ive always thought the most revealing line hamlet says about himself (besides “o, what an ass am i”) is the “o i could be bounded in a nutshell and call myself king of infinite space, if it were not that i have bad dreams” bit. because it outlines his Problem so simply, or maybe just because it always feels to me like my problem. “i could do anything, i could do anything i wanted to or that anyone else wanted me to, if i wasn’t hecked up from the neck up”
Besides “if i wasn’t hecked up from the neck up” being the greatest phrase ever, this post is also Very Important because you do see Hamlet slipping here from pretending to be insane to actually talking about problems he has. It’s like halfway through To Be where he goes from being ~dramatic~ to stopping and saying that he is terrified of death and the afterlife, and confiding in the audience his fears.
It’s brilliant. We as the audience are also being duped by Hamlet and we don’t even realize it. Except, unlike his family being tricked into thinking he’s insane, we are being tricked into thinking that he’s dealing with things fine mentally and emotionally ever since the ghost showed up. It’s only in the little moments where he slips from acting mad to genuinely expressing the problems he’s having that we begin to realize Hamlet’s true mental state. He’s a clinically depressed teenager crying out for help with nobody hearing him, resorting to dropping hints and hiding behind jokes. To the audience. He is begging us to help him, and even we who have witnessed everything can’t even hear him.
R+J remake that is actually set in Italy so the only thing Tybalt and Mercutio wear are respectively this
(black shirt with the words “to the combat” in white and the drawing of a sword crossed with an axe in red, produced by the famous satyrical filo-medievalist Facebook page “Feudalism and freedom”
and this
(white shirt with the words “I don’t want to be sexy but someone has to” in North-eastern Italian dialect, found by op in a trashy tourist bait gift shop in Trieste
Also, tentative suggestion: this is both partially a straight play adaptation and a jukebox musical, like Mamma Mia but with all De Andrè songs
Here for the underdogs 