Have I been Duped into Watching the 1990 film Ghost as a Hamlet Derivative?

Ghost. Dir. Jerry Zucker. Perf. Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg. 1990. DVD. 

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Somewhere, at some point, I saw the 1990 movie Ghost—you know the one . . . Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg?—on a list of Hamlet derivatives.

"Really?" I thought.

But I put it on a list of films to get to, and I've recently managed to get to it.

And I'm not convinced.

Shakespeare Geek and I often argue about whether The Lion King counts as a Hamlet derivative or not. My basic answer falls back on the intentional fallacy. Whether the creators intended it to be related to Hamlet or not, it's evident that it's related to Hamlet (though the ways in which it's related are complicated and interesting).

I'm not entirely sure I can make that argument about Ghost. So many things just don't fit.

Spoiler warning.

So, yes, there will be spoilers ahead. But Ghost was one of the most popular films of 1990, so if you don't know the basic plot by now, you might just want to read on to learn it.

Sam (the Patrick Swayze character) and Molly (played by Demi Moore) are sweet on each other and hope to get married. They work together on some pottery in the film's most iconic scene. Same has found some strange incongruencies in the accounts at work. Carl finds out—and the's the guilty, embezzling party. So he hires someone to kill Sam. Sam stays around as a ghost, and figures out Carl's guilt. Carl starts to make the moves on a grief-stricken Molly. Using Oda Mae Brown (played by Whoopi Goldberg), a fake psychic who turns into a real psychic when she hears Sam's voice, Sam figures out a way to get revenge on Carl and to express his love for Molly.

To fit this in to the Hamlet narrative, we need to imagine that Sam is Hamlet and Hamlet, Sr., that Molly is Gertrude and Ophelia, and that Carl is Claudius.  And I suppose Oda Mae is Horatio or the ghost. There's something there, but it's not absolutely clear.

Here's one scene that resonates, even though there's no direct correspondence with Hamlet:

I think Hamlet, Sr. would have gotten a big kick out of being able to do something like that.

The only direct connection to Shakespeare is actually a reference to Macbeth—not actually to any plot element or any line, but to a production of Macbeth that Molly and Sam go to see:

Yes, Sam isn't particularly impressed by the production. Of course, that's before he became a ghost—perhaps his perspective on Shakespeare changes when he makes that change.

What are your thoughts? Have you been told this is a Hamlet derivative?  Does that make sense to you, or is it confusing to you like it is to me?

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Book Note: Life on the Mississippi

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Signet Classic, 1961.

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Shakespeare crops up in both expected and unexpected places constantly.

I was recently listening to an audiobook of Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain's fascinating, semi-autobiographical of growing up on, learning to pilot on, and taking a tour of the Mississippi river. Somehow, I didn't note the Shakespeare in any of my previous trips up and down Life on the Mississippi.

Perhaps that's not so rare—there's not all that much there. But what there is makes me wonder if the possibility of a scene like The Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn (for which, q.v.) is starting to develop in Twain's mind.

The section comes late in the book (in the edition cited above, it's on pages 287 and 288). Twain tells the story of an apprentice to the blacksmith in (most probably) Hannibal, Missouri. A couple English actors arrived in the town and eventually performed a fight scene from Richard III. That was it for the blacksmith's apprentice. He left the small town to travel to the big city to take up the profession of acting.

Sound familiar? In this case, we substitute Hannibal and St. Louis for Stratford and London . . . and the rest of the story differs as well.

But I'll let Mr. Twain tell you in his own inimitable words:

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Book Note: By the Pricking of my Thumbs

Christie, Agatha. By the Pricking of my Thumbs: A Tommy and Tuppence Mystery. New York: William Morrow, 2012.

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If you ever feel like Alice and want to jump down a rabbit hole, start browsing and / or reading your way through this list of works that take their titles from Shakespeare quotes. The works may or may not have anything else to do with Shakespeare–they may simply be parasitical works that find a nifty title in a Shakespeare play.

