#reviving laertes

[darkfrog24]

The "I hate boys"/"all boys are [bad trait]" might, might have been understandable in gradeschool girls who've had "he does it because he likes you"/"all boys do that" beaten into their heads until it made them puke, but I left it behind before high school even though I didn't understand why at the time.

To be clearer: a lot of us were expressly and overtly told that all boys were bad over and over for years. It was not only subtext. It was text. THAT IS WHERE THIS IS COMING FROM.

We educate ourselves that Columbus didn't discover America, that Tulsa and the Trail of Tears and the Internment and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo all happened, that girls who act flirty aren't asking for assualt, that the neurospicy kid isn't doing it for attention. We have to recognize "all boys are bad" as part of our miseducation.

just kind of throwing this at your wall, sorry in advance. saw the post about "kill all men" and got really upset

im a trans guy. my boyfriend is cis, and im the first guy hes dated before. (sees me fully as whatever i want to be, does not care about my gender expression and loves me for me. great guy). he doesnt have many friends from being asocial as a teenager, so most of his friends are my trans friends!

of course. like every trans group seems to fall prey to, theres always the "all [CIS] men are bad" conversation that comes up somehow. and i never really thought much of it, because in my head itd be "ah yeah all men Except My Boyfriend"

but he and i were talking after some drinks, and he made a point that really struck me. about how he doesn't like being The Exception to the point, that he's still a man and has no interest in being anything But a man. so when people say stuff like that, he gets uncomfortable; not because He IS The Problem (like everyone who gives the "if youre saying not all men, youre the men" argument) but because it makes him feel ostracized from everyone. and idk, it really struck me.

we say stuff like that way too often in an attempt to exclude certain groups of people; and i feel like we end up excluding people close to us by proxy.

thanks for listening

i really appreciate you for taking the time to send this. i've been meaning to talk about this and have been forgetting. the following is of course not directed at you, anon, it is directed at people who behave like this

you're not feminist, progressive, cool, pro-queer rights or funny for saying "kill all men". you are exposing that you are a violent and dangerous person for believing that people should be profiled and literally killed for their gender or PERCEIVED gender.

this doesn't make people like you more. it outs you as a danger. how do we know you won't turn that hatred toward women whenever you feel like changing the goalposts? i can't trust someone like that to not turn that hatred toward other genders, either. YOU are the dangerous person you are profiling men as. you can't use men as a scapegoat for everything. sometimes YOU are the violent person who needs help.

your boyfriend shouldn't have to feel like that. like people have never really cared about gay men but people just straight up gave up all pretenses that they do and i hate it. cis men are not inherently evil. cis men can still be queer. cis men can still be good people. your boyfriend shouldn't have to feel isolated because he's cis. that's profiling. he belongs. why do people assume that everyone with a partner who is a man hates them? not everyone is choosing to be in a relationship with someone they hate. i understand that some people will date someone no matter who just to have a partner so they're not lonely, but not everyone does this. some people genuinely love their boyfriends

i'm sorry you both have dealt with this. i hope things can improve because men don't deserve to feel like this. this is why toxic masculinity exists in the first place. we have to stop reinforcing that men are evil monsters. they won't stop believing that if we keep telling them that forever. stay safe. your boyfriend is not a bad person & deserves to have a wonderful life.

[tragicsibsshowdown]

The Siblings have been Selected!

are you ready to see your favorite sets of tragic siblings go head to head? Well here are you contestants entering!

Polls will be random for the first round and continue on from there bracket style!

And if you would like to make some propaganda… well just make sure to use the tag #tragicsiblingshowdown2023 bc I do wanna see it!

Azula and Zuko from Avatar The Last Airbender

Diluc and Kaeya from Genshin Impact

Donald and Della from Ducktales 2017

Nahyuta and Apollo from Ace Attorney

Vi and Jinx from Arcane

Caleb and Phillip Wittebane from The Owl House

Mari and Sunny from OMORI

Chara and Asriel from Undertale

Luffy and Ace and Sabo from One Piece

Lucas and Claus from Mother 3

Ingo and Emmet from Pokemon

Sam & Dean Winchester from Supernatural

Ed and Al Elric from FullMetal Alchemist

Eda & Lilith Clawthorne from The Owl House

Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Jiang Yanli from Mo Dao Zu Shi

Miles Edgeworth and Franziska Von Karma from Ace Attorney

Dick Grayson and Jason Todd from DC

Dess and Noelle from Deltarune

Rillaine and Allen from Evilious Chronicles

Elsa and Anna from Frozen

Thor and Loki from Marvel

Garmadon and Wu from Ninjago

Klavier Gavin and Kristoph Gavin from Ace Attorney

Andrés, Guillermo, Kara and Tamara from Enderbomb

Natsu & Zeref Dragneel from Fairy Tail

Floofty And Snorpy Fizzlebean from Bugsnax

Adaine and Aelwyn Abernant from Fantasy High

Maki and Mai from Jujustu Kaisen

Strelitzia and Lauriam/Marluxia from Kingdom Hearts 

Sasuke and Itachi Uchiha from Naruto

NiGHTS and Reala from NiGHTS into Dreams

Thalia and Jason Grace from Percy Jackson

Bianca  and Nico Di Angelo  from Percy Jackson

Rameses and Moses from The Prince of Egypt

Mephone 4 and 4s from Inanimate Insanity

Taako and Lup from The Adventure Zone

Ianthe and Coronabeth Tridentarius from The Locked Tomb 

Dante and Gene from Minecraft Diaries

Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events

Kamado Tanjirou and Kamado Nezuko from Demon Slayer

Hornet and The Hollow Knight from Hollow Knight

Killua and Alluka Zoldyck from Hunter x Hunter

Celestia and Luna from My Little Pony

Vash and Knives from Trigun

Mipha and Sidon from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Lumine and Aether from Genshin Impact

Alice and Reko Yabusame from Your Turn to Die

Brambleclaw and Hawkfrost from Warrior Cats

Ponyboy and Darry from The Outsiders

Aaron and Alex Stowe from The Unwanteds

Shigeo Kageyama (Mob) and Ritsu Kageyama from Mob Psycho 100

Hiro and Tadashi Hamada from Big Hero 6

Shadow and Maria from Sonic 

Annie and Hallie from The Parent Trap

Ophelia and Laertes from Hamlet

Ajax and Teucer from The Odyssey

Yin and Jin (The Gold and Silver Demons) from Lego Monkey Kid

Starfire and Blackfire from Teen Titans

The Afton Siblings from Five Nights at Freddys

Kanna Kizuchi and Shin Tsukimi from Your Turn To Die

Hershel Layton and Jean Descole from Professor Layton

Stan and Ford Pines from Gravity Falls

Saeran and Saeyoung from Mystic Messenger

Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa from Star Wars

ROUND 1 MASTERPOST

Post-Round One Update

ROUND 2 MASTERPOST

ROUND 3 MASTERPOST

ROUND 4 MASTERPOST

ROUND 5 MASTERPOST

REVIVAL ROUND 1 MASTERPOST

REVIVAL ROUND 2 MASTERPOST

REVIVAL ROUND 3 MASTERPOST

REVIVAL ROUND 4 MASTERPOST

FINAL ROUND MASTER POST

[justforbooks]

The actor Michael Jayston, who has died aged 88, was a distinguished performer on stage and screen. The roles that made his name were as the doomed Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in Franklin Schaffner’s sumptuous account of the last days of the Romanovs in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and as Alec Guinness’s intelligence minder in John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on television in 1979. He never made a song and dance about himself and perhaps as a consequence was not launched in Hollywood, as were many of his contemporaries.

