For Solid Snake: Orson Scott Card Rewrites Hamlet

[Kim]

Link-a-dink-drink

Orson Scott Card has rewritten Hamlet. The back of this slim novella boasts that once we have read this "revelatory version of the Hamlet story, Shakespeare's play will be much more fun to watch—because now you'll know what's really going on." The author has previously updated other Shakespearean plays, rendering them more intelligible to modern audiences while supposedly retaining the “flavor” of the originals.

Hahaha... Snake's head will explode when he sees this. It's pretty dumb! Here's how Card defended it when he did it to Taming of the Shrew.

It seems to me that we might rather lose our contempt for Bowdler’s attempt to make Shakespeare watchable to the audience of his time, and realize that the standards of taste and decorum change from age to age, and it is not at all unreasonable to make such temporary changes in the script as will allow a play to continue to find an audience—as long as the original remains available, so it can be restored to public view when tastes change again.

...

The purpose is to present Taming of the Shrew in a way that recovers, not the original text of Shakespeare’s play, but the original experience of it—a fast-moving, instantly comprehensible, pun- and bawdy-filled, ironic, self-parodying comedy with a legitimate moral lesson about the relationship between man and woman in marriage.

And one of the worst things about the new version of Hamlet?

The extent of the novella's failure is surprising—and embarrassing, given that Card is a skilled veteran novelist and Subterranean a well-respected press. The most polite thing for us to do would be to walk away and quietly forget the whole painful exercise. But Card does not deserve our polite amnesia. His failures should be known and remembered, because the revelation in his "revelatory new version" turns out to be a nightmare of vitriolic homophobia.

Here's the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now "as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house."

Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: "Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we'll be together as I always longed for us to be."

Not really much to say other than Card is a piece of shit and I wish nothing but harm upon him. Snake's more fond of and familiar with Shakespeare's work, so I can't wait to see his reaction, which will be the only good thing to come of this.

I recommend reading the full article, too. Covers some other failings of Card's rewrite.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I have no problem with rewriting Shakespeare- shakespeare was rewiting others himself, he's overrated hugely and he wrote plays which require act of interpretation by their very nature and rewriting peope is awesome. The homophobia is pretty tacky though.

[Kerensky287]

On the one hand, Ender's Game was fantastic. On the other, its author is an enormous bigot. Luckily, I'm allowed to like the material and not the person.

While I'm here, though, let's see if there's a message Card's subconsciously communicating here...

-Naked shower wrestling.
-"The enemy's gate is down."
-The alien race is "the buggers." The only way to beat them is to penetrate deep, deep down through their defences until you can strike their nerve center with your powerful explosives. And then, once the protagonist beats them all? He begins to sympathize with their ways, and tries his best to learn more about them.

Really, the book is full of subconscious homosexual references. Maybe Card is just haunted by a gay ghost?

EDIT: I read the rest of the article. Yup, pretty sure Card's just terribly insecure in his sexuality.

[Fifthfiend]

I was waiting for the punchline cause rewriting Shakespeare is a perfectly reasonable literary endeavor that lots of people do all the time.

And then I got to it! Thread did not disappoint.

[RickZarber]

Author Scott Lynch got wind of this and decided he needed a piece of that action!

Presenting: THE SO MUCH LESS GAY and NOT WRITTEN WITH GAY BIG WORDS version of THE CRONICLE HISTORY OF HENRY THE FIFTH formerly by William Shakespeare

Excerpt:

"You're the only woman left in the play that isn't a nurse," said King Henry. "So I'm totally buying you from your dad."

Princess Katharine looked very sad and confused.

"I know I'm covered in mud now, but I can take a bath," said Henry. "Sign here, baby."

Katharine hesitantly made her mark on a parchment, then said something in French-talk.

"Stop right there," said Henry. "You are very pretty, but from now on you must speak English like Jesus did."

