Cheer Up, Hamlet! Paper Doll

Cheer Up, Hamlet! is a paper doll available for free online from Les Vieux Jours, and for which there are 16 costumes plus sundry accessories and counting. An amusing diversion, the makers at last know their Shakespeare, and find proper quotes from the play to juxtapose each image. Obviously, there's the classic look:

Alternate wear based on lines from the play:

(That's a sweet Horatio.)

Some jokes are best appreciated by fans of certain actors who have played the role.

And then there's the completely outlandish...

But Hamlet IS an avenger, right?

For more costumes, accessories, and humor, in larger sizes, check out the website.

Other Hamlets: What Shakespeare Says About Coca-Cola

Not content with co-opting Santa Claus, Coca-Cola tried to appropriate Shakespeare in a 1928 ad campaign that used famous lines from the plays to describe their product. They poached 10 plays this way, including Hamlet. The line they selected was Ophelia's description of Hamlet before he went made in the Nunnery scene (Act II scene 2):

"The glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observed of all observers."

The ad copy is pretty hilarious: "Maybe Mr. Shakespeare didn't always know just what he was writing about. We can't ask him now. We can only take what he wrote for what it is, and in penning the above he must have had Coca-Cola in mind."

Yes, that must be it. Since Ophelia goes on to say all of this is now overthrown, we can only surmise that the ad copy writers didn't always know what THEY were writing about, and this is obviously a reference to Classic Coke as it relates to New Coke.

There might be an essay in how Hamlet was used as a marketing tool through the ages...

Source

Other Hamlets: Dirtbag Hamlet

You may or may not find "Dirtbag Hamlet" amusing (the complete story HERE, text Mallory Ortberg, pictures Matt Lubchansky), a take on Hamlet that casts him as a modern teenage dirtbag. As satire of either Shakespeare or modern youth, it's pretty blunt, but does it highlight interesting truths about the play itself?

What works, I think, is the simplification of the character to the point where he is just an irreverent, jaded youth. He doesn't avenge his father's death because he rejects all authority, even the truth's. This Hamlet will not be ruled by anything. In fact, he rejects: The King's authority, the notion Hamlet Sr. was his father, his relationship to Ophelia, and the dignity of his own death. Nothing is sacred. And to the real, scripted Hamlet, this is sometimes true, so the take is legitimate. For example, the strip distills Hamlet's relationship to his mother thus:

GERTRUDE walks down the hallway. Enter HAMLET, skateboarding.
HAMLET: SLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
(HAMLET skates backwards) UUUUUUTT

Take away Hamlet's banquet of words, and you weaken the play and the character considerably - that's not in dispute - but you do get at the essence of the character. Or at least, a certain take on the character.

V.i. The Gravedigger Scene - Alas, Poor Yorick!

"Alas, poor Yorick" is, along with "To be or not to be?", easily one of Hamlet's most famous lines, and is perhaps the most used as a pop culture icon. And not just the line, but the image of Hamlet holding up a skull while saying that line (or sometimes, erroneously saying "To be or not to be?" in that position). As we wrap things up on this sequence, I thought it might be a fun change of pace if we looked at different ways pop culture has translated this moment. There are hundreds of examples, and I could have trawled the Internet for days on end to collect them all, but I will show five of my favorites, as a sample.

Hamlet is plainly nuts:

Cartoons like this one are abundant. Most are political or topical. This one is just universally goofy:

The motivation poster and LOLcats team up to bring us this:

Everything is awesome:

And a cartoonist who knows my particular pain:

Hope you enjoyed these. Feel free to link to your own favorites in the comments.

Other Hamlets: Kill Shakespeare

What happened to Hamlet on his way to England? The play tells us through a letter to Horatio, but writers Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col, along with artist Andy Belanger, have a different idea. In the 12-issue comics series Kill Shakespeare, they basically use Hamlet's exile as a launching pad for a story in which Hamlet finds his way to the shores of a fable-land where all of Shakespeare's creations co-exist. A prophecy proclaims him the "shadow king" that must one day find the lost creator, William Shakespeare, and two factions try to lay claim to him. On one side, Richard III, Lady MacBeth and Iago, on the other, Falstaff, Juliet and Othello. The first wants to kill Shakespeare and steal his power over creation, the other to convince Will to rid the land of evil.

It's a fun exercise, more approachable than League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though more contained than Fables, its two most obvious antecedents. McCreery and Del Col make a lot of references to the Shakespearean canon, not just with the characters, but in tropes (there's a play, cross-dressing, a tempest on the horizon), details (place names are in-jokes, Hamlet and Juliet speak through a chink in a wall, some of the action takes place on Twelfth Night), and dialog (many lines are referenced). It certainly keeps readers who know their Shakespeare interested. But they also don't mind fiddling with the stories so they can interact regardless of their fates in the original plays.

