#staging ideas

Hamlet is sent home from college, and brings Horatio because he hasn't got another place to crash on such short notice.

The family estate hosts our principal characters. Polonius and his wife were in charge of the servants, but after her death the staff gradually shrank. They're all in a bubble together.

This really heightens many of the themes: feeling trapped, unresolved family tensions, struggle between desire for productivity and depression, uncertainty and instability around death and safety.

The vibes for the set design should be Romeo + Juliet meets Knives Out

The players have been forced out of their theater by COVID so they give zoom performances. Hamlet donates to their Patreon so he gets to pick the performance and request an addition (they are so fucking broke ok they need this)

Nobody is super surprised by the sudden deaths with sketchy explanations. Except Laertes, whose willingness to raid the castle to find the truth would be unsettling if you didn't know he's 100% correct to be suspicious.

Ophelia is the one character who consistently masks. She sews her own floral masks, wearing a different one in almost every scene. (Feminine handicrafts, care for others, following the rules). In her mad scene, they are the flowers she scatters, and she appears maskless.

A staging of basically any Shakespeare play, but the characters speak with a strong (bonus points if also a very bad) accent from their native country, like russians in American movies.

Romeo and Juliet but they all have a very strong and very annoying Italian accent.

Hamlet but they all have a weird Danish accent.

Also, a very Scottish Macbeth, FINALLY

(inspired by @witty-fool’s excellent series)

hamlet but yorick’s skull looks like this:

me: “it’s what hamlet would have wanted”

i said in the original post that claudius would be very western in both dress and ideals, and that hamlet is the only person in 1.2 who's wearing a white hanbok (the traditional mourning clothes) while everyone else is in black western clothes. hamlet would be the only one lighting incense and putting food offerings in front of his father's portrait.

just like how the original hamlet goes to wittenberg which is the protestant university, but is confronted with his father's ghost damned to purgatory according to the doctrines of roman catholicism, hamlet in this version would be attending one of the growing missionary-run schools with a western style of education. but hamlet sr.'s ghost is a 귀신, a vengeful spirit.

in korean folklore, ghosts often cannot cross to the afterworld because of a 한 (han), an unresolved sadness or wrong committed against them. they can usually cross to the afterlife by reversing the wrong that still keeps them in the living world. (for example, virgin ghosts can sometimes be appeased by a spiritual marriage to move on.) so hamlet's murder of claudius wouldn't just be revenge; killing him would be the only thing to ensure his father crosses to the afterlife.

so when hamlet questions in 2.2 if the ghost was actually just the devil to tempt him into sin, this isn't just the moral conundrum of killing his uncle; this is a religious crisis between everything he's been taught at his new western-style school, and the deep-rooted traditions that his mother and uncle are completely disregarding.

and of course, confucianism putting so much stress on the importance of the family unit and familial obligation means gertrude and claudius' marriage comes as even more of a betrayal to hamlet. he's putting in all this effort to honor his late father through confucian rites, his hair braided and dressed in a white hanbok, and his mother is essentially sinning against her late husband in every possible way. i think that gertrude and hamlet sr. were both very traditional and gertrude only suddenly acted/dressed very western when she married claudius, which just makes everything worse.*

anyways i'm not framing the conflict between hamlet and gertrude & claudius as a conservative vs. progressive dichotomy. i just think it's so fascinating to think of hamlet's crisis with religion being a struggle between the old vs the new. and given how malleable hamlet is as a play, i think that a lot of themes parallel this specific setting of cultural and technology changes and uncertainty in society. there are so many other aspects to this (notably, the implications of laertes studying abroad which i should probably make a whole other post about) but i've been thinking about religion in hamlet lately.

lastly, to add on to what i said about white mourning clothes in the original post: i think that horatio would be wearing a white vest suit in 5.1 as western formalwear, but by the end of the scene, it's stained in blood and dirt the exact same way that hamlet, ophelia, and laertes' mourning hanboks were ruined before.