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Last year, I put up a post with a brilliant short version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And no, I'm not crowing about my own work - this short version was created by Becky Levine's son, who wrote it for his seventh-grade English class. It was as if the whole world (or at least her son's class at school) had gotten the message that it was time to brush up one's Shakespeare.

Here again is the extremely condensed version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, arranged in what I am assured is called a Humorous Nonalogue, reproduced with permission of its author, , who is, in my opinion, effing brilliant.

When Shakespeare wrote his plays, they hadn't invented a language that anyone could understand. In fact, the definition of "comedy," I'm not kidding, straight out of the theatre dictionary, was a happy ending. . . . Here's "A Midsummer's Night Dream," condensed and the way Shakespeare meant to write it, if he hadn't been shackled by Olde English:

LYSANDER: I love Hermia.

HERMIA'S DAD: You're a son of a biscuit.

HERMIA: (running away with Lysander) L8ter, Dad-io!

TITANIA: I like this kid we kidnapped.

OBERON: Too bad. Puck, dose her.

PUCK: Oops, Bottom's an ass. Okay, sir, your wife loves a donkey!

DEMETRIUS: Hey, Helena, let's go find my would-be girlfriend, I say as I'm standing right next to you.

OBERON: I feel sorry for Helena. Let's dose her boyfriend.

PUCK: "Oops," wrong dude. Uh, "sorry."

OBERON: You're "forgiven."

PUCK: GULP.

THESEUS: Yo, Hippolyta, I almost killed you, your name reminds me of the fat thing in that swamp, let's get married.

LYSANDER: Even though I loved Hermia so much we ran away, I now love Helena, for no apparent reason.

OBERON: If you want anything done in this play, you have to do it yourself.

DEMETRIUS: Hey, that's funny, now I love Helena.

HELENA: Both of you shut up.

OBERON: What the hey. I think I'll just snap my fingers and impossibly achieve the happy ending that "comedy" is all about. There, everyone's happy...except for Hermia's dad, who I'll completely forget about.

SNOUT: I am a wall.

EVERYONE: YAY! There's so many loose ends that no one knows what happens next, but everything's just DUCKY and UBER! Yipee!

                    FIN
                 (that means end)

I'll be back later in the day with more about A Midsummer Night's Dream and, of course, to announce the winner of last week's contest. But first, I am off for some real-life lunch with a good friend that involves more driving time than face time.

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Here's a list of links to all the posts related to The Tempest:

The Tempest, part 1 A summary of the play
The Tempest, part 2 Caliban, the native
The Tempest, part 3 Check and mate
The Tempest, part 4 Shipwrecked!
The Tempest, part 5 Ungentlemanlike behaviour
The Tempest, part 6 A conversation with Lisa Mantchev

Tomorrow we're moving on to A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play that we covered last year, but it's simply too delightful not to take it up again. And as I have lunch plans far from home tomorrow, I won't be around to pile posts up early in the day - that's right, it's not all Shakespeare, all the time around here. At least, not quite. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I confess to not having seen a single screen adaptation of The Tempest, so please do not consider these personal recommendations.

As mentioned in my conversation with Lisa Mantchev, there is a new film version that is going to come out in December of this year, starring Helen Mirren as Prospera (it's the only gender-change in the casting, but it should make for an interesting interpretation, and reports from early screenings are that Mirren is transcendant (as per usual, really). I have not, of course, seen it because it's still 6 months away, but I will be all over it once it's out.

The 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet is a sort of adaptation of The Tempest, but certainly not a faithful retelling. In that version, the role of Ariel is played by a robot. Haven't seen it, not interested, but those of you who are into B-movies might like it.

I refuse to mention any of the other filmed versions because I understand that they are all pretty much crap, based on reviews and on Reduced Shakespeare: The Attention-Impaired Reader's Guide to the World's Best Playwright by Reed Martin and Martin Tichenor, a review of which is forthcoming.