Before these two parts, he had already played a key role in The Power Game on television and Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, in Ken Hughes’s fine Cromwell (1969), with Richard Harris in the title role and Guinness as King Charles I. And this followed five years with the Royal Shakespeare Company including a trip to Broadway in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, in which he replaced Michael Bryant as Teddy, the brother who returns to the US and leaves his wife in London to “take care of” his father and siblings.

Jayston, who was not flamboyantly good-looking but clearly and solidly attractive, with a steely, no-nonsense, demeanour and a steady, piercing gaze, could “do” the Pinter menace as well as anyone, and that cast – who also made the 1973 movie directed by Peter Hall – included Pinter’s then wife, Vivien Merchant, as well as Paul Rogers and Ian Holm.

Jayston had found a replacement family in the theatre. Born Michael James in Nottingham, he was the only child of Myfanwy (nee Llewelyn) and Vincent; his father died of pneumonia, following a serious accident on the rugby field, when Michael was one, and his mother died when he was a barely a teenager. He was then brought up by his grandmother and an uncle, and found himself involved in amateur theatre while doing national service in the army; he directed a production of The Happiest Days of Your Life.

He continued in amateur theatre while working for two years as a trainee accountant for the National Coal Board and in Nottingham fish market, before winning a scholarship, aged 23, to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where he was five years older than everyone else on his course. He played in rep in Bangor, Northern Ireland, and at the Salisbury Playhouse before joining the Bristol Old Vic for two seasons in 1963.

At the RSC from 1965, he enjoyed good roles – Oswald in Ghosts, Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, Laertes to David Warner’s Hamlet – and was Demetrius in Hall’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), with Warner as Lysander in a romantic foursome with Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren.

But his RSC associate status did not translate itself into the stardom of, say, Alan Howard, Warner, Judi Dench, Ian Richardson and others at the time. He was never fazed or underrated in this company, but his career proceeded in a somewhat nebulous fashion, and Nicholas and Alexandra, for all its success and ballyhoo, did not bring him offers from the US.

Instead, he played Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), a so-so British musical film version with music and lyrics by John Barry and Don Black, with Michael Crawford as the White Rabbit and Peter Sellers the March Hare. In 1979 he was a colonel in Zulu Dawn, a historically explanatory prequel to the earlier smash hit Zulu.

As an actor he seemed not to be a glory-hunter. Instead, in the 1980s, he turned in stylish and well-received leading performances in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, at the Duchess, opposite Maria Aitken (1980); as Captain von Trapp in the first major London revival of The Sound of Music at the Apollo Victoria in 1981, opposite Petula Clark; and, best of all, as Mirabell, often a thankless role, in William Gaskill’s superb 1984 revival, at Chichester and the Haymarket, of The Way of the World, by William Congreve, opposite Maggie Smith as Millamant.

Nor was he averse to taking over the leading roles in plays such as Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973) or Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1992), roles first occupied in London by Alec McCowen. He rejoined the National Theatre – he had been Gratiano with Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright in The Merchant of Venice directed by Jonathan Miller in 1974 – to play a delightful Home Counties Ratty in the return of Alan Bennett’s blissful, Edwardian The Wind in the Willows in 1994.

On television, he was a favourite side-kick of David Jason in 13 episodes of David Nobbs’s A Bit of a Do (1989) – as the solicitor Neville Badger in a series of social functions and parties across West Yorkshire – and in four episodes of The Darling Buds of May (1992) as Ernest Bristow, the brewery owner. He appeared again with Jason in a 1996 episode of Only Fools and Horses.

He figured for the first time on fan sites when he appeared in the 1986 Doctor Who season The Trial of a Time Lord as Valeyard, the prosecuting counsel. In the new millennium he passed through both EastEnders and Coronation Street before bolstering the most lurid storyline of all in Emmerdale (2007-08): he was Donald de Souza, an unpleasant old cove who fell out with his family and invited his disaffected wife to push him off a cliff on the moors in his wheelchair, but died later of a heart attack.

By now living on the south coast, Jayston gravitated easily towards Chichester as a crusty old colonel – married to Wendy Craig – in Coward’s engaging early play Easy Virtue, in 1999, and, three years later, in 2002, as a hectored husband, called Hector, to Patricia Routledge’s dotty duchess in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation of Jean Anouilh’s Léocadia under the title Wild Orchids.

And then, in 2007, he exuded a tough spirituality as a confessor to David Suchet’s pragmatic pope-maker in The Last Confession, an old-fashioned but gripping Vatican thriller of financial and political finagling told in flashback. Roger Crane’s play transferred from Chichester to the Haymarket and toured abroad with a fine panoply of senior British actors, Jayston included.

After another collaboration with Jason, and Warner, in the television movie Albert’s Memorial (2009), a touching tale of old war-time buddies making sure one of them is buried on the German soil where first they met, and a theatre tour in Ronald Harwood’s musicians-in-retirement Quartet in 2010 with Susannah York, Gwen Taylor and Timothy West, he made occasional television appearances in Midsomer Murders, Doctors and Casualty. Last year he provided an introduction to a re-run of Tinker Tailor on BBC Four. He seemed always to be busy, available for all seasons.

As a keen cricketer (he also played darts and chess), Jayston was a member of the MCC and the Lord’s Taverners. After moving to Brighton, he became a member of Sussex county cricket club and played for Rottingdean, where he was also president.

His first two marriages – to the actor Lynn Farleigh in 1965 and the glass engraver Heather Sneddon in 1970 – ended in divorce. From his second marriage he had two sons, Tom and Ben, and a daughter, Li-an. In 1979 he married Ann Smithson, a nurse, and they had a son, Richard, and daughter, Katie.

🔔 Michael Jayston (Michael James), actor, born 29 October 1935; died 5 February 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[fayes-fics]

Oh also, sorry for the double but how was Shakespeare live??

