gregory Doran, who hates them, and Ralph Fiennes, who thinks audiences have become “too soft.” If somebody doesn’t already know the content of a Shakespeare play, and worries about these things, it takes no time to search online for the information. Maybe we should put an AI in charge of answering precisely this kind of question.

There’s an irony here that kills me (trigger warning). Shakespeare is supposed to portray what it means to be human. I often tell people variations on the idea that “the whole of human emotion is at one point or another depicted in the complete works of Shakespeare.” And in real life, there’s violence, hatred, and people dying. Thinking that you can avoid these things by being alerted about every optional fictional situation that contains them, you’re surely missing the bigger problem. Shakespeare also shows us how to deal with those things. It doesn’t glorify the violence and the hatred. It holds a mirror up to nature so we can see how horrible it is for ourselves and gives us time to think about it instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Shakespeare makes life better. You may have heard me say that once or twice. It’s sad to believe people think they’re doing the right thing by coming up with reasons to have less Shakespeare.

Off the top of my head right now I couldn’t tell you how many copies of Shakespeare’s sonnets I have. I get them for review, people give them to me as gifts. A common topic on the Reddit Shakespeare sub is, “How much is my copy of the sonnets worth?” And the answer is, typically, not much. Shakespeare has been published by a lot of different sources over a lot of years. It’s hardly rare and thus scarcely valuable.

Unless it’s one of only twelve copies of the 1899 Roycroft Press edition printed on vellum. In this case, according to the experts at Antiques Roadshow, it is worth up to $10,000.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13633273/nashville-antiques-roadshow-value-rare-copy-william-shakespeare-sonnets.html

So maybe there are some needles in those haystacks after all? Given that I just lost my job, perhaps I have to look through those stacks of mine and see if any Elizabethan lottery tickets are waiting for me!

Pardon the interruption for a moment for some news from real life.

I lost my job this week.

I’m in the tech industry and have been for decades, and we deal with it from time to time. The big companies like Amazon and Google often lay people off by the thousands. This isn’t my first time being here, but after a good nine years at my most recent job, I honestly thought I’d seen the last of these times. I thought I’d be retiring there. I guess the universe had other plans.

I Could Use Your Help

I’ve always lived a double life online, keeping my day job as a principal software engineer separate from my passion project of being a Shakespeare Geek (even though they overlap more than you’d think). But there are things you do when you find yourself looking for a job, and one of those things is to use all your resources. With that in mind:

• I can be found on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duanemorin/. If you’re in my line of work or know people who are, please feel free to connect. A good network is everything.
• Want to buy a book? My new book, My Own Personal Shakespeare: Macbeth, is a brand new project off to a slow start. On an optimistic note, I do have more time now to work on the second volume in the series. But right now I still need all the help I can get spreading the word about the project’s existence. Please share the link with any actors, students, and educators you know who might have a reason to dig back into Macbeth from a whole new perspective. I hope to establish something here that can grow into a valuable contribution to how people approach Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare Geek Merchandise is always available! With just about 200 unique designs on Amazon, the merch has done okay for me over the years, but it can always be better. I’ve always focused on the “put more Shakespeare into the world” aspect rather than the “make money at all costs” way of doing things. I don’t steal other people’s designs. I aim for quality, not quantity. If you’ve ever considered purchasing from my store, whether for yourself or as gifts for others, these next few weeks/months are when I could really use the help. Buy now, store stuff away from Christmas presents?

What’s Next?

It’s weird being out of work. You feel like there’s a million things to do – update your resume, call your network, set up appointments, search search search online. But also, sometimes you’re incredibly bored because you don’t know what to do with yourself. It’s times like that when I turn to my pet projects, like Shakespeare. Hopefully, you’ll see more content from me over the coming weeks, but hopefully, not too many weeks, if you know what I’m saying.

As a software guy, I’ve also always used Shakespeare as my portfolio for learning new technology. I’m going to have to update my skills in a few key areas, and show that I know what I’m talking about. The obvious way to do that is to make extensions to my work here at ShakespeareGeek.com. Will that bring anything exciting? Who knows. Maybe! Stay tuned!