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Today, another conversation with Lisa Mantchev, author of The Théâtre Illuminata series, the first two books of which are currently available in stores everywhere. You can read my reviews of Eyes Like Stars and Perchance to Dream, and/or my interview with Lisa for the Summer Blog Blast Tour in the linked-up earlier entries, if'n you want, as well as our conversation about Ophelia, which I posted last week. Lisa is a bit of an expert on these plays herself, due to her theatre training, and because Ophelia (from Hamlet) and Ariel (from The Tempest) are both important characters in the Théâtre Illuminata books. See the cover from Perchance to Dream there on the right? That white-haired boy is Ariel. Ooh! And before I move on, I simply must pimp the book trailer for PTD, which is quite possibly the most gorgeous book trailer I've ever seen – it involves a custom-made pop-up book, and it is STUNNING:





Kelly: Prospero: Hero or villain? I'd love to know your thoughts on this, since I see him as a complete mish-mash of a character. On the one hand, he behaved improperly (when he was still the Duke) by ceding his authority to his brother in order to study magic, and by causing the shipwreck. On the other hand, he doesn't allow anyone to be killed, even the true malefactors who sought his own death and/or seek the death of others during the course of the play.

Lisa: My take on Prospero isn't very flattering . . . I always pictured him as a blowhard nincompoop (something entirely due to one of Noel Streatfield's books, Theater Shoes, in which Sorrel's pompous uncle plays him onstage) and it's an image that's stuck with me over the years. Certain incarnations of the character are certainly more likable--it's easy to picture him as a Shakespearean version of Dumbledore, really!—but at the end of the day, he's a bit of a tyrant and a slave owner.

Kelly: Dumbledore? Really? Because Dumbledore seems so much more complex and competent to me than Prospero.

*ponders this further and seeks appropriate HP analogy*

For blowhard nincompoop, I suppose there's always Gilderoy Lockhart. What say you to that?

Lisa: You're right. It's only in his own head that Prospero is like Dumbledore . . . wise and magnanimous. But really, he's much more Gilderoy, who thinks he is doing mankind this huge favor just by showing up. There's potential for sympathy in this character, depending upon direction and casting, and I'm SLOBBERING to see Helen Mirren portray the feminine version, Prospera, but hold out no hope that movie will be relea

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If you saw this post over at LiveJournal, you'd probably say, "Hey Kelly, what's with the Mr. Knightley icon? Isn't he an Austen guy?" Allow me to 'splain, and I promise that, while I open with a bit of a digression, it all ties in later.

One of the key themes in Emma, by Jane Austen, is an exploration of what it is to be a gentleman. The book compares Mr. Knightley (and yes, that name is somewhat allegorical), a model English gentleman, with Frank Churchill (who has adopted a different surname than what he was born with, and whose first name, which might imply candor, is instead associated with "French" manners - though charming, he is secretive and duplicitous and a bit irresponsible; he wants to live a life of idleness and pleasure (like the Prince Regent, whom Austen disliked), and he wants out of England ASAP). Mr. Knightley is honest and actually frank (he says what's on his mind), and he attends to all of his duties as a landowner, whether it's meeting with his tenants or policing and improving his estate or paying the proper calls on people.

A true gentleman, you see, attends to his responsibilities. If he owns an estate, he (like Mr. Knightley) must actively oversee his estate. He must be fair to his tenants. He must help to keep the peace (as Knightley does when the gypsies are in the area or the poultry thieves are about). He should attend to the poor (which Knightley does by indicating his familiarity with his tenants as well as with his generosity to the Bateses). In short, if he has any obligation or responsibility, he should keep on top of things and discharge his duties properly.

This notion of proper conduct comes from a long English tradition, and certainly extends to what was expected of lords and kings centuries earlier. And so we come to Prospero, who is rapidly established as being deficient in the execution of his duties as Duke. (Yes, I know he was the Duke of Milan and not the Duke of, say, Essex, but in Shakespeare's time, one could not create fictional dukes and kings in England and get away with it - one either wrote a "history", gussied up so as to stroke the current monarch's history and beliefs, or one set their play elsewhere.)


