Dating Hamlet

This preposterous romp is the Hamlet story, but not as we know it. Borrowing from Romeo and Juliet (drugs which simulate death) and comedies like Twelfth Night (the embarrassing pitfalls of cross-dressing), it rewrites the story from Ophelia’s point of view. This feisty Ophelia is a survivor, in every sense, and an active conspirator with Hamlet and Laertes in vengeance against Claudius. She does not go mad, but pretends madness just as Hamlet does. She does not drown, but simulates death with the aid of her convenient potion after a refreshing swim. The potion and its antidote also kill and revive Hamlet, Laertes and Gertrude, leaving Claudius and Polonius as the only permanent corpses at Elsinore. Ophelia does not mourn Polonius, since he is not her real father. The gravedigger is. All these plot adjustments convert Shakespeare’s tragedy into a bodice-ripper (literally) and a melodrama, told in a style which mixes pseudo-Shakespeare, gothic sensationalism and slangy modernity. There are plenty of puns and innuendoes, and (buyers be warned) two serious sexual assaults, which may or may not be read as part of the fun. The book is a bawdy pastiche, owing more to Moll Flanders or Tom Jones than Hamlet, and an entertaining joke for teenage readers who can take it in that spirit. Not one for the school library, I think.