Of course, we're here to talk about Hamlet specifically, and there are some interesting changes made to his particular tale that can inform a new staging of the play. Elsinore is translated as Helsingor, and its king dies a month ago. Since then, Hamlet's mother has wed the king's brother and events have quickly spun out of control. Hamlet, believing he is killing Claudius on behalf of his ghostly father, accidentally murders Polonius...

The writers make certain choices that change the tenor of the play. For one thing, it takes three days for Hamlet to admit his crime and return the body to Polonius' family. You shall indeed "nose him". Second, this weighs far more heavily on Hamlet than in the play, and his exile is more or less voluntary. Though Claudius officially sends him away and decrees he shall never return on pain of death, Hamlet's guilt is a major motivator. As he prepares to leave, he says goodbye to his father's tomb and feels as if he's been set free. This is not the Hamlet whose thoughts are bloody, so the comic becomes his journey to his eventual return, changed and ready, to Denmark's shores. In fact, when he is visited by other spirits (attempting to draw him to the land of Shakespeare), he protests again and again that he is no killer.

An important difference in the comic is that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Hamlet's true friends.

They expose Claudius' plot and suggest Hamlet raise an army to regain his throne. But Hamlet accepts his punishment for the murder of Polonius and finds himself unworthy of the Danish crown. If there is a parallel with Act IV Scene 4, it's that Rosencrantz shows Hamlet how to make a difficult choice by betraying Claudius. But fate (or rather, the forces who want to control the "shadow king") intervene and leads pirates to Hamlet's ship. His friends are killed in the melee and he is cast away on alien shores. This is all part of issue 1's introduction, and from there the story proceeds apace.

Issue 7 is another important issue for Hamlet scholars. A dark troupe of players throw Hamlet on the stage in an effort to manipulate him and force him to play a part in The Murder of Gonzago. It's not clear if he also had the play presented before the Royal couple before killing Polonius, but he presumably did. He plays the role of the assassin, forcing him to connect his own murder with that of Claudius. Up to this point, Hamlet has been unwilling to accept his destiny, a mirror of his reticence to do the same in Helsingor, so forces are pushing him to confront his demons. He runs into a Hall of Mirrors where he does just that.

There he confesses his murder to Juliet, a five-fold crime in his eyes because it struck more than just Polonius. Ophelia and Laertes lost a father, Gertrude lost a son (he believes Gertrude now sees him as an abomination), and Hamlet is the last victim, having forsaken his own self as penance. He also explores his feeling towards his father, a cold and distance man of violence who was so paranoid as to wage war on all his neighbors until only internal threats were left, a man suspicious of his brother, yes, but also of his own son. Hamlet Sr. is painted as a Richard III, someone who might well have done away with Claudius and Hamlet if he feared, rightly or wrongly, they coveted the throne. Did Claudius only kill his brother in preventative self defense? Or is Hamlet only justifying, once again, why he hasn't killed Claudius in his father's name? Hamlet comes out of the experience ready to be a hero, but no to go back home.

The idea that Hamlet is the only character that can find Shakespeare is a perfectly legitimate one, even an obvious one. He is the character that perhaps most escaped his author's control. Hamlet's delays in the play are an overt attempt to stymie the play's inevitable tragedy. Hamlet does not want to die and forces his author to keep him alive and interesting. When we finally encounter Will in the final act, he admits to having given his characters free will, a Judeo-Christian allegory sure, but also commentary on how alive his characters seem. After his first few plays, imitating the "cartoons" of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare found a way to make his characters truly life-like, able to hear themselves speak and change in response to their own thoughts. In the world of Kill Shakespeare, it's caused a civil war, strife in the land at the hands of the more evil characters, but also the chance for redemption.

Though the series ends at issue 12, Hamlet does not return to Helsingor. Not yet. A new series, subtitled The Tide of Blood, has since begun publishing, continuing Hamlet's story. We shall have to return to this book again one day...

Other Hamlets: Swing with Scooter

Published by DC Comics in April-May 1967, written by Jack Miller and Barbara Friedlander, with art by Joe Orlando and Mike Esposito, Swing with Scooter #6, a "hip" teen comic that would only later become a straight Archie rip-off, featured the story "Hamlet and Eggs". You can probably guess this is a Hamlet pastiche as the cast of high school kids attempt to put on a play to raise money and don't take it very seriously. Is there anything we can learn about Shakespeare's original from a jokey comic book?