Prospero himself tells us that he neglected his duties in Act I, scene 2, when he unfolds his story to Miranda and tells her how he turned his back on his duties as Duke in order to (selfishly) pursue his study of magic - decidedly NOT a proper reason to abnegate one's responsibilities. In order to further his selfish goals, he hands the reins over to his brother, Antonio, who steers the state extremely well.

The abdication of responsibility is a big, bozo no-no, not only in Shakespeare's time, but for a few hundred more years in England and elsewhere. (As stated earlier, proper attention to one's duties remained a key indicator of mensch-hood in Austen's time, which is why characters like Darcy and Knightley and Wentworth and Edmund Ferrars and Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram are good men - they live up to their responsibilities - whereas characters like Wickham and Frank Churchill and William Elliot and Tom Bertram & Henry Crawford are not, since they do not behave like "proper" gentlemen and they shirk at least some of their responsibilities.)

Add to this the somewhat repressive Christian society (and that was in flux in the time of Elizabeth I and King James, certainly), the practice of magic was also questionable, so the combination of abnegation of duty and the choice to pursue magic tend to mark Prospero as a questionable character.

His decision to cause the shipwreck that begins the play also shows questionable morality, and yet as the play unfolds, his character eventually reveals a strong moral center, apart, perhaps, from his treatment of Ariel and Caliban, although even then, he eventually does the right thing

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In June of 1609, the Sea Venture set off from England, bound for Virginia with between 150 passengers and a lot of supplies. One of those passengers was William Strachey, secretary of the mission. It was the flagship of a seven-ship fleet carrying between 500-600 people total. About seven weeks later, the fleet was beset by what was probably a hurricane. The Sea Venture was separated from the remainder of the fleet and struggled for three days, taking on water. The ship's master intentionally grounded the ship in order to avoid her foundering, and all 150 people - and one dog - went safely ashore on what is now Bermuda.

They spent nine months on the island, during which time they constructed two new ships out of Bermuda timber and pieces taken from the Sea Venture. Some settlers died while on the island, and two men were intentionally left on the island for unspecified crimes.

In 1610, survivor Sylvester Jordain published a book entitled A discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Devils, which apparently included an account of the storm and the wreck. That same year, William Strachey wrote a letter detailing the wreck and what followed (including his time in Jamestown). The letter was published in 1625 as A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir THOMAS GATES Knight, but the Jordain book would have provided some of the same information as Strachey's account of the storm and the wreck - to say nothing of everyone surviving it, at least in the first instance, and then living to not only tell the tale, but also to sail off to their original destination (where they found nothing but death and the dying at Jamestown, but that's a different story) - definitely match up with some of The Tempest's plot points. I do not believe it likely that Shakespeare saw Strachey's letter, but the information in its contents tells some of the story of what transpired aboard the Sea Venture.

Here's a (relatively) short excerpt from Strachey's letter to the "Excellent Lady". A longer portion of the letter is available on the Folger Shakespeare Library website.

We had followed this course so long, as now we were within seven or eight days at the most, by Captain Newport’s reckoning, of making Cape Henry upon the coast of Virginia: When on St. James his day, July 24, being Monday (preparing for no less all the black night before) the clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing, and whistling most unusually, which made us to cast off our Pinnace, towing the same until then astern, a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the Northeast, which swelling, and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence then others, at length did beat all light from heaven; which like an hell of darkness turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled, and overmastered senses of all, which (taken up with amazement) the ears lay so sensible to the terrible cries, and murmurs of the winds, and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken. For surely (Noble Lady) as death comes not so sudden nor apparent, so he comes not so elvish and painful (to men especially even then in health and perfect habitudes of body) as at Sea; who comes at no time so welcome, but our frailty (so weak is the hold of hope in miserable demonstrations of danger) it makes guilty of many contrary changes, and conflicts: For indeed death is accompanied at no time, nor place with circumstances every way so uncapable of particularities of goodness and inward comforts, as at Sea. For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmerciful tempest, compound of so many contrary and diverse Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body , and most loathsomely affecteth all t

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During the big reveal in Act V, scene 1, Prospero pulls a curtain back to reveal Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, playing chess with his fiancée, Miranda, daughter of the Duke of Milan.