Hi again! 🫶

It was great despite it being outdoor and raining steadily throughout- glad I had a waterproof poncho!

Susan Wokoma stole the show. I just love her. 🥹 Luke did a monologue from Loves Labours Lost, did a funny turn (without lines) reviving his Laertes, while Stephen Mangan took the role of Polonius giving him fatherly advice, and at the end read an extract but the detail escapes me.

Anyway, an enjoyable if soggy evening lol 😁🧡🧡

[little-watcher]

ellery stumbles back, letting go of marc’s strings. it sees the fear in his eyes. in everyone’s eyes.

“i-i w as jus t…”

the words die in its throat. it knows what it would’ve done.

the weight of everything catches up to him. it doesn’t want to think about this. it needs something to distract from everything.

“we sh ould, um. prob ably do so mething about that.”

it gestures vaguely to the faceless.

There's a feeling like a loose floorboard is kicked out from under Marc's foot, and he stumbles, falling. There is the distinct sensation that his eyes are petrifying, turning to something fake and plastic and useless, and he can't see anything but the flash of a firework (or maybe a pistol) as his mind is flooded with another's pure terror. The fear tastes like adrenaline.

And then the feeling is gone, and it's his house he's stumbling in. The place is pretty torn up. Marc hadn't responded fast enough, and Laertes had taken things into his own hands.

@laertesthelocalstranger

"Laertes?"

Son of a bitch.

"Laertes!"

He goes tearing through the house, looking for his child, looking for the gun, not knowing or caring which one he'll find first. He was supposed to be helping. He needs to be hunting.

Fuck that. He's got to find them.

[cleverclove]

Hiiiiii so guess who’s reviving the Laertes single dad fic :3

[anticlea-and-laertes]

< Laertes and Anticlea.

Odysseus parents.

Odysseus - son.

Penelope - daughter in law.

Telemachus - grandson.

Currently revived.

Anticlea was the daughter of Autolycus and Amphithea. The divine trickster and messenger of the gods, Hermes, was her paternal grandfather. Anticlea was the mother of Odysseus by Laërtes. Ctimene was also her daughter by her husband Laertes.

Laertes is the father of Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan War, and plays a role in the epic poem. Laertes is also an Ionian king and the son of Arcesius and Chalcomedusa.

will add more later !!

Anticlea - Red

Laertes - Orange.

[lovelyballetandmore]

David Drew as Laertes, Derek Rencher as the King of Denmark, Rudolf Nureyev as Hamlet and Monica Mason as the Queen of Denmark in the 1964 revival of Robert Helpmann's Hamlet. The ballet originally premiered in 1942. Photo by Donald Southern/Royal Opera House, 1964

[opera-ghosts]

  Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 operatic telling of Hamlet premiered on March 9, 1868 at the Paris Opera.   Carrée and Barbier (who also wrote the libretto for Gounod’s Faust) have been greatly blamed for the distortions of Shakespeare in their text for Hamlet but, apart from the ending, they managed to condense a very long play into a reasonable opera libretto.The coronation of Gertrude (mezzo-soprano), queen and consort of Claudius, King of Denmark (bass), is taking place at the castle of Elsinore. Prince Hamlet (baritone) expresses his sadness at the death of his father and the hasty remarriage of his mother. He sings a love duet, ‘Doute de la lumière’, with Ophélie [Ophelia] (soprano). Together with her father Polonius (bass), Ophelia bids farewell to her brother Laerte [Laertes] (tenor), who is leaving Denmark. On the ramparts Hamlet sees the Ghost of his father (bass), who relates how he was murdered by his brother Claudius. Hamlet swears to avenge his father.In Act 2 Ophelia complains that Hamlet no longer loves her. She asks the queen’s permission to enter a convent, but Gertrude, already worried by her son’s strange behaviour, refuses the request. Claudius tries in vain to calm his wife’s fears. Hamlet proposes to divert the court with a play put on by a troupe of strolling actors. After a chorus and a drinking song, the play, about the murder of King Gonzago as he lay sleeping, is mimed to Hamlet’s commentary. Claudius pales, revealing his guilt, and Hamlet is overcome with rage; the act ends with a magnificent septet.Act 3 starts with Hamlet’s monologue, based on ‘To be or not to be’. Hamlet hides behind a tapestry as Claudius attempts unsuccessfully to pray. He is joined by Polonius and their conversation proves Hamlet’s suspicions to be correct. Shattered to discover that Polonius knew of the plot, Hamlet violently repulses Ophelia and her love for him. The act ends with a long duet (based largely on Shakespeare’s Closet Scene) between Gertrude and Hamlet, who finally draws a dagger with which to kill his mother, but is stopped by the Ghost.A ballet-divertissement (obligatory at the Opéra) ‘La fête du printemps’ begins Act 4, followed by Ophelia’s mad scene (‘A vos jeux … Partagez-vous mes fleurs … Et maintenant écoutez ma chanson’) and her subsequent suicide by drowning.In Act 5, after a curtailed version of the gravediggers’ scene, events depart radically from Shakespeare. On learning of the death of Ophelia, Hamlet sings ‘Comme une pâle fleur éclose au souffle de la tombe’. A funeral march heralds the arrival of Ophelia’s coffin, followed by a chorus of young girls. Prompted by a final visit from the Ghost, Hamlet kills Claudius and is acclaimed king: ‘Vive le roi Hamlet’.In Paris, at least, a Hamlet with a comparatively happy ending did not worry either the critics or the public, who flocked to hear the great baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure in the title role. The hundredth performance at the Opéra, scheduled for 28 November 1873 at the Salle Le Peletier, did not take place until four months later at the Salle Ventadour, as the Salle Le Peletier burnt down on the morning of that date. Meanwhile, on 19 June 1869, Hamlet was produced with considerable success at Covent Garden, London, where Christine Nilsson repeated the triumph she had scored as Ophelia in the Paris première. Other famous singers of Ophelia included Calvé, Albani, Melba and Garden.The mad scene, much on the lines laid down by Donizetti in Lucia di Lammermoor, is in several sections. Ophelia asks the courtiers if she can join in their games; imagining that she is married to Hamlet, she fears that he will be faithless. In a waltz movement she distributes flowers before singing the ballad ‘Pâle et blonde, dort sous l’eau profonde’, about the Wilis, spirits who lead faithless lovers to a watery grave. (Its melody is hummed by an invisible chorus after Ophelia’s death.)Although it was undoubtedly the mad scene that ensured the opera’s popularity during the 19th century, it is mainly as a superb vehicle for a baritone that Hamlet has survived since then. Faure was succeeded in the title role by singers such as Maurel, Lassalle, Renaud, Ruffo, Battistini and Singher. More recently Sherrill Milnes and Thomas Allen have sung in noteworthy revivals. Hamlet’s music is much more dramatic than that of the other characters; everything he sings is consistent with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, apart from the drinking song; even that can be seen, like his madness, as part of the camouflage put on to deceive Claudius.Another well-drawn character is Gertrude. Her second-act arioso, ‘Dans son regard plus sombre’, was considered by several contemporary critics as the finest solo number in the score, while her third-act duet with Hamlet is the opera’s dramatic and musical centre, as the Closet Scene is the heart of Shakespeare’s play. Though Laertes, Claudius, Polonius and the others are more conventional in their musical characterization, Thomas’ skill in atmospheric scene-painting is frequently at its most vivid in this work. The Ghost’s appearance on the ramparts, accompanied by eerie writing for the brass, is most effective, as also is the melodrama of the mimed play about Gonzago. The ballet music for ‘La fête du printemps’ is less interesting and overlong, but the scene of Ophelia’s funeral procession is very impressive.

