Hi, I'm Anna and I have basically been thinking about Hamlet non-stop since I've been 17, and also, incidentally, have been working on, for the last year, my own Hamlet retelling, because, as Hartley mentions in his afterword, you'd think I would have said everything there is to say about Hamlet at this point, but alas, I will not shut up. I am, of course, paraphrasing.

The first thing is that this is, all things considered, a fairly faithful retelling of Hamlet. When Fortinbras enters the scene to look at what's happened, and if Horatio is the only one around to tell the events, it wouldn't look any different than the play, but because of a few important changes Claudius is the tragic hero, and Hamlet a mere victim, which is interesting, but really does a lot to lessen the role and responsibility Hamlet has in the events of the play. It is Claudius, who murders his brother with good intentions who is solely responsible for the destruction at the end of the play. Hamlet is his bereaved and misguided nephew he loves, who he never wanted to kill, who dies as a final consequence of Claudius' love for Gertrude. Blood beckons blood as it were, and Claudius cannot escape the consequences of this not because he is the villain but because he is the tragic hero. Of course, then the title of this novel is misleading - this book is hardly about Hamlet at all, except that he's one sad, 27 year old BABY who gets dragged into this mess because of some misplaced duty he has to a father and king who never loved him, or potentially anyone. Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius, um, at all, I think. Claudius boldly, nobly accepts his death as the only outcome, having seen the destruction he has caused. In what is the end of the third act Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius because of the love he has for his uncle who was more of a father to him than Old Hamlet ever was. I think the premise has promise and it was executed well enough to see Claudius - the villain - cast in the new light of Tragic Hero. It leaves a lot of room of the authors to reinterpret the rest of the story and characters, but it does leave Hamlet in an awkward space, imo.

I have some General Misgivings about the characterization of Old Hamlet as a Bad Guy that have a lot to do with how Hamlet is insistent on mourning his father, and me accepting Hamlet as the ultimate unreliable narrator. I have significantly fewer General Misgivings bout the characterization of Claudius as a nuanced character because he is a living character in the play and his love for Gertrude seems real and genuine. This Claudius was noble, cautious, loving, and being manipulated by the villains in the play: Polonius and Voltimand.

The choice to play Polonius as a villain makes sense. While I usually prefer readings of him as a genuine if bumbling and ambitious fool who falls victim to Hamlet because he is incapable of like, minding his own business, I also believe the characters is more cunning than a lot of the rest of court (and my classmates in 11th grade) were willing to believe. It is he who really schemes to kill Old Hamlet, and it is he who suggests Claudius send Hamlet to his death. This is okay and could be...cool, even...if not for his callousness, and that he gets very little out of this arrangement. The OTHER choice of villain, Voltimand, who has been scheming for much longer to take Polonius' place and to, I don't know, cause general unrest in Denmark, is INSANE. It's one of three choices this novel made that I am still trying to grapple with because I cannot even imagine how they GOT here. Voltimand, oh you remember him from 1.2? He's the ambassador who went to Norway to tell Fortinbras' uncle that Fortinbras was causing a scene. Yeah, he's a major villain who gets his comeuppance in the fourth act in this novel. He is more than treacherous and scheming - he is violent, assaulting and eventually murdering Ophelia.

I've thought Long and Hard about Ophelia over the last few days (months, years, whatever) because she presents me with a Problem - the problem, of course, is the desire to rewrite her story in a way that is palatable, a way the returns her the agency that other characters in the play strip from her. This novel does a good job stripping her of agency - and having it be calculated and on purpose in the case of her father, out of concern from her brother, and out of spite and to get back at Polonius from Hamlet. It also strips her of the little agency she is able to exercise in the play. Ophelia's suicide is important to me, as is her madness. She is relegated to simply a victim when her only choice in the play, the only time she speaks what she thinks, is too stripped away. She is murdered, buried with the common people because Voltimand says she killed herself and was written off as crazy. Oh sure, Hamlet knows, but at what cost? Ophelia's madness and suicide is important, and I think people don't want her to ever get there, they think it would be better, that she would be a Stronger Female Character if she was more than her madness, but the reality of Ophelia's situation is that her madness and her grief is deserved, and having her be assaulted and murdered then slandered after her death, in an effort to make her Less Crazy or to expose the violence that is enacted on her makes the whole thing a lot worse. I genuinely hate! that this novel took the only choice she makes, her only act of agency, and turns it into violence. It's also a choice I understand.