As soon as I read that, I was all "what's the significance of the chess game?", only to find commentary after commentary that said something like "the chess game is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing except a scene of quiet domesticity" or "journeys end in lovers meeting over a chess board, especially when one of them is from Naples" or "sometimes a banana is just a banana". And frankly, I didn't buy it. Especially since we not only see them playing chess, but also eavesdrop on a bit of their conversation. Here are the lines in question:

Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess

MIRANDA

Sweet lord, you play me false.

FERDINAND

No, my dear'st love,
I would not for the world.

MIRANDA

Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it, fair play.

That's right - Miranda accuses Ferdinand of cheating, and when he says he wouldn't do so "for the world", she says "if you were going after twenty kingdoms, I would allow it" or, maybe, "you ought to go after twenty kingdoms, and I would not mind."

Here's what I think - and it's a hodgpodge, based on scrambling around books and the internet for information, so I feel a list coming on:

1. It's clear that Shakespeare wanted to give the audience one last look at the happy couple being happy. The choice of chess, however, is not strictly speaking necessary, and therefore has to have some sort of significance. Nevermind the naysayers - sometimes

2. Chess is "the game of kings", and was so during Shakespeare's time. Ferdinand is the Prince of Naples who will someday be king; Miranda will be queen. Interestingly, although it's the game of kings, the queen is the most powerful piece on the board.

3. In a play presumed to have been written at least 10 years earlier, The Life and Death of King John, Queen Elinor (Eleanor of Aquitaine, a distant ancestor of mine) accuses her rival in Act II as follows, "Out, insolent! Thy bastard shall be king./That thou mayst be a queen and check the world!" On its face, that second line means "you want to be the queen and thereby control the world," but that is evidently not what Queen Elinor's second meaning indicates.

I've not read the play, but I tracked down some commentaries to investigate the context, and it turns out that Queen Elinor is a bit like Lady Macbeth, urging her king (in this case, her youngest son, King John) to do what she wants. She is falsely accusing Constance, the mother of Arthur, of adultery (hence the term bastard) and of being a whore (a second meaning of "queen" in conjunction with "check" - as in checkmate), despite knowing that Constance is neither. And the phrase "Thy bastard shall be king" is not a command, but one of those "As if" sorts of constructions, at least in Shakespeare's time. One of those "this is what you want and why you want it" moments, which actually tells you more about the speaker than about the subject of the sentence. But I digress.

4. As a sidenote, for chess aficianados out there, the queen didn't actually become the most powerful piece on the board until the early 16th century, so Queen Elinor's lines are one of the many anachronisms found in Shakespeare's work. In earlier times, the queen could only jump three spaces, and did not have the run of the board.

5. In chess, in Shakespeare's time as now, the Queen has the run of the board - she may move as many spaces as she likes (or as are possible) in any direction - horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. The King, on the other hand, is far more confined and can move only one space at a tim

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Okay - after much thought, here's the order in which I'll be covering the remaining plays, for any of you who might actually commence reading some of them.

Tomorrow will still be The Tempest. Sunday will include The Tempest as well, but might transition to the next play. We shall see what I have to say next. For those of you wondering, I have no clue. I don't have a stash of prewritten posts, but kind of fly by the seat of my pants. It keeps things interesting. But I digress.

Next plays in order:

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Julius Caesar
The Winter's Tale
Henry IV, part 1
Measure by Measure
The Comedy of Errors
Romeo & Juliet
Henry IV, part 2
The Taming of the Shrew

Are any of these among your favorites? Will you be reading along with any of them, or perhaps watching a production (live or on film)?

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So, did you ever read Michel de Montaigne's essays? Me neither. Although as it's possible that some of you actually did read Montaigne's essays, I should say, rather, that I hadn't read any of his works until recently. But Shakespeare would have known about about them, seeing as Montaigne's opinions on native peoples and colonialism were the talk of the town in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and his Essaies were translated into English as early as 1603.