Agatha Christie's By the Pricking of my Thumbs is along those lines—there's not much in the way of Shakespeare in it . . . and what there is is misquoted.

The novel starts Christie's Tommy and Tuppence—a pair she used for more adventure / spy / thriller types of mysteries. A little way in, Tuppence tries to explain why she thinks there's something odd happening at the nursing home. She says, "I don't quite know . . . .  It's like the fairy stories. By the pricking of my thumbs—Something evil this way comes" (55).

"Evil" is a fairly common substitution in that quote, but "wicked" is the word Shakespeare used. In this case, it's not a question of a difference between a quarto and the folio editions—no quarto of Macbeth exists. And Macbeth is not quite a fairy story.

All the same, let's let Dame Agatha put the misquoted line in the mouth of her character. And I'll give you the rest of the context of the quote as well.  Enjoy!

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Book Note: Hag-Seed

Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold. London: Hogarth Shakespeare 2016.

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The Hogarth Shakespeare series has often been disappointing. But Hag-Seed does it just right.

Atwood gives us a "mirror novel"—a novel about a group of actors putting on a play. But it's more than that. She weaves a re-imagined Tempest plot into the production of The Tempest.

In the novel, Felix Phillips finds himself ousted from his position at the theatre where he has basically been king. He moves into something of an exile, taking on a new name and plotting his potential revenge.

Whether it's part of his revenge or not, he takes up a position directing Shakespeare plays at a nearby penitentiary.

I was able to check this out from my library in electronic form—let me use that to do something I haven't done before. It's something of a live-tweet encounter with the novel.

In this first section, Felix, in a wonderfully self-reflexive, self-aware way, starts to see his own story as the story of Prospero:

As one way to get his actors interested in the play, he asks them to find all the curses they can in The Tempest:

In the following scene, Felix contemplates the vengeance he wants to take on the person who ousted him and took his position at the theater:

Here, he defends Shakespeare--and why Shakespeare is valuable for everyone, not just some high-culture upper-crust group:

Here, too, the defense of Shakespeare takes center stage:

We also get his opening speech to his new group of actors, quoting a bit from The Tempest and summing up one answer to "Why do Shakespeare?":

As they rehears, the players decide to come up with a rap for Caliban. Here it is:

I am very impressed by Atwood's careful and intriguing use of The Tempest in her creation of this novel.

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Book Note: Macbeth, Illustrated by Salvador Dali

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Illus. Salvador Dali. Garden City: Doubleday, 1946.

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As you might expect, I have a fairly-large collection of Shakespeare books. I have large scholarly tomes and children's retellings, modern Shakespearean fiction and Shakespeare biographies, critical editions of the plays and books on Shakespeare films.

But I don't have much that would count as rare or valuable—except one book: The first edition of the Macbeth illustrated by Salvador Dali. It's not in great condition, and it doesn't have the slipcase that originally accompanied it, but I picked it up at a bargain rate, and perhaps it will appreciate in value.

If it doesn't, that's fine—that's not the point. The point is that I will grow in my appreciation of it.

I don't dip into it too often, but my eye fell on it (insert King Lear joke here) as I was glancing over my shelves, and I decided to glance through it and give it a write-up here.

The illustrations seem to me to be typical of Dali—they're odd and unexpected . . . and they seem to pop right off the page into the viewer's face. Here, for example, is the illustration of the line about Duncan's horses eating each other:

And here's an illustration that goes with Macbeth's visit to the Weïrd Sisters in Act IV:

The illustrations are wild, interesting, and disturbing. They do seem to fit the play pretty well.

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Book Note: Nutshell

McEwan, Ian. Nutshell: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

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Whole handfuls of Hamlets have filled bookshelves and DVD racks around the world. There's even a collective noun for a bunch of Hamlets.

It's "a vengeance of Hamlets" for those of you keeping score (for which, q.v.).