The plot is pretty simple and rather silly, and has absolutely nothing to do with the cover. Miss Bluff, the German drama teacher, puts the kids in rehearsals for Hamlet, and has some real trouble getting them to focus. They giggle, they start doing lines from other plays (one girl, Penny, confuses Hamlet with Romeo and Juliet, which could be an interesting idea for a mash-up since the Prince of Denmark and Ophelia are also star-crossed lovers; maybe something with the Ghost of Mercutio), fight for roles, or destroy props and sets. By the time they're selling tickets, everyone's heard it's to be a disaster and no one wants to come. Then, the comic's titular hero, Scooter/Hamlet, is inspired to turn the tragedy into... a musical comedy?

Sorry Hamlet 2, Swing with Scooter was there first! Hopefully, the townsfolk know the story, because that banner isn't spoiler-free. Could this work? If you know it's going to be terrible, saying it's a comedy might be the way to go. And Hamlet does have a lot of humor and wit, it would be a matter of sending up the tragical elements. Sadly, we get very little of the play itself in the comic, barely more than the following page, but it does give us an idea of how the evening went:

Scooter's version of the play apparently appropriates lines and re-purposes them as pop tunes to create entirely new scenes. "To be or not to be" becomes a love song, for example, "To be or not to be my baby". This, perhaps accidentally, taps into meanings presents in the original text. In poetry, dying and making love are related concepts. For the teens in this book, Polonius was right: Hamlet's sanity hinges on the love of Ophelia. "To be" is to love this girl. "Not to be" is to be alone. The teen Hamlet (as opposed to the oddly middle-aged Hamlet of the play) may express his sexual frustration with jealousy for his sexually active mother and trying to get revenge for his dead father. There is something interesting as well about Penny (the second Ophelia) appropriating "to sleep, perchance to dream" since Hamlet's speech may be what eventually drives her to suicide. Ophelia's madness is represented as a kind of dream state that ties into this image as well.

And finally, there's the matter of the competing Ophelias, a joke from rehearsals taken to its logical punchline on opening night. In the panel following the above page, the last we'll see of the play, there are two simultaneous fights. Hamlet and Laertes, of course, and the two Ophelias (neither dead, it seems). They're breaking character, of course, but doubling up on characters in a more serious attempt at the play could create the image of a girl battling herself. There's the dutiful daughter and Hamlet's lover, and their struggle leads to her madness and death. Unfortunately, both sides of Ophelia are dominated by men, which makes this metaphor far less useful than the Cynthia/Penny rivalry would seem to suggest.

"Hamlet and Eggs" only plays it for laughs (or frankly, for the thin, occasional smile), but the play is rich enough that even a silly pastiche of it can still uncover staging ideas and meaning.

III.iii. The Confessional - Spider-Hamlet

Comic Book Resources collected various comics art crossovers with the works of the Bard this week, and I wanted to show the Hamlet-inspired ones before we move on to the next scene.

Artist Sean McFarland offers a Spider-Man incapable of killing his uncle's murderer due to Marvel Comics angst, making that murderer Norman Osborn (The Green Goblin), though Osborn killed Gwen (Ophelia), not Uncle Ben. McFarland still manages to hit a few metaphorical cords, with Harry as Laertes being the son of Claudius/Norman, which is how the King initially treats Laertes (giving him leave to go first, and only later calling out to Hamlet). The Goblin of course never married Aunt May/Gertrude, though Doctor Octopus once did, but he probably wouldn't have worked as well in relation to the other characters depicted. Where's Flash Thompson as Rosencrantz or Guildenstern?

From a later scene, John Trumbull shows this piece featuring Spider-Ham (the funny animal version of Spider-Man):

Strangely enough with Mysterio as Horatio. The joke is in like-sounding names, but having a master of special effects and illusion as Hamlet's best friend does play on the idea that Horatio is causing the play to happen, and in this case, that he would have been responsible for the appearance of the Ghost (a projection, no doubt). Could Horatio be working for Fortinbras, which is why he's left to tell the tale at the end? It's really a debriefing?

III.i. To Be or Not to Be - Brian Cox Masterclass with Theo

Before going on to the next sequence, I thought I'd share this lovely video of Brian Cox teaching a 30-month-old to do Hamlet. Though it's a measure of parroting the words, is there something modern actors or directors can take away from this innocent intonation of the words? There may be. We're used to Hamlet being "too old" to be a student, but how about too young? How does that change our perception of the play? What if Hamlet were a troubled teenager? Or as in this case, he would be meditating on mortality when his entire life stretches before him? It's a magical moment when Theo looks away from Cox and repeats the soliloquy while looking into the distance, somehow getting into the proper performance on instinct.

