I wanted to let you all know that my recasting of Hamlet as the 2020 election is now up for sale through this link.

And I’m giving the e-book version away free today and tomorrow, April 25 and 26. If you do read it, please consider leaving a review.

The book reimagines Hamlet as the 2020 election by substituting the main players on our national stage for the play’s original cast of characters. I think the result is highly entertaining, but it also provides surprising insights into our current predicament, and it gives readers a chance to enjoy Shakespeare’s great tragedy from an entirely new angle.

Hamlet is an eerily good fit for the 2020 election. After all, you have in Claudius a usurping king who takes the place but cannot fill the shoes of a conquering hero. Since Joe Biden in his senility seems to be disappearing before our very eyes, I cast as Claudius not just Biden, but more broadly the cabal that installed him in office. And we know who the grand, just, and wise usurped King Hamlet is, of course, not only from his achievements in office, but from how he continues to haunt so many after his political demise. I even gave him orange hair.

I cast Kamala Harris as Queen Gertrude, Prince Hamlet’s mother and, after marrying his murdering uncle Claudius, also his aunt. I did this not only because Kamala is Vice President, but because of the “dexterous” (Hamlet’s word for her) way she rose to national prominence. Gertrude, after all, is a sexual Machiavel who is drawn to the corridors of power. And since by that logic any woman who seeks power and influence beyond her own earned position can qualify as a Gertrude, I made Jill Biden (and Megyn Kelly, and a few others) Kamala’s understudies.

And the spying! If ever there were a time built to profit from reflection on the great spymaster Polonius, it is ours. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai (the Google CEO) are men whose powers of surveillance Polonius would have wept to possess. Imagine being paid by the people you are spying on to spy on them. Well, we don’t need to imagine that – we are living it.

And that brings us to, as everything in time brings us to, Prince Hamlet. He is All of Us. His conundrum, after all, is ours; how to avenge the theft of a nation’s entire government in a way that reveals the illegitimacy of the usurping regime and restores the nation to legitimate rule. How indeed. Yes, I’m not sure either. But we must find a way.

As for the fair Ophelia, at first, I cast her as America, or, you know, America as her. But Ophelia dies, and while America’s republic is arguably now in abeyance, it is not quite dead. So I made her America’s Innocence. Because that certainly is now dead.

There are a few other bit players, who (spoiler alert) all die; Ophelia’s brother Laertes, and two childhood friends of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Laertes starts out as a man of some virtue, but he gets co-opted by an evil regime. We have plenty of examples of that, so I cast as Laertes Governors Asa Hutchinson and Kristi Noem, and a few other virtuous folks who also became co-opted along the way (looking at you, Jonah Goldberg).

As for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they were never really virtuous to begin with, and they did all they could to falsely persuade Hamlet that they were on his side. So they are RINOs, like Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Mitt Romney…there have been far too many to choose from.

My mission in running abardseyeview.com has been to bring more Shakespeare to people’s lives, and this book should also give any reader a rich experience of the bard, along with a kind of hallucinatory sense of how apt are the play’s insights into our current predicament. Hamlet is a famously long play, but this abridged version moves swiftly, though we still present every scene, uncover some hidden gems, and, when you need to take a breath, we pause for some historical and scholarly reflection.

You know all about 2020, but I’m confident you’ve never seen it like this.

Buckle up!