Productions of and retellings of Hamlet fill every genre out there: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.

There are male Hamlets and female Hamlets, truly insane Hamlets and cagey Hamlets, skeptical Hamlets and religious Hamlets, old Hamlets and young Hamlets.

Speaking of young Hamlets, Ian McEwan retells the story of Hamlet from a record-breakingly young Hamlet. His Hamlet has not yet been born—though he's very nearly ready to do so.

The epigraph for the book is, perhaps unsurprisingly, from Hamlet: "Oh, God—I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space" (II.ii.254-55). That's our narrator—bounded in the womb, he thinks and plans and schemes . . . but cannot act—or can he?

That's a clever device, but McEwan makes more of it than just a passing, fleeting idea. Our narrator overhears the plots his mother and uncle concoct—in this modern setting, juice of cursed hebenon in a vial has been replaced by antifreeze in a smoothie (and it's ingested rather than poured in the ear)—and contemplates the fate that awaits them all

I found it to be a compelling novel, providing an interesting reading of Hamlet's helplessness. Let me give you a sample of the narrator's voice. At the beginning of Chapter Nine, he imagines what he might say to his father (who's a published poet rather than a king)—and contemplates the fallen world:

I've done some preliminary searching to see if anyone has taken a stance on just which Shakespeare sonnet Hamlet alludes to, but I'm not finding anything definitive. It does sound like an awful lot of them, but I wonder if it's Sonnet 74 ("But be contented: when that fell arrest / Without all bail shall carry me away . . ."). If you have another suggestion, please leave a comment!

The novel may not become a mainstay of my modern Shakespearean fiction class, but it's important to know and pretty amusing.

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Book Note: Tom Jones

Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. New York: Modern Library, n.d.

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I've been reading a lot of modern Shakespearean fiction recently—and also Tom Jones, which is really just one of those three. But it does have a lot of Shakespeare in it (by way of quotations or allusions), and some of the comic scenes (particularly those involving exasperating servants) have a Shakespearean flavor to them.

But there's also a scene where some of our main characters head off to the theatre. The summary of Book XVI, chapter v is a beginning:  "In which Jones receives a letter from Sophia, and goes to a play with Mrs Miller and Partridge." But when we get there, we learn not only that they're seeing a production of Hamlet, but they're seeing David Garrick in the title role!

Garrick is known for his tireless promotion of Shakespeare, including his organization of the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford.

In any case, the scene in Tom Jones brings to mind the Shakespeare scenes from Huckleberry Finn (for which, q.v.). Partridge, Tom's loyal traveling companion, doesn't think much of the play—and is particularly scornful of the Ghost, saying, "Though I can’t say I ever actually saw a ghost in my life, yet I am certain I should know one, if I saw him, better than that comes to. No, no, sir, ghosts don’t appear in such dresses as that, neither" (737).

All that changes when he sees how Garrick reacts to the ghost. But I'll let you read it yourself. Note: The full text of the novel is readily-available, but I'm providing images from my copy for your edification. The section in question begins at the second full paragraph on page 737:

It's a fascinating fictional account of a trip to the playhouse in the middle of the 1700s. Would that we had been there. It would have much amazed us.

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Book Note: Dunbar

St. Aubyn, Edward. Dunbar. London: Hogarth Shakespeare, 2017.

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While we seem to be on the general subject of King Lear, we might consider one of the recent additions to the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

Dunbar is a retelling of King Lear that has some wonderful moments but is also largely unsuccessful.

The best thing about the novel is its starting point. St. Aubyn takes King Lear and begins in medias res. Henry Dunbar, our Lear analogue, is on the point of escaping from a sanitarium into which he's been confined by his greedy, horrible daughters who have an insider trading scheme for taking over his vast media and investment enterprise. He's made an alliance with a deeply-alchoholic retired comedian named Peter Walker to escape and to gain some sort of revenge on his daughters Abby and Megan. In the meantime, Florence (our Cordelia), aided by Wilson (Kent) is on her way to rescue him.

