The many makeovers of Hamlet
The same(ish) story portrayed 7 different ways (plus 1 for kicks)
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If we’ve learned anything about pop culture, it’s that people can’t resist a Shakespeare adaptation. Whether that means Baz Luhrmann casting teen heartthrobs as angsty modern versions of Romeo and Juliet or Akira Kurosawa appropriating King Lear’s plot points for Ran, the Bard’s classic works are always ripe for a makeover. Such is the case with David Wroblewski’s best-selling The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle, a contemporary version of Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin, which launched a love-it-or-hate-it discourse last year. Ahead of Wroblewski’s lecture at the S. Dillon Ripley Center on Monday, The A.V. Club takes a look at other successful adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s revenge-themed tragedy.
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play—and its later, lesser film adaptation—Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead puts a post-modern twist on Shakespeare’s original work and on the theater itself. Focusing on two minor characters from Hamlet, the story follows the eloquent Guildenstern and his archetypically dumber sidekick Rosencrantz as they get swept into a play within a play that’s based on yet another play. The result pretty much breaks down the fourth wall (along with most of the ceiling and the floor), but never gets too heady or overly preachy.
Hamlet 2
Blasphemy rarely gets old. Especially when it involves a dead-end drama teacher singing and dancing to a song called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.” And especially when the performance in question is a high-school play titled Hamlet 2. Given that pretty much everyone ends up getting killed, killing themselves, or going totally insane by the end of Shakespeare’s play, a plausible follow-up seems totally ridiculous, but Andrew Fleming’s movie is actually funnier than its gimmicky, easy-laugh premise suggests.
The Lion King
The Lion King is a perfect example of Disney-fication in action—that is, changing a gruesome old fairytale/book/legend/play into a fluffy, sing-along-packed, kid-friendly money-maker. The story has Hamlet written all over it, what with the murdered father, corrupt uncle, and vengeance undercurrent, but avoids the particularly nasty details of the play—Simba’s she-lion friend Nala, for instance, doesn’t go bat-shit and drown herself—in favor of more family-oriented themes. Borrowing heavily from Osamu Tezuka's Kimba The White Lion, Disney replaced the Danish court with the anthropomorphized African savannah (because, you know, the animal kingdom is totally like a European monarchy) to give The Lion King an effective spin on an old story.
The Tragedy Of Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark
Dan Carroll
Dan Carroll's webcomic condenses Hamlet without reducing the story to a cheap, SparkNotes diet pill. Carroll portrays the austerity of the plot through the simplicity of his designs and manages to capture both the play's essential dialogue and formative clichés. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for example, look a whole lot like Sesame Street's mismatched, ambiguously oriented roommates Bert and Ernie). This succinct reimagining may lose some of the original drama—er, naturalistic tension—but it stays true to the essence of the play while offering some lighthearted brevity.
The Simpsons: "Do The Bard, Man"
The final segment of The Simpsons' three-part episode "Tales From The Public Domain" recreates the events of Hamlet in true Springfield style. There are a few overlapping plot points—Claudius (Moe) marries Gertrude (Marge), King Hamlet (Homer) visits Prince Hamlet (Bart) as a ghost, and by the end of the episode everyone is happily dead—but Matt Groening takes some welcome liberties with the characters' demises. Ophelia (Lisa), for one, apparently drowns in an attempt to "out-crazy" Bart (an interpretation that may set feminist literary scholars back a few years), while Laertes (Ralph Wiggum) dies by accidentally stabbing himself during his pre-duel warm up, and Rosencarl and Guildenlenny (uh, Carl and Lenny) kill each other with a poisonous high-five. But, really, the most important part of this adaptation is the concluding revelation that Hamlet was actually the inspiration for Ghostbusters.
Gertrude And Claudius
John Updike's Gertrude And Claudius is a sort of prequel to the events of Hamlet. Using the same source material Shakespeare drew from—namely, a medieval Danish historian's straightforward account and a more colorful update by a Renaissance author (published barely 25 years before the goateed bard started writing his own version)—Updike recreates the story from a different angle. With Hamlet's character limited to a snotty-nosed rug-rat and, later, an absentee student for much of the novel, the plot instead revolves around his dick of father, sex-pot mom, and dashing uncle. The book draws from all three of Updike's predecessors, but it sticks most closely to Shakespeare with a conclusion that coincides with the end of Hamlet's first act.
To Be Or Not To Be
As with most of his work, Mel Brooks’ To Be Or Not To Be is a comedy—a comedy set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, but a comedy all the same. The story follows the members of a Polish acting troupe who outsmart the occupying soldiers through a series of improvised disguises amid their production of Hamlet. Based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic of the same name, the movie doesn’t appropriate Hamlet so much as just make frequent, satirical reference to it. The German occupation of Poland is analogous to Claudius’ occupation of the court, and the movie’s title is an obvious reference to that famous soliloquy, but the soundtrack-exclusive number “To Be Or Not To Be (The Hitler Rap)” is a crowning achievement of sly parody.
Clueless
Okay, so Clueless is actually based on Jane Austen’s Emma. And, fine, it barely resembles Hamlet in any way—except maybe when Dionne’s boyfriend Murray tells Cher that Christian doesn’t like-like her, which is totally kind of like when Laertes tells Ophelia that Hamlet doesn’t like-like her. That said, this gem of mid-'90s teen trash has one of the best pieces of Hamlet-related dialogue that Hollywood has deigned to giggle at:
Heather: It's just like Hamlet said, "To thine own self be true."
Cher: Hamlet didn't say that.
Heather: I think I remember Hamlet accurately.
Cher: Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn't say that. That Polonius guy did.