[edettethegreat]

Imagine...you have been granted access to the play of Hamlet. You are however, allowed to save only one from the last scene. Who do you choose and why? [10 marks]

Ok lets go through the characters who die and who should be saved-

Hamlet- Look he’s been waiting to die this whole time. He’s not all that upset about it. And would I really wanna be like “hey you’re alive now, also Fortunbras  (idk how to spell that and the play isn’t here with me) is here so you’ll have to deal with him maybe taking over your kingdom haha” I’ll give him a 6/10 points for how revivable he is.

Claudius- 0/10 points. The whole point of the play was to watch him die

Gertrude- She didn’t have to die, but then again, she didn’t have to marry her brother-in-law, so ehhh. I’ll give her a 4/10

Laertes- I kinda feel bad for him, because yes, Hamlet killed his father, and he should have the same rights of revenge as Hamlet had. So although I don’t really like him, I think he should be the one who gets to revive. 9/10 revive points. 

[marat]

🌻🌻🌻

I’m watching the Kevin Kline version of hamlet from the 90s and the guy who plays Laertes also played john Dickinson in the 1997 revival of 1776 and I thought it would be weird but honestly I’m digging his portrayal

[likealittleheartbeat]

““Too much water hast thou, poor Ophelia,” remarks Laertes in the scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the Queen announces his sister’s death (4.7.211). More than a commentary on the way she died—drowned, surrounded by flowers, in a stream under a weeping willow—Laertes diagnoses Ophelia with watery excess. This infirmity was the essence of her languishing nature and physiology. Two centuries later, the drowning of wayward beauties became a preoccupation of Romantic poets and pre-Raphaelite painters. John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) produced three paintings of Ophelia and three more of her contemporary counterpart: the ephemeral character after which Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) entitled his 1832 ballad, The Lady of Shalott [Figure 1]. Many unhappy successors—both fictive and real—followed Ophelia and the Lady of Shalotts by going to the water, apparently to end their lives. Within the tragic-romance genre, the water itself emerges as an integral element of these women’s death scenes. Yet, as the trope of watery women reached into the twentieth century, the utter femininity of these women’s drownings was attributed to their beauty and the lovesick delusions that led them to their demise, rather than to Laertes’ diagnosis: that women were inherently made of ��too much water.” In the early modern period, the gendered connotations of water in contemporary medical thought were what naturalized drowning as an inherently feminine form of death, giving rise to a persistent narrative that then continued for centuries after the medical theory that produced it had faded into obscurity. Reintroducing excess water as a condition from which the women of the drowned beauty trope suffered provides insight into the original significance of the apathetic dispositions which led to their deaths. It also revives an enduring question: did these women really drown themselves? Or rather, were they drowned from within?”

Laertes’s response upon hearing the news of his sister’s death, “Too much water hast though, poor Ophelia,” refers to the watery surplus of phlegm in her body that corroded her disposition (4.7.211). Hamlet’s strange wish during his farewell to Ophelia, that she be “as chaste as ice,” also comes into focus (3.1.146). He desired for Ophelia to be so inundated by the coldest and wateriest female humors that she was frozen into abstinence. This language of women’s humoral imbalance is still present in Tennyson’s description of the Lady of Shalott, whose, “Blood was frozen slowly,” as her body floated into Camelot (1842 version, IV.30) [Figure 4].

[drsilverfish]

Re-Fridging Mary Winchester? The Ouroboros Narrative Swallows its Origin Story (14x18)

This is the last time we see Mary Winchester alive (14x17 Game Night). Her last words are, “Jack, please, listen to me!” and her last shot is this shaky close-up, straight to camera. 

(Image credit Wayward Winchester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIbBibdvsaM )

Doesn’t it look as if she’s directly addressing the audience here, as if to say, “Hey, folks, pay close attention!”?

The “real” Mary is, like the title of the episode (Absence) absent in 14x18. 

Rowena says, after doing her locator spell, that Mary, “...is not on this earth.” We see ash that is supposedly hers, as Jack tries desperately to “resurrect” her. We learn Castiel has seen her soul in Heaven, but we do not see her, only the apparent door to her Heaven:

And the “body” Jack raises using Rowena’s necromancy spell? It is not Mary:

(Image credit Wayward Winchester:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny7tLZC3nto )

Sam is very explicit about that. He says, “I talked to Rowena. She said she thinks that what Jack brought back, he just brought back a shell, a body, y’know, that it was empty, just a... replica, incapable of holding life.”

A replica, like... a doppleganger, a mirror-image?

The shot above, of her sons holding this shell, this replica-double, is laid out at a boundary, between grass and ash, between life and death, almost as if between one world and another (separated, perhaps, by a portal?).

You might have seen my posts already about 14x17 Game Night and 14x18 Absence, wherein I am suspicious (for various reasons) as to whether that is really the last we will see of Mary Winchester on the show.  Just as I am suspicious about Jack’s “Hallucifer” really just being a part of his own mind, because likewise, I highly doubt we have seen the last of Lucifer on the show:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/183968888069/lucifer-rides-again-games-within-games

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/184140015899/14x18-absence-the-games-continue

So, my consideration of the re-fridging of Mary Winchester in the S14 SPN narrative is caveated by the fact that I have a sense that this re-fridging may be contingent rather than final. 

It is also caveated by the fact that Mary’s second (apparent) fridging was handled by Berens in a way which subverts it, because, as outlined above, Mary herself is absent from the mise-en-scène of her re-fridging. She has noped out of it! 

But, if my suspicions concerning another twist to this narrative are incorrect (and I hope they’re not) then, deft or not, Mary is still dead again to further our male protagonists’ narratives. 

I think we’re probably all familiar with the term, “fridging”....

