Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In Shakespeare for the Modern Man, Lesson 2: Hamlet (2003), playwright Scott Eckert offers two versions of Shakespeare's tragedy on the same stage at the same time. The first is a conventional performance in period language and, in the words of the introduction, “sissy costumes,” the second a modern adaptation by “normal people in normal clothes” speaking in “language we can all understand.” Though the simultaneous performances follow the Shakespearean narrative closely and mirror each other's blocking, the modern passages delight in finding irreverent pop analogies and allusions – Bernardo and Marcellus as dope-smoking Gen-Xers, Madonna films among the “slings and arrows” Hamlet must suffer – and contemporary slang they can set against the formal poetry and manner of “straight” Shakespeare. The effect of this juxtaposition is not as easy to locate as it might at first seem. Eckert denies that his intent is parodic; rather, he regards his play as a “comic deconstruction” which presents Shakespeare to modern audiences in terms that are entertaining and relevant while preserving the integrity of the original. Nevertheless, there are reasons for placing the play within a tradition of Shakespearean parody stretching at least as far back as Victorian Shakespeare burlesques, where “high” Shakespeare was transposed into the “low” contexts of working-class characters, colloquial idioms, ... log in or subscribe to read full text