We’re doing Hamlet, giving the mash-it-up-with-the-news treatment to the entire play over the next month or so, starting with Act I, scene 1, and covering enough of the text to follow all the details of the story. We’ll play the hits, uncover the hidden gems, and examine its parallels with 21st-century life as we go. You’ll come out the other end seeing Hamlet in a whole new light, and seeing Shakespeare in everything around you. Buckle up.

Cast of Characters:

King Claudius – Biden’s Cabal

Queen Gertrude – Kamala Harris (understudy; Megyn Kelly)

Polonius – The Tech Oligarchs and Social Media Titans

Hamlet – All of Us

Ophelia – American Innocence

Laertes – All the Co-opted Conservatives, from Christi Noem to Asa Hutchinson

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – The RINOs

Horatio – Any Personable TV Game Show Host

Hamlet opens ‘round midnight, as a few Danish guards posted at the newly-erected barbed-wire battlements of the royal castle (no “defund the police” nonsense for King Claudius) discuss a ghostly visitation. They have invited Horatio, Prince Hamlet’s college friend (a personable guy; think of Chris Harrison, the recently canceled host of The Bachelor), to witness the ghost that they had recently began seeing arrive each night as the clock struck one:

Marcellus: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”

Bernardo: “I have seen nothing.”

Marcellus: “Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us.
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night….”

Horatio: “Tush, tush, ‘twill not appear.”

Bernardo: “Well, sit you down,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we have two nights seen.”

There has been a recent change of regime. The new king, selected in the dead of night by the nation’s high aristocrats in a vote whose posted results changed between 2 and 4 a.m., puzzling the participants, claims to be legitimate, but he has called up 20,000 guards to surround the Capitol, added that barbed-wire fencing, and placed the country on a war footing. The ghost, meanwhile, resembles the valiant former king, who died under suspicious circumstances. All that he is missing is the orange hair. He appears, and Horatio speaks:

Horatio: “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometime march? By heaven, I charge thee, speak!”

He’s still wearing the suit he wore at his last campaign rally, with that winkingly overlong tie. Meanwhile, Marcellus knows that Horatio, as a friend of Hamlet’s, is plugged into the court gossip, and asks him about the new barbed wire fencing, that is, why the country is suddenly on a war footing.

Mar: “And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-laborer with the day?”

Horatio explains that Denmark is on a war footing because Fortinbras, son of the slain king of Norway, is putting together an army to recover lands that Hamlet’s father won, or won back, from Norway in a prior war. In that war Hamlet’s father, also named Hamlet, slew Fortinbras’ father, also named Fortinbras, setting the stage for a recurrence, or a rematch. (A most emulate pride refers to King Fortinbras’ excessive pride, not King Hamlet’s).

Horatio: “That can I;
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king,
Whose image even but now appeared to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet –
For so this side of our known world esteemed him –
Did slay this Fortinbras; who by a sealed compact
Well ratified by law and heraldry
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror…”

That is, Denmark led by King Hamlet beat Norway in a war, and in that war King Hamlet killed Fortinbras, the King of Norway. Norway’s crown went to that dead king’s brother (called Old Norway) just as, after King Hamlet’s later death in Denmark, his crown went to his brother, Claudius.

The upshot? With the fathers dead, the uncles rule – while the Deplorable nephews fester.

Think Groundhog Day. New characters, with the exact same names as the old characters, continue a fight over the same lands. Another Clinton, another Bush, another Afghanistan, another sellout to China. Grasping, elderly elites cling to power, while the freshness and vitality of the young is hidden behind cloth masks and condemned to endless Zoom meetings.

Tune in for more tomorrow…