Montaigne, you see, was a philosopher. He influenced lots of people you probably have read, including Rousseau (who borrowed at least some of his idea of the "noble savage" from Montaigne), and he claimed his motto was "Que sais-je?" (What do I know?). He argued that imperialism and colonialism were wrong because of their negative impact on the indigenous peoples, about which he said in his essay "On Cannibals", "These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naiveté. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours." Montaigne, raised to be a humanist, believed that nature was superior to man. "All our efforts cannot create the nest of the tiniest bird: its structure, its beauty, or the usefulness of its form; nor can we create the web of the lowly spider. All things, said Plato, are produced by nature, chance, or human skill, the greatest and most beautiful things by one of the first two, the lesser and most imperfect, by the latter."

This is a people, I would say to Plato, among whom there is no commerce at all, no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers, nor any judges, or political superiority, no habit of service, riches, or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, no occupations but easy ones, no respect for any relationship except ordinary family ones, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. From "On Cannibals"

But Kelly, you say, aren't you digressing? Not this time. In Shakespeare's time, the word "cannibal" was sometimes spelled "canibal". A little shifting about and hey, presto, you have "Caliban." Also? The natives who Columbus and others discovered on those islands in the West Indies were not called "Caribbeans" at the time, but "Caribans". In the immortal words of the Brain: "Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"

Caliban sounds a lot like Cariban, and is an anagram of canibal. Neither of those things is accidental. Cariban is the island native, who was ruled by natural laws until Prospero, the imperial colonialist, turned up. Shakespeare tells us, in fact, that until Prospero got there, Caliban had a lot in common with Montaigne's cannibal:

Montaigne: "no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers"

Caliban:When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in 't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less . . .

Miranda: I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
. . .

Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on 't
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language! Act I, scene 2

Montaigne: "no habit of service, riches, or poverty"

Caliban
This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me. . .

. . . All the charms
of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me

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Welcome to The Tempest, one of those plays that is sometimes called a comedy and sometimes called a "problem play" or a "romance", because it's a bit of a mixed bag. These days, it'd probably be called a "dramedy", really, so let's go with that.

Here's my own abbreviated version of the play. It took hours to put together, not including the hour spent trying to find a good icon to go with the post. (In the end, I went with Puck's quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream, because I couldn't find one. Woe.) Named characters will be bolded when they are first introduced. Actions are between asterisks. Actual quotes are in quotations - all other dialogue is my own take on it. And for whatever reason, I've made more than one reference to Buddy the Elf ("Buddy the Elf - what's your favorite color?") in here.


Act I, scene 1: on a boat

Enter crewmembers, rapping: I'm on a boat, mothaf*cka, take a look at me!

Or not.

[There's a storm brewing. And various noble wanks are giving the crew crap. And the crew is thinking of jumping ship.]

Antonio: "Let's all sink with the king."

Sebastian: "Let's take leave of him."

Gonzalo: *sings* Give me land, lots of land, with the starry skies above.



Act I, scene 2: on an island, outside Prospero's digs

Miranda: WTF with the big storm, Father mine? If you stirred it up, you'd better calm it back down. I saw a ship sink, for Pete's sake!

Prospero: No harm, therefore no foul. You think I'm just your father, but you don't know the half of me. Allow me to bore you senseless with my backstory enlighten you. Help me remove my magic cape of magic!

*puts his magic cape of magic down*

Miranda: Are you really going to tell me our backstory?

Prospero: In detail. . . . and, to sum up, I was the Duke of Milan and you are a Duke's daughter, and my brother is a treasonous snake who stole my dukedom and he wanted us dead but instead we've been here on this island for 12 years. The end.

Miranda: What was that middle part again?

