Everyone, we can fix Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet if we just switch the leads.
Romeo wakes up in Hamlet's body and meets the ghost of "his" father telling him to kill his uncle. So if course Romeo just fucking does it, because he never considers consequences, and then gets onto more important shit, like romancing Ophelia, political fallout be damned! But given that he's the son of the murdered king, he'd probably end up on top.
Hamlet wakes up as Romeo and is told that he can't marry the love of his life because his family hates her family. Instead of killing Tybalt and getting Merucio murdered, he's planning elaborate meet-cutes for the two warring families. He's putting on plays about blood feuds and how to overcome them. He either succeeds in bringing the families together or bores Juliet enough with his indecision that the glow wears off and she moves on; both positive options. Everybody lives.
This is much funnier than switching Hamlet and Othello.
This tracks with how I think about tragedies. A tragedy is when a flawed character is put in the exact situation where those specific flaws will cause their demise. You put them in a nightmare scenario crafted especially for them. Since a tragedy is a union of a specific character and specific situation, if you take the character out of the situation it's probably not a tragedy anymore.
If we watched a character so flawed that they will always fall to calamity, then that's just a biography of a walking disaster.
If we put a character into a situation where anyone would fail, then that's just torture.
It's a tragedy because the character is complicated. They have flaws but also strengths and aren't doomed from the start, but then are put in a scenario specifically crafted to bring out the worst in them.
Hamlet is genre savvy enough that I think he'd probably do well in *most* other Shakespeare play scenarios. A lot of his problems come from the fact that he can *kinda* see where this is going, and *kinda* knows what happens when you kill a king (nothing good) and he's stuck in this trolley problem trap. No matter what he does, he can imagine a potential negative outcome, and this holding pattern he's in... like it's not great but it's *bareable.* He's miserable but everyone else is okay. It's a lot of low-stakes spying-behind-corners BS. His solution is to basically provoke Claudius into acting out in order to get things going and justify his actions.
Romeo has comically little emotional control ("by his own tears made drunk") and would see the ghost and just tell... everybody. Ophelia knows about the ghost. Gertrude knows about the ghost. It wouldn't be a tactic or anything, he just wouldn't be able to stop himself. They'd probably be saying "crazy prince Hamlet" but Claudius would be freaking out and Gertrude would be saying... hey wait just a second.
Claudius would attempt to kill Prince Romeo... and Romeo just kills him. but by this point he would probably have secretly married Ophelia and the two of them run away with the pirates. And then it turns into... Gertrude vs Fortinbras.
