yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story
if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.
The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.
I love this post.
Feels
I believe the artist is Katy Doughty.
I want “The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong damn story” tattooed somewhere on my person
Taking another short break from Twelfth Night. OK, so I’m over a year late to get on the Hamilton bandwagon. I’ve been geeking out about it from afar but only recently made the time to actually sit down and listen properly to the whole thing.
It’s hardly revolutionary (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) to make a connection between Hamilton and Hamlet. Hamilton’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, got the ball rolling with this recorded encounter:
Well, I’ve never met a musical number that I haven’t wanted to at least try to parody, so I thought I’d take a song from Hamilton and rework it a bit… into Hamleton. It was not easy, as Miranda’s lyrics are very dense and intricate, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve succeeded, but here it is anyways. Many thanks to Dan Beaulieu of the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company and No Holds Bard Podcast for acting as Lyrical Dramaturge on this effort.
of course, the irony about this cartoon – which I assume is meant to demonstrate shallow selfie culture desecrating the great classics – is that among other things a) hamlet is a disaffected young man suffering from depression and, frankly, deeply self-absorbed and b) the entire play is obsessed with the idea of performance and performativity and so absolutely hamlet taking selfies would be in the spirit of the original because a selfie is a new way of constructing the self through images
so what I’m saying is: fuck off culture snobs I’m coming for you
Yeah, my first thought was definitely “huh. That would make for a pretty good adaptation.”
absolutely. I can’t think of anything more in character for Hamlet than filling his snapchat with selfies taken in super-moody lighting with weird angsty captions about the peace of the grave, and no one can decide whether he’s losing his grip or if he’s a master of subtweeting
An adaptation of Hamlet told entirely through Hamlet’s SnapChats.
Steel Phoenix Studios 