Okay, so Yorick? The explanation for Yorick is that they didn't want Hamlet to be doing soliloquies (fair - especially because this is a Thriller and not the Existential Nightmare that is typically what we think of his Hamlet. In theory, I'm getting there, but SPOILER, I don't think this is a fair assessment of Hamlet the play) and so instead gave them back to him in dialogue, and that to do Hamlet without Hamlet talking to Yorick would do a disservice to literature or something. It's an interesting concept. Yorick was executed after learning of Claudius and Gertrude's affair by Old King Hamlet. He told Polonius, who told both Old Hamlet and Claudius and so is the indirect cause of the madness of the play that follows. He is immortalized not in a skull (though ALSO in a skull) but in the humiliating statues and paintings of him Old Hamlet puts up of him after his death, and is Hamlet's mind. While the ghost of the king might be real, the ghost of Yorick is less certain. Hamlet is the only character to interact with Yorick, and Yorick disappears once Hamlet starts to interact with the play at large. Also, he's the only character who has any meta-knowledge of the play Hamlet, so I became aware that Yorick (pretending he is Young Yorick) was at the very least a ghost long before Hamlet did. He functions in much the same way as the soliloquies do, asking Hamlet to same questions about life and death and justice, and as Hamlet really is just talking to himself, it's fine. But also, he replaces Horatio. At first I thought I was imagining it, since in my own work I have given Horatio a more major role, but there are several scenes in which Yorick replaces Horatio. Sure Horatio disappears for all of the second and much of the third act but he is important as a grounding character to Hamlet and to others. He is relegated in this work to the role he has in many adaptations (except for one I watched over the summer where he was very earnest and very ridiculous, but the whole adaptation was such a hot mess it like, honestly barely counts): Hamlet's second. If you need a sounding board for Hamlet's soliloquies Horatio is right there, and while Yorick is, in this adaptation, a perfect person to reflect on who is Uncle and who is Father are, because Yorick was a victim of all of this, I think Horatio could have been brought to center stage and we could have lost Chaos-Demon-Yorick altogether. Also, the idea that he acts as Hamlet's foil is, at this point, laughable. Not that he doesn't act as Hamlet's foil, but that if there was ever a character in the history of literature who did not benefit from having a foil it was Hamlet. He has a foil, okay! Every where you look in Hamlet there's a character who can act as Hamlet's foil. There is no reason to create a new character to serve this purpose.

Lastly, in their afterword, AJ Hartley talks about Hamlet as thriller: this novel cements Hamlet from the play as the Least Reliable Narrator, imo, because the political conflict that is happening outside the walls of Elsinore is completely made into a non-issue until the final scene. But with the majority of this novel taking place from Claudius' point of view, Fortinbras' nonsense is front and center and drives much of the plot. Hamlet's madness is a destabilizing force, and Voltimand and Polonius both are seemingly working against Denmark. The King, in the last act, desperate to save his family but not a warrior like his brother, makes a deal with Fortinbras to take Denmark if he will let him and Gertrude escape and leaves the civilians alone. Hamlet is a prophesied "Danish Arthur" who is meant to save Denmark, born on the very day that Old Fortinbras was slain, but Hamlet, alas, is Hamlet and is woefully unsuccessful and not even a major player in the events that transpire. Also, I resent that Hamlet, as it is, is not a thriller, not plot driven. The first two acts are about Hamlet waiting and biding his time and feeling sorry for himself, but the second half of the play, starting from the mousetrap scene and until the very end, are definitely Thrilling; they're driving. Hamlet, mostly, is about Hamlet desperately trying to have the events of Hamlet not happen, and you know he's aware of it because he writes his own play. We never seen the end of the mousetrap, but how do we think it ends? Good because Hamlet's deluded himself? Unlikely! But once Hamlet puts his plan in motion, there is no stopping any of it. (Incidentally, the grave yard scene is important because it is a break! from the chaos.)

Anyway, this is good, it obviously is well-informed, and very entertaining. There were some choices I never would have made in a million years, but apart from the choices about Ophelia and Horatio, none of them were bad. It's also both too reliant on the text of Hamlet and disregards it at strange times. Four Stars!