Prospero: I kinda turned things over to my brother Antonio to run while I studied magic. And he fell into cahoots with the King of Naples, and tried to have us killed, in a "huntsman and Snow White" sort of way. We were tossed into the sea in a wreck of a boat, but Gonzalo at least left us food and drink and wonderful clothing and lots of books, and we actually made it to this island.

*picks up his magic cape of magic again*

Miranda: Okay, so what's with the storm?

Prospero: Oh. Right. Every single enemy I ever had plus the guy who helped us happened to be on that ship, so I wrecked it off our coast, and now they're all here on Fantasy Island.

*Miranda falls asleep and Ariel enters*

Prospero: Did you do what I asked?

Ariel: Yep. I messed with their minds but good. Everyone but the crew jumped ship. And the King of Naples's son, Ferdinand, was an especially scaredy cat. I've got him in an isolation chamber, the crew enchanted on the ship, and everyone else in separate small groups.

Prospero: Good work, but why do you seem moody?

Ariel: Because I want my freedom. Duh.

Prosperio: Let me tell you your own backstory [*Ariel rolls eyes*] and that of Caliban, the ugly mutant slave-boy . . . and, in short, you owe me. No more whining or I'll peg you in Caliban's knot-hole or something equally unpleasant for a Very Long Time. Go do something useful.

*Ariel leaves to do something nymph-like and useful; Prospero wakes Miranda u

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I know. I said I was moving on to The Tempest and I am. But I really wanted to talk about Hamlet's first soliloquy before moving on. It is usually performed as follows, which is basically the text from the First Folio (from 1623, put together after Shakespeare's death), cleaned up with modern spellings and punctuation:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

However.

In the Quarto published during Shakespeare's life (in 1604), the "s" word in that first line is "sallied", a form of the word "sullied".

You can see scans of both versions in this post, which does nothing to resolve the issue as to which version is "correct." Modern editions of the play pick one and roll with it, based on their own determinations as to which source is more reliable. (On the one hand, "solid" seems to go better with thawing and melting; on the other, "sullied" seems like Shakespeare's original choice, but who knows what sort of oversight there was in the printing of the Quarto?) Modern actors pick one and roll with it as well. David Tennant,Kenneth Branagh, Mel Gibson, Kevin Klein and Laurence Olivier all say "solid" in their film versions, but "sullied" is still sometimes selected.

Oh, and how much do you love the play of words on "canon/cannon" here? (I know I love it SO MUCH!)

Here's Kenneth Branagh's reading for you:

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I have to say that I've always taken issue with how Ophelia is portrayed. And so has my friend, Lisa Mantchev, author of the books Eyes Like Stars and Perchance to Dream. In fact, Ophelia and Hamlet are characters in Eyes Like Stars, with Hamlet being a selfish prince (I almost replaced those last three letters with a "ck") and Ophelia being . . . well, I can't tell you if you haven't read it.

We had a discussion about Ophelia this morning, and this is how it went:

Lisa: As a teen reader (and a student in AP English) I never had any use for Hamlet. In my mind, he was the same sort of melancholy introvert as Holden Caulfield, one of those moody emo boys with floppy hair and a tattered copy of some book I'd never heard of shoved in his back pocket . . . the sort of guy I would try to speak with during lunches in the tri but could never get to talk to me.

Thus (but not just by default!) all my affections and sympathies aligned with Ophelia. Here was a girl, I thought, being bossed around by her father and brother for their own advantage. If ever there was a girl trapped by time period and conventions and socio-political obligations, Ophelia was that girl. And, as a teen reader, I desperately, desperately wanted her to tell everyone to bugger off. I wanted her to sprout a spine and tell them all to get bent. I wanted her to have a life outside the role that had been written for her. When she couldn't manage it, I was angry; with her, with the world, with the constraints women in the past have had to deal with, and with myself for ever thinking that a boyfriend would be just the thing to solve all my problems.