Thanks to everyone for all the support over the years. It’s easy to put stuff up on the web and just think of the people that will see it as “traffic” but that’s not true here. I know many of you. I’ve had conversations this month with people I first met through ShakespeareGeek over ten years ago. We’re all trying to make life better with Shakespeare. Sometimes that means helping each other out, too. Thanks again. Sorry for the interruption.

I mean that literally. The other day, while thinking about ghosts and special effects in modernized Shakespeare adaptations, I thought, couldn’t Hamlet have dreamed the whole thing? We’ve already got his “in my mind’s eye, Horatio,” reference. What would that do to the play? Has anybody done that before?

I don’t know about the answer to that last question but I thought we could cover the first two.

Marcellus and Bernardo

Step one, we have to get rid of the opening scene. Marcellus and Bernardo in the opening scene. I think this is an easy cut for this purpose, though, because it’s not like the fact that these two have seen the ghost makes any difference to the play at all. They don’t mention it again, to Hamlet or anyone else.

Horatio

Like Marcellus and Bernardo, Horatio seems to forget all about the ghost after they take Hamlet to see him. But the fact is that Horatio did see the ghost, and he does continue his ongoing dialogue with Hamlet for the rest of the play, so it must inform his thoughts and actions in some way. Thus the question for us has to be, does Hamlet tell him about this dream he had? Horatio never gets to hear what Hamlet and his dad talked about, just that they did. It’s basically just an extension of this scene:

HAMLET
My father!–methinks I see my father.

HORATIO
Where, my lord?

HAMLET
In my mind’s eye, Horatio.

HORATIO
I saw him once; he was a goodly king.

HAMLET
He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.

Hamlet I ii

Let’s say that we insert a dream sequence scene between Hamlet and his father. Now, for this scene with Horatio, Hamlet drops a “methinks I saw my father” rather than “see”. Testing the waters, to see if he wants to tell Horatio what happened. But then he changes his mind, and turns it into a sigh and an, “Oh, that’s just be being sad, never mind, nothing to see here.” And nothing more is ever mentioned about it.

Hamlet’s Point of View

So now we’ve got a world where only Hamlet has seen or heard from his father’s spirit. This might as well be the definition of paranoid schizophrenic – the man’s hearing voices saying to avenge a murder. Even if he did tell anyone, he’s going to look crazy. His “antic disposition” now is all in his head, nobody knows what he’s talking about. Out of the blue, he tells his friends, “Listen, you’re going to think I’ve gone crazy, but I haven’t! Trust me!” And of course they’re all thinking, “He’s crazy.”

Gertrude’s Bedchamber

This is the tricky scene because, as we all know, the ghost comes back while Hamlet confronts his mother, Gertrude, in her bedchamber (even though he was clearly told not to!). We can’t easily make this a dream sequence, since Gertrude has to be an interactive part of it. There’s the theory that Hamlet really is imagining the ghost at this point, since Gertrude does not see him. But if we went down that path we are taking the mystery out of it, Hamlet’s definitely seeing things.

I don’t want that, I want the question of Hamlet’s sanity to remain front and center. We the audience are the only ones who know what happened in his dream so we’re the only ones in a place to say whether he’s gone mad.

We could do a flashback sort of thing where the ghost’s only appearance here is just a replay of the dream ghost saying “leave her to Heaven.” Hamlet suddenly reminding himself of this causes him to stop cold in his tracks, possibly mid sentence, which causes Gertrude to react. Maybe Hamlet forgets where he is and starts talking to himself as if the ghost is there. Something along those lines. Easier to do on film than on stage, though. Hard to get across “ghost isn’t really there, it’s just Hamlet remembering his dream”. Not sure about this part yet.

Is That It?

I’m no director, I just wanted to try brainstorming my way through a specific interpretation of an idea. What did I miss? Any horrible continuity errors if we did this?