Brian Cox explains the experiment in a later interview:

III.i. To Be or Not to Be - Discovering Hamlet

In 1988, Derek Jacobi was asked to direct Kenneth Branagh's first stage Hamlet. It was his only directing job ever - not because he did a poor job, but because he much prefers acting - but the documentary special Discovering Hamlet chronicled the effort (if not the finished play). "To be or not to be" is the only sequence from the documentary I wanted to examine on Hyperion to a Satyr, but it's an incredibly intriguing take on the scene. He sadly doesn't go into detail, but Jacobi claims his approach is wholly rooted in the text. That approach? Having Hamlet speak the lines, not as a true soliloquy, but to Ophelia.

In my estimation, he's entirely correct in thinking this. For one thing, Ophelia is on stage when Hamlet enters, and no stage directions have her leave or hide. Shakespeare's didascalia are always sparse, but entrances and exists are clearly marked. What if the Bard meant for Ophelia to be present and aware of the speech? The main argument against this staging is the final line, "Soft you now! The fair Ophelia," written as an interruptive and usually read as Hamlet's realization that she is present. However, it is possible to read them instead as Hamlet shushing her, giving her permission not to respond to his meditation on mortality. He's not telling himself or the audience to be quiet, but her. "Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd" becomes the actual conclusion to "To be or not to be", Hamlet perhaps admitting what spurred this black speech on, i.e. the guilt of having cut Ophelia off from his affections.

Brought into the scene quite viscerally, Ophelia is both witness and confidante. She may well be the only person Hamlet could say this to (Horatio has been absent a while), showing vulnerability for the first time since he went "mad". So how much greater is Ophelia's betrayal when the spies are discovered? She hasn't just lured Hamlet into the open, but made him show his true self. In other words, Jacobi's staging seems to confirm that the speech is not an act on Hamlet's part, and furthermore indicate that he perhaps would not have made it at all if not for the safety provided by Ophelia. Her presence makes him admit something he should not have. Theatrical conventions aside, it also confirms that the spies heard the speech, which normally would have been a long aside to the audience, representative of inner thought. There's an ambiguity on stage, that can lead the audience to reject that the character is literally talking to himself aloud, and ambiguity that is dispelled in this staging of it.

And of course, it heightens the irony of Ophelia later taking her own life, "acting" where Hamlet was unable to. While her prince seems to be confiding in her, we'll find that he was planting an idea in her head instead. In this version, there is no speech without Ophelia. In any version where she is present - hidden or not - it could be said Ophelia doesn't die but for this speech.

Other Hamlets: Hambat

University professor Lee Shackleford and fellow blogger Snell both turned me on to this on to this one-shot comic strip at Funny Shorts almost as soon as it came out (thank you both). It's entitled "Hambat" and is quite the Frankenstein monster. It's a webcomic about a comic book character fused with Shakespeare's greatest play, told in the style of a movie trailer.But IS Batman Hamlet in disguise? Well, no. Though both have suffered the loss of a parent, and both have sworn some kind of revenge, Batman does not delay his action. Unlike Hamlet, he doesn't need to make sure his Claudius is truly guilty; he just goes into the night at takes his revenge on all criminals. Nor does Batman have an untrustworthy supporting cast. All threats come from outside. And yet, both characters are brooding avengers who put on an act when around "courtiers" to hide their true selves. Both are surrounded by corruption and madness. But it's in their differences that the comic irony comes through.
Hambat is a proactive Hamlet who through the same text actually enacts his revenge rather than delays it. Just goes to show once again how selectively cutting the play can create new and intriguing interpretations, even though some are just for fun.

Other Hamlets: Gilligan's Island Revisited

When I posted the Gilligan's Island Hamlet parody some months ago, I did so without comment. I feel kind of bad about that. So here's my attempt at analyzing what makes the parody interesting.

First, I must acknowledge the (probably unknowing) amount of postmodernism at work here. This is a broad sitcom doing a parody of both Shakespeare AND Gilbert & Sullivan at the same time, tracing a line through theatrical tradition from the 16th to the 20th centuries. While Gilbert & Sullivan's nautical themes are a perfect choice for a play partly put on by the Skipper and his first mate, we might wonder: Why Hamlet? I'm not disputing its popularity or that the 1960s audience would know its basic plot and characters, recognize its key lines, etc. (and certainly, it may speak favorably to the state of education in the 60s that a low brow comedy program would think nothing of parodying the Bard), but it's certainly not the most light-hearted of subject matter. One might think that The Tempest would be a better fit for Gilligan's Island, after all.