Dunbar's decision to leave the Fool and to try to make his way to London—and his subsequent descent into madness with the elements—is very moving. I'd like to provide an extract from Chapter Seven to illustrate the powerful reimagining of Shakespeare's Lear on the Blasted Heath scenes:

St. Aubyn gives us some tremendous character development and psychological insight in those few pages.

The novel's reimagining of Regan and Goneril are not so subtle. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are sexual deviants (one of them nearly bites off the nipple of Dr. Bob—our Edmund figure—early in the novel, and things go downhill from there).

The conclusion of the novel also leaves much to be desired. St. Aubyn throws a number of balls in the air—particularly in the last twenty percent of the novel—and then walks away, leaving them to fall where they will.

For me, the value of a work of Shakespearean fiction is at least partially found in what it enables us to think about Shakespeare's play. Dunbar makes me want to re-examine the character of King Lear, but it doesn't invite much else.

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Lear's Shadow: Coming Soon to a Festival Near You

Lear's Shadow. Dir. Brian Elerding. Perf. David Blue, Fred Cross, and  Katie Peabody. 2018. For Film Festival Release. 

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Lear's Shadow will soon be making the tour of the film festivals, starting with the Pasadena International Film Festival on March 11. In the meantime, special screenings are making the tour of the Shakespeare blogs.

The film is a stripped-down, bare bones show, all the more impressive for how much it accomplishes.

The premise gradually unfolds in a single setting—a theatre's rehearsal space. A somewhat-confused director—Jack—makes his way in, followed by an actor—Stephen. Jack starts complaining about the scripts and the other actors who haven't shown up. We start to realize that Jack has some sort of short-term memory loss and he's just been released from the hospital.

Stephen, at first as a delaying tactic, starts to talk about King Lear. That's the launching pad for a number of discussions of the play—how it ought to be acted, how it has been acted, what significance it has—as well as a number of performances of key scenes. It becomes something of a mirror movie at that point, the two men working out some longstanding disagreements as well as the recent events that have brought them to such a state.

And that's all I'm going to tell you about the plot. I hope the film will do well on the festival circuit and that it will eventually achieve larger distribution. I hope that because it's good.  It's quite good.

First, I was impressed by the acting. I'm privileged to see a lot of work that hasn't made it to a theatrical release, and a good premise is sometimes played out in a less-than-satisfying manner. That's not the case here. Both in acting their roles and in their roles acting parts of King Lear, David Blue and Fred Cross do magnificent work.

Second, the use of Shakespeare is fascinating here. The writer isn't setting out to make Shakespeare relevant—I get them impression that he knows that Shakespeare is already relevant. Instead, Lear's Shadow reveals Shakespeare's relevance. Parts of King Lear are carefully, organically crafted in to the film, and we're shown one way the suffering of King Lear becomes significant, meaningful, and healing to other sufferers in the world.

If you're able to catch this at a film festival, do so. It's a powerful piece where writing, acting, and concept come together to produce a significant reflection on Shakespeare that stands on its own as well.

Note: I can't provide a clip of the film or a trailer for it at this point, though I will try to add those in a future update. In the meantime, here are a few additional stills from the film.

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Links: The Film at IMDB. The Film's Official Website.

Book Note: Performing King Lear: Gielgud to Russell Beale

Croall, Jonathan. Performing King Lear: Gielgud to Russell Beale. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

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Jonathan Croall provides the world with an invaluable resource for thinking about King Lear in performance. This book covers dozens of stage performances of the play from 1931 (John Gielgud's first Lear—he was twenty-seven—directed by Harcourt Williams) to 2014 (Simon Russell Beale, directed by Sam Mendes).

The research is intricate and careful, providing contemporary reviews, interviews with actors and directors, and (to a lesser degree) critical commentary on the productions.

The book is organized by performance, which means that readers can either read the work straight through and get a sense of the development of the modern stage by means of how one one play has been staged or pick and choose to read about particular productions / actors / directors that interest them.

