Adapting Hamlet

Even if you have never read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you will probably know catchphrases that have entered popular knowledge (“To be or not to be – that is the question”, “What a piece of work is man”, or “The rest is silence” are just some of them). Most of you will imagine a bookish guy standing on a stage with a skull in his hand when asked who Hamlet is. You might also know that the model procrastinator is a misogynist who suffers from a prototypical Oedipus-complex and drives his (ex-)lover Ophelia into committing suicide. Given its visibility on the stage and in cultural memory, it is no wonder that Shakespeare’s tragedy has inspired dozens of playwrights, novelists and screenwriters to write pieces complementing or contradicting his story or telling it from another perspective. In this class, we will explore some of them.

We will start with a detailed discussion of Shakespeare’s play itself, and then discuss Tom Stoppard’s classic of the British theatre of the absurd, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as well as James Ijames’s very recent Fat Ham. We will then move to prose with Margaret Atwood’s feminist rewriting “Gertrude talks back” and Matt Haig’s The Dead Fathers Club, a contemporary retelling of Hamlet. Last but not least, we will analyse various film-adaptations, discussing clips from Laurence Olivier’s classic depiction of the Danish prince, Kenneth Branagh’s ‘unabridged’ version, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet turned urban slacker in Hamlet – The Denmark Corporation as well as Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, a Hindi Hamlet. Our final text of the class will be the 2018 Ophelia, a retelling of the play from the point of view of Ophelia.

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