[BloodyMage]

The extent of the novella's failure is surprising—and embarrassing, given that Card is a skilled veteran novelist and Subterranean a well-respected press. The most polite thing for us to do would be to walk away and quietly forget the whole painful exercise. But Card does not deserve our polite amnesia. His failures should be known and remembered, because the revelation in his "revelatory new version" turns out to be a nightmare of vitriolic homophobia.

Here's the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now "as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house."

Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: "Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we'll be together as I always longed for us to be."

Hahaha, what?

Seriously, is he on drugs?

You could argue that Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, because even in the original text, Hamlet has the flimsiest logic for actually doing any of it. Oh sure, there's the revenge plot from a ghost, but Hamlet was pretty stupid to stab a curtain without looking behind it, and completely rejecting Ophelia. Death of her father + romantic rejection = suicide. Maybe he's not directly responsible for that one, but his basic reasoning is that 'if I act crazy, no one will suspect any thing, except grief'. It'd have made far more sense just to carry on as normal, since he was already actually grieving for goodness sake. After this he basically just starts killing his way to the top. The whole thing goes to hell in a hand basket until foreign powers come in to take over.

The king being gay, and molesting his son and his friends not only dramatically changes the tone of the story, but makes the plot insensible. Even in the original plot, Hamlet at least sort of has a plan to act off his head to catch them off guard so he can get the full story, but ends up using a travelling band of actors to act out the suspected death scene. This way Hamlet at least checks to see if his Uncle is guilty. How does this work in the novella? Hamlet would have to blindly believe his fathers ghost and run off killing people, which is really just a completely different story. I'd suspect it'd be a little more difficult to convince him if he was a raving homosexual with a history of molestation. Critics have often speculated that perhaps there was some sort of incestuous tension between Hamlet and his mother but this is rather ridiculous. I'm not even going to touch on the molestation makes you gay too idea.

[Satan's Onion]

So, let's see here. My inner decent human being hates this because he's being a gigantic fucking bigot to gay people. My inner Bardolator hates him because he's turned interesting and complex characters with complicated motivations into a series of paper cutouts in his preschool-level collage on The Evilz of Gheys and Their Buttseckz Oh No.

Consider this:

Note that he considers it a virtue for a text to be "instantly comprehensible," as though it were a very bad thing to confront an audience with something they don't already know, understand, and believe.

He apparently thinks the big trouble with Shakespeare is that the reader he doesn't understand all of it, immediately and completely, from the very beginning--that he actually has to think a little with his entertainment. With that attitude, I wouldn't trust him to adapt the ad copy on a box of cereal, and that's even if he didn't turn the cast into mouthpieces for his horrifying notions of sexuality. You know, now I'm actually rather glad I never really got into his work. (Well, gladder than I was before.)

Oh, and also:

The purpose is to present Taming of the Shrew in a way that recovers, not the original text of Shakespeare’s play, but the original experience of it—a fast-moving, instantly comprehensible, pun- and bawdy-filled, ironic, self-parodying comedy with a legitimate moral lesson about the relationship between man and woman in marriage.

Oh, fuck you, Orson Scott Card. Fuck you right in the ass until you enjoy it.

[Kim]

Originally Posted by Fifthfiend

I was waiting for the punchline cause rewriting Shakespeare is a perfectly reasonable literary endeavor that lots of people do all the time.

Yeah my beef, other than how terribly he does it and the homophobia and all that, was that it was fucking ORSON SCOTT CARD doing this and fuck I just really hate the guy.

[Locke cole]

...Can I still like the Ender's Game series, even though I despise this thing even more than I hated Treason?

...Darn it, I hate it when the creator of a work I have enjoyed turns out to be an enormous jerk. It just makes it harder to enjoy the work on its own merits, because I can't help but think about the guy who made it.

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

Shakespeare's overrated hugely

I don't think I'd take so much issue to this if we weren't talking about Hamlet. I mean, sure, you can re-write the dialogue if the old vocabulary and stuff isn't your thing, but the character of Hamlet that those words build is pretty solidly interesting.