Want to know how Peter Brook's production with Paul Scofield influenced nearly every production that followed it?  You'll find that here.  Want to learn how they got a good Lear out of Nicol Williamson? It's here. Want to think about how Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Richard Briers, Christopher Plummer, or Peter Ustinov approached the role? This is every inch the book.

Let me provide a sample page and a sample image from the book. First, here's a bit of the section on richard Briers' performance (directed by Kenneth Branagh):

Next, here's one of an unfortunately-limited selection of images—Joseph Marcell (directed by Bill Buckhurst in 2014):

Croall mentions film versions of King Lear in passing, and the ones he mentions are usually film versions of the stage plays he's detailing. Bardfilm would like to suggest a sequel that covers the films more fully.

But that isn't a weakness. Croall is writing about stage productions that can no longer be seen. We can watch and re-watch a huge number of film versions of Lear, but we can't get a ticket to any of John Gielgud's Lears—not even on StubHub. The only production Croall writes about that I saw is the 2007 Ian McKellen King Lear directed by Trevor Nunn, and Croall provides tremendous insight into that show.

Performing King Lear is an incredibly valuable and utterly fascinating text that gives its readers a detailed sense of the scope and depth of modern productions of King Lear. 

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Live-Action Shakespeare in Live-Action Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast. Dir. Bill Condon. Perf. Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, and Kevin Kline. 2017. DVD. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2017.

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Having seen the animated Beauty and the Beast a few times and having gleaned (as I thought) all the Shakespeare it had to offer (for which, q.v.), I wasn't expecting to find any in the live-action remake.

But I was delightfully surprised by hearing a quote from Midsummer Night's Dream and a discussion of Romeo and Juliet in the film.

Prior to this scene, the Beast has been injured saving Belle from the wolves. For some reason (probably one not unrelated to the overall theme of the film), Belle's reciting some lines from Hermia's speech in Act I of Midsummer Night's Dream (I've put editorial brackets around the line that does not actually make its way into the film but that gives an object to the first sentence that does):

[Things base and vile, holding no quality]
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid pointed blind. (I.i.232-35)

The implication is that Beauty can, indeed, love the Beast—love does not look with the eyes, after all. And the rest of the scene, as is plays out, helps us see with the mind rather than with the eyes:

That's interesting in a few ways. First, the Beast says that there "are so many better things to read" than Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps he, too, is thinking of Midsummer Night's Dream, where a lady falls in love with someone whose outer appearance wouldn't usually inspire love: Bottom the Weaver with an ass head.

It's also interesting that the Beast, despite the "expensive education" he says he received, didn't pick up on the rules of iambic pentameter.  The word "wing'd" should not be pronounced with two syllables (i.e., "wingèd") in this line—it ruins the meter! It should read in this way (capitals indicate stressed syllables): "and THEREfore IS wing'd CUpid PAINTed BLIND."

Sorry. That's a bit of a digression. The point is that I was surprised to find Shakespeare in the film.

But the Shakespeare actually comes in quite a bit earlier than this scene. Here's an exchange from Belle's first song

[MONSIEUR JEAN]
Where are you off to? 

[BELLE]
To return this book to Père Robert. It's about two lovers in fair Verona.

[MONSIEUR JEAN]
Sounds boring.

Compare that to the equivalent scene in the 1991 animated version:

[BELLE]
Good morning, Monsieur.

[BAKER]
And where are you off to, today?

[BELLE]

The bookshop. I just finished the most wonderful story about a beanstalk and an ogre and a—

BAKER
That's nice. Marie! The baguettes! Hurry up!

Someone has deliberately foregrounded the Romeo and Juliet narrative in the live-action Beauty and the Beast. Was it to make the live-action Belle more mature, at least in her choice of reading matter? Was it to bring a narrative about a man and a woman forbidden to marry each other by their parents into the film?

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
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