Nutshell
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, apparently, re-imagined.
Like Vinegar Girl — Taming of the Shrew?
Not always sure I trust the PR or jacket blurb.
This passage, in preparation for the book, I was hoping to listen to all of Hamlet again, but only managed the first act. Listening, not the first time, but listening carefully, this is right before the ghost walks on the set, or appears, however that might be stage-managed, there’s a bit from Horatio, setting the tone.
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
And even the like precurse of fear’d events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.
Horatio in Hamlet 1.i.113-26
Originally, I was going to start on the Neptune reference, as I’ve seen a lot of Neptune action lately — owing, no doubt — to a station at 9 Pisces, as the oracle predicted.
Looking at the order of the plays, there’s some academic discussion that Shakespeare deviated from his earlier English History to keep from getting censored. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is followed by either one or two comedies, then Hamlet. Because I jumped sequence, from Julius Caesar straight into that first act of Hamlet, I reminded myself that the play would still be fresh in the minds of the Elizabethan audiences, so the mention would summon up Great Caesar’s Ghost.
“Really, you’re going to go there?”
Yeah, I take a shot when I get one. While Neptune — as a planet — wasn’t even a mathematical idea yet, the notion of eclipses was solidly in the mindset of the milieu.
Nutshell
So I — mistakenly — thought this was part of the series. It’s not, but that doesn’t stop it from being a delightful, in a sickly twisted sense, retelling of Hamlet where the Prince — Prince Hamlet, son of the dead King Hamlet — is the narrator and he’s still a fetus in his mother’s belly.
Is that weird enough?
Given the arrangement, and allowing for due course, the telling of the tale offers a different voice, and adds to the original source rather than — it is weird — sure, but good, too.
Thoroughly strange, and yet, familiar as there is a confidence in the voice of the unborn.
Listening to Hamlet again, I was pondering a production I saw, years ago, on stage. Hamlet was portrayed as kid in a black turtleneck sweater, all angst-ridden over events. He does spend an almost inordinate amount of stage time questioning existence, and the meaning of it all.
Sort of surprising that all that emo, millennial generations haven't embraced Hamlet as an archetype.
Same for the book, in a darkly comic way. Rather brilliantly done.
At the end of the book? Yeah, why I like certain books.
Nutshell: A Novel
Nutshell
Rewriting Shakespeare — another view:
In the New Yorker —