 The term originates with Gail Simone, a comic book writer who created the website Women in Refrigerators in 1999 (twenty years ago now, wow). 

This is the link to the website (still live) and this is an excerpt of what she said:

“This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.”

http://lby3.com/wir/ 

The trope, “fridging”, has now taken on an established life of its own in pop-culture criticism. 

Here is some more discussion of it in an article by Maria Norris “ Comics and Human Rights: A Change is Gonna Come. Women in the Superhero Genre” (2015).

“The trope Simone describes is now widely acknowledged, and the practice it describes has come to commonly known as ‘fridging’. The superhero genre typically depicts interactions and relationships between male and female characters that lack consequence, emotional resonance, permanence and accountability. Often, these fictional relationships stagnate, or end tragically. Too often, women in superhero comics become pawns in schemes meant to develop male characters or give them motivation to act.”

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/80285/1/Comics%20and%20Human%20Rights_%20A%20Change%20is%20Gonna%20Come.pdf

So, we can define fridging, from these sources as - the often gruesome or shocking death of a female character, for the primary purpose of driving male character motivation or development. 

Whilst the trope may have been defined in the 1990s, it is much older in literature. We could argue that Oedipus’ mother, Jocasta, was fridged, for instance, because who she is (Oedipus’ birth mother) and her suicide, are framed as being all about Oedipus and the impact on Oedipus. We could even argue that Shakespeare fridged Ophelia, whose tragic suicide is driven by Hamlet’s cruelty (and his murder of her father) and whose death, in the play, is primarily designed to impact her menfolk - Hamlet (her beloved) and her brother Laertes. 

Essentially, what we mean by the “fridging” of a female character is that in stories (usually by men) where men are the protagonists and the heroes (or tragic heroes or anti-heroes) sometimes (by no means always) women are written as primarily existing in relation to those men, so that their own deaths are not about themselves, but are used principally to explore the emotional landscapes of the hero-protagonists to whom they mattered and who live on after they are gone.  

Mary Winchester’s original fridging, her gruesome burning on the ceiling, which we the audience see in 1x01 Pilot, provides the origin story for Supernatural. 

Mary is fridged because she is dead the moment we meet her. 

We don’t have time to get to know who she is, or what her death means as part of her own journey. She is killed gruesomely and that death provides major character motivation and development for her husband John Winchester and for her sons Sam and Dean. She is, originally, defined primarily by her relationships to them; as a dead wife and a dead mother.

Mary Winchester is fridged by fire and her menfolk are thus “birthed” into narrative. Over her silenced and torched corpse, they become words and action.  Their narrative journey begins because hers ends. 

That fridging is, in the very same pilot episode, repeated for Sam’s girlfriend Jess:

Supernatural, it is thus swiftly established (by a double fridging at the outset) is, overtly, a story of heterosexual men (John and Sam being so established by their relationships to Mary and Jess) without familial women. Men who have been initiated into a world of violence and grief, powerfully driven by revenge, because their women-folk have been slaughtered. 

(Dean, however, has been queer-coded from the beginning, but that’s another story.)

In the established patriarchal order of the SPN universe (in which stories about men are central and stories about women are peripheral) heightened masculine emotion (which lies at the heart of Supernatural) is thus created and legitimised, by the death of women.

When Bobby becomes the Winchesters gruff substitute father-figure (with a gooey,  although masked, heart-of-gold centre) his own back-story repeats the pattern. We learn Bobby had to kill his own wife, Karen, whilst she was possessed by a demon (see 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me, 5x15 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and 7x10 Death’s Door). In Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Karen is raised as a zombie by Death, and Bobby is forced to kill her all over again, thus, once more, reinforcing the death of familial women as the origin point for the centrality of masculine emotion in the narrative. Karen, in the SPN narrative, does not really exist as her own person, only as Bobby’s tragic wife, framed, rather tellingly, as a home-maker and help-meet in this shot from 5x15:

Familial women, associated with the core male characters in Supernatural are thus, initially, strongly framed as occupying the domestic space, the hearth-fire, whilst hunting and the open road belongs to their (bereaved) menfolk. 

For Mary Winchester, however, things become a little more complicated than that. Because, thanks to the time-travel abilities of the angels, she is “resurrected” in 4x03 In the Beginning and 5x13 The Song Remains the Same and her sons get to meet a living, younger, version of her. Mary becomes a person, raised as a hunter in her own right, rebellious, brave, independent, determined, a fighter. We see her having something of her own agency, although to a limited extent, in that she remains “trapped” by the angel breeding programme and the fate the angels have laid out for her - to marry John and to bear angel-vessel sons. She cannot therefore, escape her primary framing as a wife and mother, as in this shot from 5x13:

So, when Dabb inaugurated his era as showrunner, and his Ouroboros narrative structure, by taking us back to the start of Superantural and re-working the story by unnfridging Mary Winchester (11x23 Alpha and Omega):

(Image credit: http://timetraveldean.tumblr.com/post/144939142393 )

it was such a brilliant “un-zipping” of the original SPN narrative architecture. The Ur “woman in white” was back from the dead; Supernatural was going meta-narrative on its own ass in a big way. By having Mary brought back to life from Heaven by the feminine God-principle in the universe, Amara, who had previously been unjustly locked away by her brother, God, SPN was critiquing its own patriarchal origin story. 

Yay! 

Which is why Mary’s re-fridging in 14x18, IF the writers’ room is playing it straight (and, as above, I have my strong doubts about that) would be so disappointing.

Sure, on one level, from Dabb’s Ouroboros narrative perspective, it makes impactful and symmetrical sense.

Jack was always paralleled to Azazel, as well as to Dean and Sam, at his birth - see this meta of mine on 12x23 All Along the Watchtower:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/160876601179/all-along-the-watchtower-12x23-and-12x22-and

A yellow-eyed supernatural being in a nursery, a baby, and a mother who dies. The ingredients are the same (1x01 and 12x23) - the recombination is different, as part of the narrative journey.  

Mary’s first death inaugurated Dean as substitute-parent to Sam. 

Jack’s mother, Kelly Kline’s death, inaugurated the Winchesters as substitute parents to Jack. And oh boy, did the narrative not treat Kelly Kline well. Kelly Kline was stealth-raped by Lucifer and died giving birth to Jack (her body mystically ripped apart by the birth). Kelly was fridged for Jack’s nascent emotional journey, because, once again, the show’s core depends on the absence of familial women. 

Kelly Kline dies giving birth to Jack (12x23)

Jack’s birth and Sam and Dean’s parental responsibility for him also coincided with Castiel’s death, thus (in subtext) the narrative also mirrored Dean’s grief at losing Cas to his father John Winchester’s grief at losing Mary.

