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no offense if people like the kenbran hamlet or anything else of course. i am so subjective i am SO biased i am always thinking about how i would play hamlet and i mercilessly judge every production that doesn't live up to my imaginary visions. i get specifically very annoyed when productions or individual actors lean into treating the play (and shakespeare in general) as Loftily Serious, because it is my personal onion that despite the early modern language hamlet plays very very well as an up-close-and-personal messier thing that's just some asshole Going Through It talking frantically at the audience. nobody ever leans hard enough into him being a weird and manic little freak actively falling apart. maxhamlet isn't monologuing grimly with great dignity he's like rolling on the floor and pulling out his hair and shit. i'd love to do 1.5 where after the ghost vanishes hamlet does some good old fashioned Just Wordless Screaming

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i also think some of my hamlet takes/interpretations are somewhat inseparable from the fact that i read hamlet as at least fairly young, regardless of exactly how old he is, because the way the older characters in the play treat him resonates very deeply with my experience of being a mentally ill teenager. like, you know something is wrong, you know this thing you're experiencing (in hamlet's case, grief, but also the knowledge of the murder) is real and it's unimaginably painful and it might actually kill you, and yet not ONLY are the people around you telling you to just Be Normal and Get Over It, they are ALSO?? acting like everything is FINE?? they're walking around and living their lives like everything is perfectly normal and the same it's always been, and they're interacting with you like they expect you to live that way too, and at some point you inevitably hear the siren song of "just how much do i have to act out before they're FORCED to acknowledge it?" and then you put on an antic disposition and kill your situationship's dad, you know how it is.

this doesn't mean hamlet has to literally be a teenager. like, hell, you could have your thirtysomething hamlet and still lean into this reading, because it would be really compelling to highlight that a thirty-year-old hamlet is a fully grown adult being shoved into the role of a teenager/youth because the generation above him refuses to treat him like an adult or allow him autonomy. but i do think this is why hamlet as, like, Traditional Handsome Brooding Protagonist man almost always falls flat for me, because your average traditional handsome brooding protagonist man isn't being constantly infantilized, denied, ignored, told his emotions are meaningless, told he can't possibly be an authority on his own experience, etc. obviously some of this is stated in the text (particularly claudius's get-over-it speech), but in performance it falls flat for me if he's just stalking thirtyfiveishly around the castle as Some Guy Who Also Lives Here. no!!! they put that prince in the INCONVENIENT TEENAGER WE DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH box and you're gonna ACT LIKE IT

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Here's a remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)

Anthony and Cleopatra: ~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017

As You Like It: ~ At Wolfe Park - 2013 ~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006

Coriolanus: ~ NYET Alumni - 2016 ~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014 ~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011

Cymbelline: ~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014

Hamlet: ~ David Tennant - 2009 ~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000 ~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989 ~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990 ~ Broadway - 1964 ~ Christopher Plummer - 1964 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948

Henry IV: ~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989 ~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017

Henry V: ~ The BBC's - 1990 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944

Julius Caesar: ~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1979 ~ John Gielgud - 1970

King Lear: ~ The RSC's - 2008 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1983 ~ The BBC's - 1975 ~ James Earl Jones - 1974 ~ Orson Wells - 1953

Love's Labour's Lost: ~ Calvin University - 2016

Macbeth: ~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017 ~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969 ~ Sean Connery - 1961

Measure for Measure: ~ Hugo Weaving - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1990

The Merchant of Venice: ~ Al Pacino - 2004 ~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001 ~ The BBC's - 1980 ~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973

The Merry Wives of Windsor: ~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982

A Midsummer Night's Dream: ~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019 ~ City of Columbus's - 2018 ~ Julie Taymor's - 2014 ~ The Globe's - 2013 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986

Much Ado About Nothing: ~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019 ~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993 ~ The BBC's - 1984

Othello: ~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990

Richard II: ~ David Tennant - 2013 ~ Deborah Warner's - 1997 ~ The BBC's - 1978

Richard III: ~ Ian McKellen - 1995 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1955

Romeo and Juliet: ~ Simon Godwin's - 2021 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954

The Taming of the Shrew: ~ Ontario production? ~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976 ~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967 ~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929

The Tempest: ~ Gregory Doran's - 2017 ~ The BBC's - 1988

Timon of Athens: ~ Barry Avrich's - 2024

Troilus and Cressida: ~ Audio Production ~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016

Titus Andronicus: ~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999

Twelfth night: ~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015 ~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970

Two Gentlemen of Verona: ~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018 ~ The BBC's

The Winter's Tale: ~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)

Bonuses:

Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)

Rock Opera Hamlet???

