For years, loyal readers know, I’ve been telling Shakespeare stories to my children. Sometimes as a bedtime story, sometimes by request, and sometimes to entire classrooms of elementary school children.  Thus far it’s been fairly straightforward, and I’ve been able to tell most of them off the top of my head.

This month is got complicated.  My daughter, at 11yrs old, is in middle school (sixth grade) and starting down the theatre road (she’s playing an orphan in their production of Annie next month).  What’s interesting is that in the high school, just three short years away, they do Shakespeare.  This year it’s Hamlet.

I thought, “I know! I’ll write up a Hamlet intro/guide/summary/cheat sheet that’s not just an off-the-top-of-my-head summary, but an actual short ebook that would be advanced enough for middle school kids to understand. My goal : a middle school student reads my book, then goes to see Hamlet, and actually gets a better experience because of it.” I even told my daughter that I’d have something for her, and that if we thought it was good enough, maybe she could forward it around to some of her friends. My true goal would be to go straight to her teachers, of course, and distribute it that way.

And here I sit, word processor at the ready, half a dozen attempts started and restarted.  How do you summarize Shakespeare?  At one end you just collapse it down to the essential plot line, leave out most of the interesting bits, and end up with something that could as easily be the Lion King. But at the far end of the spectrum you get something in the “modern English translation” category where you’re so afraid to leave out even a single bit that you go through the play word by word, “updating” it in the hopes of making it easier to understand? Does that ever work?

I’m looking for advice.  I don’t want to do some sort of novelization where I’m reinventing setting and dialogue.  I want to tell enough of the play, presumably to an audience that’s not yet seen it, that when they *do* see it they’ll recognize what’s going on and be able to pay attention to details that I’ve told them ahead of time to watch for.

Right now I’m going scene by scene, almost as if they were on flash cards.  That at least gives me a baseline to treat the entire play on equal footing (rather than front loading it with all the introductory stuff and the whipping through other scenes too quickly).  I’m not sure how that will format in the final version.  I’d also like to something more character driven.  I definitely believe in the “short attention span” approach, and would like to serve up Hamlet in a number of bite-sized, more easily processed bits.  If my reader wants to absorb them in random order, that’s fine with me.

How would you summarize Shakespeare?  Would you swing more toward the “less is more” side, cutting out everything that gets in the way? Or is every detail important, and it’s all a matter of how succinctly you explain them?

While trying to explain all of Hamlet’s characters to my daughter I found another interesting spin I’d never considered.

Poor Francisco is in the play entirely to hand over the watch to Bernardo and Marcellus (and Horatio, but he’s not technically one of the guards). 

How come one guy is being relieved by two?

Second question – do you think Francisco saw the ghost? 

Think about it. He has no witnesses to back his story. Who is he going to tell?  At least Marcellus and Bernardo have someone else with them so they can do that whole “Did you see what I just saw?” dance.  But Francisco’s just out there by his lonesome with no one to talk to but himself.

I got a laugh out of the image of the ghost appearing before Francisco, and Francisco just staring blankly back at him.  The ghost, who is here to get a message to Hamlet, gets more and more frustrated at Francisco’s refusal to tell anybody that he eventually throws up his hands and tries Marcellus and Bernardo.  Meanwhile Francisco’s all, “Yeah, I’m not saying a word about this.”

You could even work it in here:

BERNARDO Have you had … quiet guard?

FRANCISCO

(wait for it…..wait for it…..) Not a mouse stirring.
“If you’re asking whether I saw the ghost of dead king Hamlet then no I most certainly did not thank you very much, I’m going to bed.”

Ok, so. I’ve had this review copy of Ian Doescher’s “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars” for months, given to me by the publisher, with the intent that I post a review.  And then I never did it.  The more time goes past the more I tell myself I should, and then I feel guilty that I’d be forcing myself to review it out of guilt and thus not give it a fair review, and then I put it off even longer.

So it’s only fair that I give it to someone who is going to review it.

How To Enter

1) You must be a Shakespeare blogger.  You can prove this by posting something on your Shakespeare blog, linking back to ShakespeareGeek.com (the homepage if you please, not this specific post).

2) You must not have previously reviewed the book. I don’t know why you’d want another copy if you already have one, but I need to put this in.  I’d like the book to go to someone who has not yet read it, and would like to.

3) In your post, make a Shakespeare/Star Wars reference of some sort. Be creative.  Here’s a whole bunch of ideas to get you started.

4) Contact me and let me know you’ve done this and where I can check.

5) Do all of this before end of day Saturday, November 9, 2013.  That’s this Saturday. End of day for the detail-oriented folks means midnight in the Eastern Standard time zone, counting for daylight savings time. I’ve never had anybody run it down to the minute before but my lawyers insist I say that.

6) Continental US residents only, please.

Obviously I am hoping that the winner will succeed where I failed, and post a review of the book. I can’t force that ahead of time, I can only ask nicely.  So whoever does win, please post a review of the book?  Thanks 🙂

I’m working my way through a Hamlet summary for my daughter (their high school is performing Hamlet next week!) and I want to make sure I understand something.  Here’s the timeline of how Hamlet’s “antic disposition” goes down:

* Hamlet sees ghost.  Hatches plan to “put an antic disposition on.”

* Scene with Polonius where Ophelia runs in to tell her father that “she has been so affrighted” that Hamlet wandered into her room looking all crazy and what not. Polonius decides that he’s mad from love and runs to tell the king and queen.

* Scene with Claudius and Gertrude, who have already summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to snap Hamlet out o this mood he’s been in.

* Polonius enters, announcing that he has discovered the cause of Hamlet’s madness. The queen says well duh it’s obviously his father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage.

* Polonius then reads the love letters that Hamlet has sent Ophelia.

So I’m trying to figure out how much time is going by here.  If we take Ophelia out of the picture we’re led to believe that significant time has passed, for Claudius and Gertrude to decide that something’s wrong with Hamlet and to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, right?  Everybody seems to agree that something’s wrong with Hamlet, and has been for awhile.

If that’s true … then how does the Ophelia story work into it? Why now all of a sudden is she so suddenly affrighted? Doesn’t she know that Hamlet is crazy? And, doesn’t Polonius also know that Hamlet is crazy?

Maybe Polonius has an epiphany here, maybe in whatever months have gone by Hamlet’s had nothing to do with Ophelia (as Polonius desired), but now he suddenly bursts in on her and Polonius says “Aha!  He’s clearly mad because he hasn’t been close to my daughter! I’ve cracked the case!”

But if *that* is true…then where did the love poems come from?  He doesn’t apparently give her anything when he barges into her room.  And if the letters were part of what Ophelia gave over to her father back at the beginning when she was initially asked, those would have been written at a time before Hamlet was supposedly nuts.  So that means that Hamlet’s been writing letters to Ophelia during these intervening months?

Is that it?  Ophelia is no longer speaking to Hamlet. Hamlet is writing letters to Ophelia, which she is not answering, and he’s getting more and more desperate.  Nobody notices the connection. But now he’s so desperate he’s getting physical, and Polonius finally connects the dots.

Do I have that right?

This morning I learned what a “levirate marriage” is.  From the wiki page:

a type of marriage in which the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow.

Interesting.  Now, who do we know who married the brother of her deceased husband?  Gertrude is even referenced in the Wikipedia page as a popular culture reference.

Any connection, or purely a coincidence?  I expect the latter.  The technical definition of the term suggests that only *childless* widows count, and Queen Gertrude is not childless … is she? 🙂  While some folks like to argue that perhaps Claudius is Hamlet’s real father, I don’t think anybody argues that Gertrude is not his real mother.