The Hamlet variations

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is having a moment. Or rather—two variations on Shakespeare’s tragedy, begun in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, are finally enjoying lengthy runs exactly five years after the theater world shut down in March of 2020. Lauren Gunderson’s A Room in the Castle (running at the Folger Theatre through April 6) and my own The Comedy of Hamlet! (a prequel) (written with Reed Martin and co-produced by our Reduced Shakespeare Company and Merrimack Repertory Theatre through March 30), explore the lives of Shakespeare’s characters before, during, and after the events of his greatest tragedy, and both plays recognize that many of those characters—especially Ophelia—deserve better fates and richer backstories than Shakespeare gave them.

As Lauren Gunderson explained on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, “the origin story of” A Room in the Castle was her desire to “try to find a way to save Ophelia,” and she took her cue from Shakespeare’s text. The only account we have of Ophelia’s death is Queen Gertrude’s famously detailed speech in act 4, scene 7 of Hamlet, “There is a willow grows askant the brook,” the incredible specificity of which raises several questions. Why does Gertrude’s report seem, in Gunderson’s words, “too perfect” and “so beautifully articulated that it [feels] fake”? If, as Shakespeare’s Gertrude describes it, Ophelia’s “clothes…bore her up” in the water for “awhile,” why didn’t Gertrude do anything to save her? To Gunderson, these questions opened “a little tiny door” into envisioning not only an alternate fate for Ophelia, but a fuller investigation into the motivations of Hamlet’s mother. The lady doth protest too much, indeed.

To Gunderson’s surprise, A Room in the Castle “became a play about motherhood” and an examination of the actions Gertrude takes in Shakespeare’s play. As Gunderson sees it, “A woman [like Gertrude] who has been in power that long, having married one king and now married another, is way smarter than anyone in this play or in the country of Denmark is aware.” Gunderson’s exploration of the lengths to which Gertrude will go to protect her son—and the sisterhood that develops between her, Ophelia, and the newly invented character of Ophelia’s nurse Anna—reveals how women survive in a world where, to quote Gunderson from our conversation on my Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast, “the patriarchy’s gonna patriarchy in all the ways that it does.”

Gunderson is the mother of two young boys, and my co-author Reed Martin and I each also have two children, so it’s perhaps not surprising that our play The Comedy of Hamlet! (a prequel) also became a play about parenting. Comic tension between teenage Hamlet and Ophelia and their respective parents allowed us to address questions Shakespeare’s play suggests but never answers, such as: Where did Hamlet get his incredibly specific knowledge of theatre and playacting? What happened to Ophelia’s mother in Shakespeare’s play, and why is she never even mentioned by any of the characters? Resolving the second question helped us address the first: when Ophelia’s mother dies, her ghost returns and commands Ophelia to “replace [her] as the Chair of the nunnery’s ladies auxiliary.” To appease her mother’s spirit, Ophelia enlists Hamlet and Yorick to put on a show to save the crumbling nunnery, and during the frantic rehearsals of their play within a play, it’s the king’s jester (of course!) who teaches Hamlet everything he knows about theater and deception, including “the purpose of playing,” how to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” and how to make people think he’s insane should ever the need arise.

Just as Ophelia’s relationship with her mother (and subsequently, her ghost) echoes Hamlet’s experience in Shakespeare’s play, so does the young prince’s relationship between his father and Yorick the jester mirror the father-son triangle at the heart of Henry IV, Part 1. King Hamlet encourages his son to pursue a career in the arts and not be doomed to the admin and endless royal drudgery of ruling Denmark. Hamlet, however, is reluctant to live out his “father’s boyhood fantasies” and, in a knowing homage to another Hamlet variation, The Lion King, declares, “For ’tis as the song says / O, I just cannot wait to be king.” Nonetheless, the King commands Yorick to “teach young Hamlet all the secrets” the jester knows and “show [the prince] how the showbiz sausage gets made.” Yorick, a former actor who trained at DADA (the Danish Academy of the Dramatic Arts), knows well the risks of a life in the performing arts, explaining that he took the “solid, steady, reliable gig” of being a royal fool over the unreliable career of an itinerant actor. Uncertain about whose advice to follow, but afraid of losing his father’s love, the famously thoughtful Hamlet finally decides to act in the fundraiser when he realizes that “the play’s the thing / wherein I’ll catch the affection of the king.”

While our prequel takes place before Hamlet, A Room in the Castle is set, as ‘twere, in the wings of Shakespeare’s play in the manner of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which also happens at the same time as Hamlet’s tragic events are unfolding (and contains the mind-expanding observation that “every exit is an entrance somewhere else”). The Folger’s website rightly describes A Room in the Castle as “a hilarious […] drama,” and our prequel could be similarly characterized as a serious comedy; both we and Gunderson play with Shakespearean tonal shifts to create surprise and subvert expectations.