In a patriarchal culture where male feeling is repressed, which is definitely the in-show world of Supernatural (mirroring aspects of IRL US culture) the stakes, apparently, “have to” be bloody, they “have to” be high, in order for the narrative to “permit” the levels of traumatic emotion which Dean and Sam (and now Jack) continually cycle through, whilst maintaining their ostensibly “tough” hunter hero status.

The bedrock of that “permission”, i.e. permission to be a show about male sentiment? With Kelly Kline’s death, it continued to be predicated on the violent death of familial women - at the very moment the Winchesters themselves became fathers.

Dabb used the same (tired) trope in 9x20 Bloodlines (Ennis lost his girfriend to a werewolf attack, and was thus deeply emotionally wounded and bent on revenge).

Female familial death is the narrative “excuse” for the homo-social world of SPN, and it also works to contain the homoerotic subtext of SPN. Women are ostensibly, only absent from these men’s lives because they keep traumatically losing them, not because they, in fact, prefer the company of other men.

Two grown brothers and a male-embodied angel who live together, have adopted a son together, and who spend all their time in states of incredible emotional angst?

Hollywood culture (and the mainstream audience it imagines it is speaking to) still (for the most part - although let’s acknowledge Tapert’s Spartacus for Starz, 2010-2013) cannot compute how to experience that kind of set-up as both “queer” AND “manly” (which is why Troy [2004] eviscerates the homo-romantic from Achilles/ Patroclus) so the violent death of familial women in Supernatural is used as an excuse for their absence

Mary’s ostensible death in 14x18 seems, once again, to re-affirm this patriarchal order, even though, in her time back on earth, from 11x23 to now, Mary has been written and portrayed as a flawed, real person; her apple-pie baking, perfect Mom, childhood mirage (Dean’s dream of her idealised memory) thoroughly deconstructed. And I have lived for that. 

To have her re-fridged, for her sons’  man-pain (i.e. for the narrative “permission” to cycle through grief and angst and growth again) after all that, just sits wrong with me.

And, despite the beauty of Beren’s structure, despite his respectful treatment of her, make no mistake, Mary is (if we read this as played straight) re-fridged, because her death, is not about her or her own journey, rather, narratively, it now deliberately leaves her sons in the place of their father. 

A yellow-eyed “demon” (their adopted Nephilim son Jack, whom they fear has lost his soul) has killed Mary Winchester, again. Will the Winchesters follow in the footsteps of John Winchester’s revenge quest, or will they find another way? 

I really hope Mary comes back from the AU world she’s been un-wittingly blasted to by Jack to kick some sense into her sons’ asses and, oh yeah, punch Lucifer in the face all over again:

Mary punching Lucifer in 13x22 Exodus. 

[notcatherinemorland]

it’s that time of year again: annual Hamlet posting Session

Production: Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe. Marketed to me as: Post-pandemic theatre revival, Generic Globe Production of Good Quality, Candle-lit and intimate.  Expectations: Will do something a littol edgy and thematic, will have at least 1 (one) theme, it will be of overall good quality considering that it’s the globe and the ticket price. 

So.

ive got some thots 

i always have Thots on hamlet. crawling over me like weevils

Literally i do not think i’ve heard shakespeare in any regional accent beyond the a level lit class reading aloud. hamlet had a black country accent (i am copying that identification from reviews of the actor, i could not place it for the life of me; i speak like stephen fry.) 

it absolutely slapped.

it changed the rhythm, it changed the stresses, it therefore changed the meaning. it was so, so interesting. Gertrude had Generic Shakespeare RP accent, but Claudius had a bit of london accent mixed with his RP. Ophelia i will come to later.

they had a very diverse cast! diverse in race, actor’s gender and accent. and every single actor was so good. ophelia and laertes especially were outstanding.

They ad-libbed swearing. i would recommend you get thee to the globe theatre just for Laertes alone yelling ‘Where the FUCK is my father’, covered in blood. Unparalleled shakespeare experience. it was scattered throughout the play but god it was so much fun. it changed the energy of the scene every time someone swore, it brought so much life and depth to the playtext we have probably memorised as a nation like fucking f.451. 

music! they had music! it was interesting! i thought it would be a bit crunchy for me, but the way the characters interacted with the musician (who was the grave digger) and the new layer it brought was really good! it helped that a) all those who had to sing could carry a tune b) the music was from the smiths but im uncultured and had to learn that from reviews. i liked it though.

audience participation!!!! hamlet had to ask if he was a coward 5 times before we got the hint to tell him. this one guy down in the pit seats had a whole nonverbal conversation with hamlet about his cowardice of nod, shake head, shrug shoulders. i loved that bit unironically. hamlet started the play off stage by leaning into the window frame next to my head and then looking head dead in the eyes to lament he couldn’t top himself. i gave him a little nod. but like what the fuck!!! i was complicit in the play!! i cannot sleep at night any more i peaked right there.

ophelia. literally this production revolved around her. she started off as Your Typical Ophelia with such a lightness and youth about her, giggling with laertes. and then was on stage for every single court scene bar the ones she logically couldn’t know about. they really went in on not letting ophelia talk, and the nonverbal communication with gertrude, but they also gave her the inserted players monologue! she was part of the play! god! im obsessed with that one! the actress has my full kudos for absolutely nailing ophelia the character being an actress. her madness.. i do not feel qualified to talk about the reception of it at all, but it was an interesting choice. Ophelia’s madness was in sweats and a hoodie and a protective hair wrap and she lost all her linguistic and behavior and costume’s structure to yell, and bounce up and down the stage and sing (an elsinore version of that ‘everywhere we go’ chant), and my god it really struck me. The inclusion of the actor’s race into Ophelia’s character moved it firmly away from the previous globe hamlet i saw (2017? clown!hamlet michelle terry) which had a more ‘blind’ approach to casting (barring R&G). It was such a comment on the marginalisation of Ophelia’s voice in the play. She was just loaded with meaning and themes. On the flip side, because she was a loadbearing pillar for the play, it can be quite the negative.

you will notice my language does not separate ophelia from her actor! this is intentional. mostly because i am talking about this hamlet production, not hamlet As a production - i am not qualified to talk about the theatre industry in terms greater than some hamlets.

literally no hamlet production has ever made me understand the utter, heartbreaking tragedy that is watching 2 families disintegrate before your eyes. it fucking broke me. so many productions get caught up in the Hamletiness of hamlet; the madness, the self-absorption, the internal struggle and action vs inaction. this production was much more about the utter devastation hamlet leaves in his wake, and my god, they made it hurt.

music again! they had all the dead characters sing in the final scene (with ophelia and polonius holding hands at the back) and then when hamlet said the rest is silence, they stopped. the play ended. the silence was harrowing and it echoed of the small enclosed theatre space and the lights snapped off at the exact moment the singing stopped and it literally broke me as a person. :)

they had like. a pool of water built into the middle of the stage and it was Nice and Thematic and they used it to douse the candle chandeliers! fun and interesting and leant some very nice ideas about light and water to a play very concerned with both of those (give me some light! vs hamlet sent to sea, thaw, melt, resolve itself into a dew, the ever-cut fortinbras scene on the cliff). but literally by the end the play it had ashes and blood and a hoodie floating about and it all looked so dirty that i could not think about much else. it looked so grim... 