Shakespeare animated tales

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy

From the original post:

A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.

Russian Hamlet here

Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Hamlet retelling.

Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.

This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.

The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!

Here's the 1948 one,

the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there

A Lego adaptation of Othello here.

Here's commentary on David Tennant's Richard II

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Jean Francois Ferdinand Lematte, 1850-1929

Oreste et les Furies, 1876, oil on canvas, 75x54 cm

Private Collection (Artnet)

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There are many depictions of the iconic fight about Troja in artworks though history. One of the best in my opinion is a unique vase of the Berlin painter (505 to 460 BC) you can find in the British Museum today. It was painted in the early classical Attic red-figure style (the one we automatically associate with greek vase paintings today). He depicted the epic climax of the Trojan War, the battle between Achilles and Hector. Both heroes are supported by their patrons, Athena and Apollo.

I tried to use every element you can find on this vase and include it in my fore-edge painting. So, this fore-edge painting is my attempt to change my favourite vase into book form.

Whenever I read the Iliad (honestly, it's so good!!! You have to give it a try and just open it at any page and read it out loud) I just love the thought, that humans have read the same words as I do for thousands of years.

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them. them! them.

inspired by @two-bees-poetry :’)

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when priam is like hi helen you have done nothing wrong in your life ever i only blame the gods and fate. btw who is that massive hottie on the battlefield. and helen is like you have been at war with this guy for the past nine years how do you not know who agamemnon is

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twelfth night main plot: haha bisexual love triangle that is gay in both directions! haha mistaken identity and gender fuckery haha

malvolio side plot:

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hey um i’ve got some bad news. we mulled your boyfriend. he fell in the wine and we mulled him. yeah with the cinnamon sticks.

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in the club suffering a sea change into something rich and strange

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november 17, 2024

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I don’t have a firm stance on whether hamlet is “mad” or just acting and I also think that’s not a great question because obviously there’s degrees and I don’t think it can be answered with “he is” or “he isn’t.” but there are two moments in hamlet where I always think “oh, he’s really lost it.”

the first is when he’s making jokes about Polonius’ dead body in front of the whole court, when he won’t tell them where he’s hidden his corpse. even the fact that he’s hidden it is horrific and makes no sense—obviously his mom knows, obviously she’s telling everyone, obviously there will be consequences. so why did he do it? why did he drag polonius from behind the curtains in his mother’s room to the stairs, drag his body up the stairs, and into the lobby—he’s got to have blood all over him from the struggle, there’s got to be blood all over the stairs. is ophelia nearby? is anyone taking care of her? does anyone usher her away? or is she around the corner, listening? does she hear hamlet joking about how her father will be food for the worms, and that is how she finds out her father is dead?

the second moment is when hamlet is talking about what he’s done to rosencrantz and guildenstern. it’s not really clear there’s something off from anything he says, but from the way horatio responds. all of horatio’s responses are remarkably short, mostly one sentence, monosyllabic replies—go look at the scene in V.2, he’s almost speechless. there’s something wrong with hamlet, really wrong, horatio can tell—and it disturbs him. maybe he call tell from his tone, maybe from the way hamlet brings up conscience twice and asks horatio to confirm that his own is “perfect,” maybe something in his face or his eyes. we don’t know. we’re not told, by stage directions or otherwise, that something’s wrong. but we know from horatio’s replies. horatio sees something that the audience can’t quite distinguish, something really, deeply wrong with his friend—he sees he’s not acting.

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the curse of local theatre is that a show can change you forever and there is no recording of it anywhere at all and after a few years all you have are scattered memories and the knowledge that you were different before.

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$1 butch odysseus comm for @measureformeasure! this was a treat. for both of us

interested? check out my commission sheet here!