W.S. Gilbert vs. Shakespeare’s Hamlet

“If you promise me faithfully not to mention this to a single person, not even to your dearest friend,” W.S. Gilbert confessed to his actor friend George Grossmith, “I don’t think Shakespeare rollicking.”

Wait, what? Shakespeare, not a laugh-a-minute dramatist? What about all those zany jesters like Touchstone and Feste? Dogsberry, not funny? Just because Victorians, who were centuries away from to the Tudors, found some of Shakespeare’s in-jokes incomprehensible doesn’t mean that audiences shouldn’t laugh at the right places, if they pretend to be cultured individuals.

However, Gilbert being Gilbert, what do you think he did?

He wrote a parody of Hamlet, of course!

Gilbert’s play was called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and even that severe critic Hesketh Pearson in W. S. Gilbert: His Life and Strife considered that it was just about “the best parody of the poet ever written.”

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, King Claudius has a secret, but it’s not what you might think. Claudius confesses to Gertrude that when he was a young man, he wrote a five-act tragedy that was so awful it was laughed off the stage. Mortified, he decreed that anyone who even mentioned the play would be subject to the death penalty.

“Was it, my Lord, so very, very bad?” asks Gertrude.

“Not to deceive my trusting Queen, it was,” Claudius replies.

Ophelia would rather marry Rosencrantz, but she can’t. She was betrothed against her will to Hamlet, the moody Danish prince who may or may not be mad. His mother Gertrude worries about Hamlet’s alarming tendency to soliloquize and the fact that, even though he’s an eleventh-century Dane, he always dresses like King James the First.

Ophelia explains, “Hamlet is idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy.”

But life isn’t all that easy for poor Hamlet. Every time he starts to say, “To be, or not to be,” he gets interrupted. How rude!

Rosencrantz’s friend Guildenstern suggests that they talk Hamlet into mounting a production of the five-act tragedy “Gonzago.” Using reverse psychology, they convince the stubborn and contrary Hamlet by telling him not to do it – but they don’t tell him who wrote the work, or that his life will be forfeit if he puts the play on.

The play is performed for the King, who almost immediately recognizes his own awful work. As the conspirators planned, the King condemns Hamlet to death.  Hamlet is horrified, because as a philosopher he constantly thinks about death but he certainly doesn’t want to go there. Luckily, Ophelia has an idea. As the King pulls his dagger out to kill Hamlet on the spot, she stops him.

Why not banish Hamlet instead, Ophelia suggests.  Send him to the island beyond the sea known as Engle-land, where the natives might appreciate Hamlet. England, of course!  The King agrees, saying, “They’re welcome to his philosophic brain.”

And so all ends happily, with Ophelia united with Rosencrantz and Hamlet taking his “philosophic brain” to England, where he’s been admired for centuries.

You can check out the entire play here. http://www.gilbertandsullivanarchive.org/gilbert/plays/rosencrantz/index.html

Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed it as much as I did!