Light! GOD. they started off with a whole Moment^TM of lighting the candles and then putting out the candles, and then as the play progressed (sig. after play within play) they used artificial light more and more. i loved it, but i like that kind of thing. everyone’s costumes and the setting had a shine on it, so i think like 90% of the place was inflammable. i find this very funny. 

polonius was hilariously good. he had this fucking Geralt the Witcher looking ass wig on his head (lacefront clockable in the candlelight lol) and he was like. over 6ft. any Polonii worth their salt will make me laugh in the historical-pastoral-comical lines and he was very very funny. he took the humour with him when he died :(

Claudius had a proper energy and youth to him, which was a very nice change from the norm of conniving bastard politician. he was very much like laertes; hot headed, opportunistic, but still conniving and politically savvy. i Really liked him. someone sneezed in the claudius - hamlet ‘kill him when he’s praying’ scene, and claudius and ham turned, claudius said ‘bless you’ and i nearly lost the fucking plot. you could not buy timing so perfect. 

Gertrude. she was a gertrude. she was drunk in the duel scene, which brought such a chaos. she knowingly drank the poison (i always like seeing what productions do with that) but her absolutely outstanding moment was after the Play in a Play. 

sidebar: about the theatre. the corridors of the ground floor seating had large, wooden frame open windows/rectangular holes. it opened the space up a lot, but it had specific use for lighting - moved from warm to cold, dim to bright. but it was used for the actors to move around the theatre with intent. Hamlet started off (next to me!!) and leaned in the window monologuing - not even in the stage boundary of elsinore. Themes! they had the guards/ R&G running around looking for Ham post-closet scene, Laertes stormed his way around and burst in yelling for his dad (swearing, covered in blood) but my favourite use was after ‘Give me some light!’ - Gertude and Claudius swept back and forth around the corridor swearing blue at each other about grief and lying to each other. it was such a cacophony over the next scene, they had a whole like 10 mins of scripted arguing, and Gertrude was fantastic. best moment of the play. 

costumes! they were generic fake medieval and very pretty. ham wore docs. ophelia had some dirty white trainers. laertes wore sliders and nike shorts. a solid costumed production, i really liked it. unobtrusive and yet brought something new to it. wonderful

i didn’t care too much for the ghost of his dead dad, but it was like, fine. nothing heinous i just prefer it more when they do something weird. having the ghost dressed in nothing but ye olde leather armour with his tits out (tiddies out for elsinore) was tonally dissonant with the rest of the costumes and the following graffiti so i was just a bit unimpressed. it wasn’t BAD, it just didn’t win me over. however i think the best ghost is the mazine peake in manchester’s 360 theatre which is just lights, so make of it what you will.

laertes. one of THEE best laertes i’ve ever seen. absolutely fantastic. and not just because i’m in love with the actor because i am a giant lesbian and she was covered in blood. partially because i am a giant lesbian and she was covered in blood. but also his sibling relationship with ophelia was subtle and wonderfully done, they had a proper intimacy. 

R&G doubled up on the 2 court officials and also the players and guards. it was grand. i know every production does it for ease and themes, but they were good actors and it was well done.

setting! they had a whole set change in the first interval to cover the palace in graffiti; which hamlet had supposedly done. i think more hamlets should be given sharpies. i really liked it, honestly, it made it look a) claustrophobic, b) mixing the political nature of graffiti with the personal revenge theme was a++ c) talk about instability in hamlet, they literally dismantled the bloody set twice on a meta level. loved it a lot. also i think there was a mishap with the pool of water, one of the pieces making the tip of it was taken off in the 2nd interval and so it was missing. thematically rich. angela carter moment of everything will disintegrate. 

gravedigger was metafictional. boss move to be honest. his bit had nothing to do with anything textual, made pop culture references, and got in a few digs about garden parties and corrupt politicians. very nice experience, would laugh again. he and the vicar (polonius actor with an irish accent) had a little singalong by using the yorricks skulls as percussion which was very funny. 

hamlet himself! he was very good indeed. he picked up speed after the 1st interval. to be or not to be was good, but his energy in the monologues kinda tailed off half way through pretty consistently. Loved his accent, loved his energy with the other characters. a solid ham.

honestly it was an absolutely banging production of hamlet to see live. it was a very audio/visual focused production, which felt very refreshing compared to some very stripped back hamlets that focus on the words. 

the outstanding part was how it focused on the familial tragedy. it was very like Leer, with 2 sets of 3 being put in opposition to each other and the drama coming from their clashes. it was a surprisingly emotional version of the story because of it.

the theatre was integral to the experience with the use of the corridor. smashed holes in the public/private theme of the textual hamlet. the graffiti and ophelia’s integrated actor attributes bringing class to the idea of decay (very poignant). light and lighting used to full effect throughout. would write page upon page about this for the a level mark scheme.

overall thoughts: see it live if possible. solid cast, only a handful of detractions, brought a lot of interesting things to the forefront, a firmly political production within itself and on a metafictional (metatheatrical?) level. would see it again for the swearing alone. ophelia was outstanding. 

[ask-tim-stoker]

they will be found.

anyway Laertes this is a threat if you die I will personally revive you and then burn your quilt zombie remains just for dying

Dying, you say?

🍄🪱🍄🪱🍄🪱

@ask-tim-stoker the anons are bullying me

[verdiprati]

Hi there! (I love this blog btw, God bless) I'm not an opera expert, hence the anon, but a theatre buff who would very much like to hear your thoughts on Brett Dean's Hamlet if you feel like it ...

Greetings, Anon! Thank you for the compliment on my blog, and thanks for sending me a question! I like to chat and discuss stuff.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen Brett Dean’s Hamlet or not so I am not sure how much context I need to give for my remarks. I will take a stab at this, though.

The first thing I’d observe about Dean’s Hamlet is that it assumes its audience is already very familiar with the play. I think it’s watchable even if you do not know the play well, but sort of like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, it is aimed at people who have probably read the play in school and seen multiple stage performances and/or movie adaptations of it, and who may be able to quote some of the more famous lines from memory. Hamlet is one of the most performed and most adapted pieces of theater in the world; Brett Dean and the librettist Matthew Jocelyn are well aware of that, and do not respond by trying to make the ultimate, most perfect adaptation, but rather by making something new yet recognizable, with plenty of in-jokes. 

