what would you have me do?

i want there to be more fanfic aus where everything is the same but for one minor detail. everything is the same but there’s sentient animals wandering around. everything is the same but everyone is called gerry. everything is the same but two characters are siblings for no reason

At the Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2018 there was a show called “Hamlet, But Hamlet’s a Chicken.” It was more or less what it said on the tin. They had made arrangements to borrow some therapy chickens, and for any scene that needed Hamlet, an affectionate handler gently carried in that day’s chicken (it would be one specific chicken for any given performance, but they didn’t have one chicken play Hamlet the whole time as that would have stressed out the chickens) and set her on the stage and then the chicken got to wander around and do whatever she wanted as the other actors did the scene.

There was also, I think, a scene with swordfighting where it was “the fight scene, but everyone’s using pool noodles” and some other similarly bizarre changes, but the MAIN thing I remember

was Hamlet’s soliloquy

because they just announced, “Hamlet’s soliloquy!” and then brought out the chicken and set her on the stage and then let her just hang out being a chicken for like FIVE MINUTES and the entire audience watched, completely riveted. It helps that chickens are cute. At one point she fluffed up her feathers and everyone gasped. A+ show, would go see it again.

Because it exists

In honor of To Be or Not To Be Tuesday, friendly reminder that if you’ve experienced one or more of the following, you may be entitled to compensation or a consummation devoutly to be wished:

I really enjoy the genre of “older literature featuring a really smart but deranged college student who does something really fucked up with his knowledge and has multiple breakdowns over it for the rest of the story.” one because it is entertaining and two it encapsulates the college experience in a way nothing else does.

Bill Waterson understands the human condition just as well as if not better than Shakespeare. I die on this hill.

My skull studies slowly turned into sassy Yorick studies

boy meets world rewatch | 1.20 the play’s the thing

no no nobody look at me this isnt gonna be well worded but LISTEN. every hamlet character is a facet of hamlet’s personality and they die one by one and that’s why hamlet dies last. like okay ophelia is hamlet’s gentler side and after ophelia dies hamlet’s gentleness kinda does too. and laertes is hamlet’s aggressive side and he dies just before hamlet bc hamlet and his aggression are so knit together and that’s why hamlet dies gently - the rest is silence - bc his aggression thru laertes has already died. and gertrude where do i even start with her - hamlet’s sort of - waffling, his willingness to not take drastic action right away even when he knows he has to - and as soon as gertrude dies that hesitating part of hamlet dies and he slices and cuts laertes. or something. man okay my brain is going whirr whirr ding. fuck. and the part of hamlet that’s like horatio SURVIVES. through horatio. fucmvnrgnrng, h

I feel like I need to tell everyone how brilliantly the Globe incorporated a deaf Gildenstern into the 2018 Hamlet and then force all of you to watch it

ok, so Gildenstern is played by a deaf actor, Nadia Nadarajah. he* signs all his lines, and either Rosencratz interprets for him, or the person he’s talking to says something that makes it obvious what he just said, depending. how each character reacts to Gildenstern is completely in-character and often hilarious

it’s all brilliant and adds another layer of humor and pathos and you should all watch it

*casting at the Globe right now is gender neutral so I’m just going to use the character’s pronouns

guys I know I’m wittering on about this but the thing I want to emphasize is that there is no tokenism here. they didn’t just shove a deaf actor into a speaking role so they could pat themselves on the back about how progressive they are. they went to the effort of fully integrating Nadarajah’s deafness into the story so that it not only fit organically within the narrative but actually enhanced it. watching Hamlet’s signing disintegrate as his trust in R&G disintegrates adds a depth to that storyline I’ve never seen before. Claudius has exactly the awkwardness of someone who thinks of himself as a good person and therefore thinks he’s being kind and generous with his accommodations for disability, but has never even once actually asked a disabled person what they need, which is so on-point for his character it hurts.

I know Michelle Terry gets a lot of hate mail for her policy of race-, gender-, and disability-blind casting, but fuck all those people. long may that policy continue.

the glenda jackson production of king lear on broadway did something similar with the Duke of Cornwall, and it was actually the best part of the play, imo.  because when Cornwall was speaking to Lear or to the Court, he had a sign language interpreter to speak the actual literal words aloud, but when he was talking to and conspiring with Regan, his wife, they were just signing back and forth with no translation for the audience, and it emphasized the intimacy between the two even as they turn against literally everyone else in the play, which was fantastic.

and the best part of it was, by the second half of the play, you were so used to it, that you didn’t even blink anymore when watching him and listening to the spoken words come from the interpreter - you just watched the actor playing Cornwall and let the words come from the other guy, but the guy kind of fades into the background.  it didn’t hurt that the actor for Cornwall was one of the tallest on stage, and had bright red hair - it was easy to watch him, instead of his interpreter.

which is why it was so shocking and so perfect when the interpreter is the one who kills him.

See, they folded the character of the servant who kills Cornwall into the person of this character who had been such a non-entity that you almost forgot he was on stage - until you realize, no, this is another person, and he’s been here, watching all this the whole time, and he finally gets to the breaking point where he can’t stand by and translate anymore, he has to do something to stop the cruelty he’s seeing, and it’s not just a random guy who comes in for the scene and sees them blinding Gloucester, it’s the man whose been by his side for the entire play, the man who was his voice who finally has a line of his own.  who finally speaks on his own behalf to say “no.”

and then, of course, he gets killed, but Cornwall dies in the same scene so it’s not like they need to get a new translator or anything.  but it was the most fucking brilliant choice i’ve ever seen re: casting in a Shakespearean production, and the rest of the play pales in my memory in comparison.

This is part of why Shakespeare is still performed when so many of his contemporaries are not. There is both strength and space in the characters and story to support this kind of expansion and deepening.