(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.)

The slithery usurper Claudius, sitting on the throne that is rightfully Prince Hamlet’s, and that he gained by  killing Hamlet’s father, receives Hamlet at court. Of course Biden is a good fit for a usurping king, but we can also cast the woke managerial class of our major corporations and universities as usurping Claudiuses, or Claudii, inhabiting places that should rightfully held by competent leaders who love and seek to advance our civilization.

The prince (and Hamlet in any century represents us all) has returned from his studies at Wittenberg, but too late to claim the crown, which we can surmise Denmark’s aristocracy, through ballot stuffing, awarded to Claudius. (Hamlet will later say Claudius “popped up between the election and my hopes.”) Claudius dismisses Laertes, son of his councilor Polonius, and turns to Hamlet:

Claudius: “Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will!
But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son –”

Hamlet: “A little more than kin and less than kind.”

Claudius: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?”

Hamlet: “Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun.”

“A little more than kin: because Claudius is both Hamlet’s uncle and his step-father, and “less than kind” for marrying Hamlet’s mother. “Too much in the sun” means too much in royal (that is, Claudius’) favor – though here Hamlet is merely being courteous. If anyone is being shown to be in royal favor, it’s Laertes. Next, Hamlet’s mother, who is now also his aunt, Queen Gertrude, speaks:

Gertrude: “Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark,
Do not forever with thy veiled lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.”

Live with the stolen election, brat; corrupt, fallen republics are common as dirt, and who are you to complain. Live with the surveillance state our friends in Facebook and Google are setting up for you. Hamlet has the right answer:

Hamlet: “Ay, madam, it is common.”

For Hamlet, the idea of regarding oneself as merely passing through nature to eternity, as though through some oddly scenic digestive tract, is simply insufficient. (Suits here means presentations):

Hamlet: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,…
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

Hamlet mourns his father as we mourn our republic. Claudius responds with an oily compliment of Hamlet’s demonstration of grief, but goes on to criticize his sorrow as unseemly in its excess:

Claudius: “’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father,
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow,”

In other words, Do go gently into that good night. And Claudius is merely preparing the ground for a further assault:

Claudius: “…but to persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. ‘Tis unmanly grief,…
Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corpse till he that died today,
“This most be so.” We pray you, throw to earth
This unprevailing woe and think of us
As of a father;…your intent
in going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire,…”

Gertrude: “Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.
I pray you, stay with us, go not to Wittenberg.”

Hamlet: “I shall in all my best obey you, madam.”

Claudius: “Why, ’tis a loving and a fair reply.”

Claudius manages to combine an insult to Hamlet’s manhood (“unmanly grief”) with a presumptuous assertion of himself as a substitute father, before bringing in the big gun – Hamlet’s mother – to seal the deal. Hamlet’s quiet desire to go lick his wounds by returning to Wittenberg, Germany – a suitable city for him; sober, studious, dour, and philosophical (in contrast to Laertes’ preference for the frivolities of France) – is efficiently crushed.

We’ll cast Laertes a bit later on in our tour. OK, fine, spoiler alert; he’s a NeverTrumper RINO.

Claudius, Gertrude, and the attending courtiers depart, leaving Hamlet alone on stage to mumble to himself (or to exclaim to the heavens, depending on the actor) the first of his seven famous soliloquies. (Canon means a statute or law):

Hamlet: “O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ‘t, ah fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

Shakespeare nails the feelings of a nation of adolescents confined to quarters for a year over a pandemic that doesn’t affect adolescents. What once seemed a garden to him is now a garden grown to seed, possessed only by things rank and gross in nature (Shakespeare likes that image; he has Iago use it as well). It sounds like Hamlet has just spent a year locked indoors, studying by Zoom meeting.

We’ll need to brush up on a few dusty terms to decipher the rest of this famous speech, which focuses on Kamala Harris’, I mean Gertrude’s, hasty transformation from grieving widow to blushing bride:

This in line 2 below, means this king, or Claudius; Hyperion refers to Titan, the sun god; a satyr was a lecherous, mythological creature; beteem means permit; wants here means lacks; post means hurry to.) Ready?

Hamlet: “But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet within a month –
Let me not think on ‘t. Frailty, thy name is woman! –
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,…
O God, a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourned longer – married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,…
She married, O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”

Gertrude sounds a lot like someone who would sleep her way to the top, so Kamala it is.

And the final line, but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue, holds the key to Hamlet’s behavior throughout the play. After all, we can’t really write all we would like to in our chatrooms anymore, now that we know who’s listening.

Hope you’re enjoying this mashup of Hamlet and current events. The Blogging Hamlet series starts with this post.