Kelly: I didn't read Hamlet in high school - we did Macbeth and Othello and Julius Caesar, but not Hamlet. So my first exposure to him was my own leisure reading of the play when I was in my 20s, prior to the Mel Gibson release. I was drawn to Hamlet the same way I was kind of drawn to Heathcliff - that tragic, brooding guy who couldn't have what he wanted and was therefore a bit of a bastard. That said, I am with you in wishing that Ophelia would have developed a spine, or at least shown a bit of spunk - and really, Helena Bonham Carter's version of Ophelia managed to show a bit of sass: even though she was constrained to follow Polonius's command, she obviously did it grudgingly. And she sure as heck didn't go quietly into that good night.

The problem with so many depictions of Ophelia is that she's too tame, and then too crazy. That's certainly true of the Ophelia in the Tennant/Stewart production - she seems a bit wooden to me, and then completely crazy-cakes, and it was true in the recent Broadway production, where she appeared all unfocused and then shrieky. I don't really care for a feckless Ophelia. My preferred readings of that character are more nuanced. Kate Winslet was awesome in the Branagh movie version, bringing a fragility to the role and displaying so much confusion early on that her descent into madness didn't seem like a complete hop off the cliff, but I'm still waiting for the reading I most want to see. I mean, I know that Ophelia drops her basket (to borrow a term from the Ya Ya Sisterhood), but "though this be madness, yet there is method in it" - the songs she sings and the flowers she references (in conjunction with their recipients) show that she wasn't completely out

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Death is one of the major themes in Hamlet. I find it interesting that most of the deaths were not anticipated by the characters – kinda notable in an age when warfare was common. And given that Hamlet spends most of the play deciding to kill Claudius and Claudius spends it thinking Hamlet might be out to get him, it's kind of funny that Claudius doesn't truly see it coming until it's there (since he's so smug that he thinks Laertes has it all under control and that will be that).

Want to test your knowledge of who dies and how? You can always take this quiz.

Meanwhile, nearly all the main players die except Horatio. I figured I'd tackle them in order of death.

How do they all die? Let me count the ways:

1. King Hamlet: murdered prior to the start of the play by Claudius through the cunning use of poison in the ear. In real life (to the extent that the play is based in fact, after all), the brother stabbed King Hamlet and there were witnesses. Shakespeare's decision to switch up the mode of death accomplishes two things:

  a) It shows that Shakespeare was familiar with the latest scientific discoveries of his time.
  (Check out this New York Times article from 1982 for further details.) and

  b) It makes the means of death less obvious, thereby creating some doubt in Hamlet's mind as to whether the
  ghost is truthful or a liar, and as to whether Claudius could have commited "murther most foul".

Since King Hamlet had not made his final confession before his untimely death, his soul is doomed to purgatory, or so his spirit intimates in Act I.

2. Polonius: stabbed by Hamlet because he thought it was Claudius. Not that Hamlet had any love for Polonius, but neither did he have it in for him. Hamlet "lugs the guts" from the chamber and stashes it in a stairwell. Polonius is buried in "hugger-mugger", a term encompassing both notions of secrecy and of confusion or muddle. We must assume that Polonius can't go straight to heaven, either.

3. Ophelia: drowned. Not of her own volition, really, so it's not technically a suicide, but when she fell in the water, she didn't try to save herself, either; hence, the church's quarrel with burying her in sacred ground, and the conversation between the gravediggers about what does and does not constitute a drowning by suicide. If she truly wanted to die and ended up dead, then she would never, ever get to heaven (under the Elizabethan understanding of things). Poor Ophelia was so terribly depressed, what with Hamlet forsaking her and her father dying and Laertes skipping about Paris and all, that she probably didn't have the energy to fight the current. To say nothing of the weight of her robes/gown/whatever. Or the fact that noblewomen in Denmark might not have been taught to swim back then. I could go on, but I won't.

4. Rosencrantz & Guildstern: executed in England as a favor to Denmark. The English court thinks they're responding to a request from Claudius, but it's Hamlet who signed their death warrant, assisted by his father's ring (which bore the requisite seal). Hamlet doesn't feel any remorse for these deaths, since he's all Hammurabi about it (kind of "an eye for an eye", even though it's a two for one exchange).