As you may know, they sort of put the text(s) through a blender. Many famous lines and familiar characters were completely cut out; other lines were re-ordered and re-assigned. A chorus, nonexistent in the Shakespeare play, was added; as well as making up the court of Elsinore, it functions like a classic Greek chorus, commenting on and amplifying the action, and also like an extension of the orchestra, sometimes adding eerie vocal effects to the overall tapestry of sound in the auditorium. The roles of Horatio and Marcellus are greatly reduced in the Dean/Jocelyn Hamlet while the presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is increased in proportion to (what is left of) the rest of the play.

Probably my favorite thing about the Dean/Jocelyn adaptation of Hamlet is the fact that they deliberately selected bits and pieces of language from all three of the textual witnesses, including the so-called “bad quarto.” To back up and explain a little bit (with apologies if you know this stuff already): there is no one text of Hamlet. As with all the rest of Shakespeare’s plays, we have no manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand. What we have are various early printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays that could plausibly, in one way or another, have derived from a manuscript (or multiple manuscripts!) written by Shakespeare. In the case of Hamlet, there’s the 1603 quarto edition (Q1), the 1604 quarto (Q2), and the version included in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (F1). The texts of Q2 and F1 are largely similar to each other and most modern editions of Hamlet are based on a melding of them, but Q1 is substantially shorter than the other two texts, a couple of the characters have different names, and some of the speeches are chopped up in ways that seem clearly erroneous (Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech is notoriously muddled in Q1). Thus Q1 has come to be known as a “bad quarto” and has traditionally been disparaged and discarded by editors trying to piece together an authoritatively Shakespearean version of Hamlet. 

There are various theories of how Q1 came to be so “bad.” I did my undergraduate thesis on the so-called “bad quarto” of Romeo and Juliet, so I spent a few months reading as much scholarship on the “bad quartos” as I could get my hands on. Some of the “bad quarto” theories are kind of crackpot. The generally-accepted explanation for how these texts came into existence, though, is piracy by memorial reconstruction: the idea is that a couple of actors in Shakespeare’s company would go to a printer and recite as much of the play as they could from memory. They would report their own parts pretty reliably, and they would have fair-to-good recall of other actors’ lines from the scenes they were in, but their recall would degrade for scenes where they were offstage. Moreover, cuts and other changes to the text might have been made in the theater in the process of bringing the play to the stage; these would be reflected in the “bad quarto” but not in other versions of the text deriving more directly from a manuscript penned by Shakespeare. On the plus side, the actors would sometimes supply stage directions in the “bad quartos” that were never specified in other textual witnesses, giving us some valuable clues about the action Shakespeare’s original audiences might actually have seen on the stage.

In recent years, there’s been some interest in reviving the so-called “bad quartos” as performance texts, with an eye towards accessing more “theatrical” versions of Shakespeare’s plays: my interest in the “bad quartos” was first hooked when I met a scholar of early modern performance studies who was directing a “bad quarto” performance of Romeo and Juliet at Oxford in the late ′90s. After finishing my Romeo and Juliet undergrad thesis, I headed off to a graduate program known for its strengths in textual studies, intending to continue in this academic vein. I actually ended up changing fields for my dissertation but I took enough graduate coursework in bibliography, textual criticism, and scholarly editing to achieve geekgasm when Dean and Jocelyn had characters alternately singing “solid” and “sullied”—a reference to a notorious editorial crux in Hamlet, one of the most famous scholarly editing problems of all time. (Here is just one person’s take on the matter.) I really enjoyed the fact that they not only used bits and pieces of Hamlet Q1 on an equal footing with pieces of Q2 and F1 but also took the spirit of a “theatrical” reading of the bad quartos as justification for their adaptation: in cutting and reordering the Hamlet scripts and reassigning many words to other characters, they were not doing anything that Shakespeare’s own company of actors didn’t do. (They did a lot more of it, though!)

Witty and intriguing little turns in the Dean/Jocelyn adaptation flew by too quickly for me to remember them all, but I remember having the impression that their version of Hamlet did a number of things to foreground the theatrical themes of the play. For instance, the whole episode of Hamlet’s trip to England was cut, but the play-within-a-play received lavish attention. (Amber Treadway composed an excellent tweet on “the most meta players scene ever.”) One tiny detail that I especially liked: Hamlet’s line “Do not saw the air too much with your hand,” from his instructions to the players, was relocated to the final duel, where it became a taunt from Hamlet to Laertes, calling attention to the aesthetic aspect of Laertes’ performance as a fencer.

By reducing the cast of soloists, minimizing some of the secondary roles, and completely cutting out all references to the Norwegian threat to the Danish state, Dean and Jocelyn shaped their version of Hamlet into a drama of two interlinked families. Hamlet, the Ghost, Claudius, and Gertrude make up one of the families; Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia make up the other; and the two are linked by Hamlet and Ophelia’s broken romance. This adaptation foregrounds Gertrude’s tenderness towards Ophelia and Laertes; up until Hamlet gave them reasons to hate him, after all, Gertrude was planning and assuming that she would soon welcome them as new relatives by marriage. Throughout the Glyndebourne staging directed by Neil Armfield, Gertrude can frequently be seen literally reaching out to other characters, touching and caressing them; she is, in this version, a dedicated peacemaker, striving—up until the moment of her own poisoning, when she realizes that her husband intends to kill her son—to hold the court together.

Another interesting presence in this version was the triply-cast role of the ghost of old Hamlet, the first player, and the gravedigger, played memorably by Sir John Tomlinson for the premiere production. I liked the fact that the opera made use of role doubling, a longstanding theatrical practice that is believed to have been used by Shakespeare’s acting company. Besides being one of the elements that made the opera feel very “theatrical” to me, it also allowed the ghost of Hamlet’s father to sort of implicitly or symbolically stick around as an ally to Hamlet. The roles of the first player and the gravedigger stand outside the two-family structure I outlined above, but they fit into another structure of Dean’s Hamlet: Team Hamlet vs. Team Claudius. As Hamlet’s bonds with his immediate family and his girlfriend are rapidly eroded, he turns to figures like Horatio, Marcellus, the players, and the gravedigger for trustworthy information and companionship. As I already mentioned, the roles of Horatio and Marcellus are minimized in this adaptation, so the roles of the first player and the gravedigger take on proportionally greater importance (even though their lines are also reduced). 

Those are my thoughts on Brett Dean’s Hamlet, or at least, as many thoughts as I can write up in an evening. Feel free to send me your thoughts too, or ask follow-up questions!