The again, Gilligan's Island is about delay, just like Hamlet is. Everything in the show conspires to delay the castaways' rescue, even while dangling it in front of their noses almost every episode. Obviously, as soon as they get off the island, the show is over. In the same way, as soon as Hamlet takes his revenge, the play is over. And this is the power of Hamlet. As a play, it communicates its theme so strongly that any story of delay becomes a version of Hamlet. And as a character, Hamlet is the instrument of his own delay. He stretches the play out before him more than circumstances do (as is they case for Gilligan's Island or similar, ongoing programming like The Prisoner or Star Trek: Voyager). In fact, a LOT of television can be examined through the Hamlet filter because it employs strategies to prevent early resolution. Even romantic comedies are like Hamlet in that way, a slippery road that leads to a psycho-sexual analysis of the Hamlet-Claudius relationship. Few comparisons to television shows (and other serialized formats) hold up in the end because their protagonists are not the instruments of the featured delay. Only in the character in charge of his or her own destiny do we find the prototypical Hamlet.

Other Hamlets: Gilligan's Island

Left without comment

Because really, what can you say to this?

Other Hamlets: Theatre of War by Justin Richards

It occurs to me that I should find a place for versions of Hamlet that appear in media other than the ones I've chosen to dissect. So from this point on, there is a good chance of my doing just that in between Scenes. Having just run through a number of scenes of David Tennant's turn in the role, I thought it might be appropriate to look at a Doctor Who (currently Tennant's most famous role) novel that makes strong use of Hamlet.

Theatre of War by Justin Richards doesn't feature Tennant's Doctor, of course, but rather Sylvester McCoy's, as part of the New Adventures, a range of books that continued the Doctor's story after the show's cancellation in 1989. The novel presents a future society obsessed with theater and a team of archaeologists who find an ancient theater-projecting machine that creates a virtual Hamlet as well as other plays. Richards has fun with Shakespeare throughout, giving voice to drama critics of the future in various text pieces, or turning some of the text into doggerel written by a fictitious future dramatist called Osterling. (The latter is by all accounts a rather poor writer, but brought people back to the theatre by embracing the technology of his time, more or less creating live action films... not too far from where theater seems to be going.)

For purposes of these articles, the plot of the novel isn't particularly relevant, but I did note down a few passages that are. On page 211, the Doctor makes the following observation about the Hamlet theatre projector: "There's a whole universe captured in there. People who think they're real but who are actually just fiction are running about saying pre-written lines about self-will and never even realizing it." Hamlet is one of several Shakespeare plays that make implicit references to the world being a play, and all of us players, and yet I hadn't really connected with that central irony until I read that sentence. The postmodern answer to Hamlet's inaction is simply that he was written that way. "Fortune", in a very real sense, is dramatic necessity, incarnated as Shakespeare himself. It's not TOO useful to go too far in that direction, but it is a legitimate take on theatre (or fiction in general; but more pronounced when that fiction is meant to be repeated).

Page 270 presents a fictitious critical essay that makes an interesting point about Shakespeare. In contrast to the fictitious Osterling, who wrote detailed stage directions because he did not work with the actors or theatre, Shakespeare's are incredibly sparse, exactly because he DID work with the actors in staging the play. This is an interesting notion, and perhaps how and why directors are now able to stage his plays in such a variety of ways. Today, the plays and their characters seem widely open to interpretation, but originally, they had Shakespeare on hand to direct them, much as Hamlet does with the Players of "The Mousetrap". What was the original intent? We will never know, and that mystery is part of the plays' longevity. The "essay" does mention how Shakespeare actually embeds stage directions in the text, offering the example of the Ghost leaving in Act I Scene 1: "See how it skulks away!". This tells the actor what he must do, and perhaps was a useful cue for actors who had to learn and stage the plays in a matter of days. Since the audience sees the Ghost skulking away, it need not be said, but one must understand how Elizabethan theatre functioned to see its necessity. It perhaps also helped members of the audience who were sitting in unadvantageous seats.

Theatre of War doesn't use Hamlet is a revolutionary way, and is not a proper critical work, but Richards does use it to make some interesting points in a format that suits him. If anything, the scenes with the Hamlet characters reminds one of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, in the way other characters are swept into the action of the play, a stronger current that the actual unfolding fiction. Tom Stoppard's play is one we'll have to get to at some point.