Country Matters: Spoony Bard Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

The name of the new theatre company working on campus, Spoony Bard Shakespeare, references the video game Final Fantasy in which the Engrish insult is understood as loosely akin to “you bastard!” The geek culture meme to which the name alludes accurately represents the aesthetic of their Hamlet: a dark Mulan-ification of the Danish prince that tonally smacks of something like the ABC television series, Once Upon A Time. Through provocative costuming, soundtrack, and cross-dressing choices (including tags from Mulan, The Little Mermaid, the Harry Potter series, and Beauty and the Beast), Spoony Bard manipulates our familiarity with Hamlet to spotlight the rankness of transprejudice.

Caution: possible spoilers ahead.

It is not enough to say that Hamlet is played by a woman, Megan Scharlau, in this production. So are Rosencrantz (Hannah Kline), Guildenstern (Kara Lane), Fortinbras (Mylene Haus), and Horatio (one of Celia Mueller’s most understated and arguably best performances yet). Within the fiction of the play Hamlet is and isn’t a woman. It is unclear if a female Hamlet has been cross-dressing as male for her entire life in order to fulfill the requirements of an heir to the throne, or is a transgendered character that everyone seems to accept as female except for Polonius (rather perfectly cast with Tom Fornander), Ophelia (Sara Nie), and Laertes (Clayton Gentilcore). In this case, not only is the love between Ophelia and Hamlet taboo to her father for reasons of sexual orientation rather than class, but it seems too the Ophelia acquiesced to Hamlet’s courtship only when she was out of women’s weeds. Having realized she had fallen for a woman, this seems to motivate Ophelia into returning Hamlet’s letters and snitching. When Hamlet then asks Ophelia why she would be “a breeder of men,” that question rings entirely differently and I might say more meaningfully. Likewise, when Ophelia cries out to Hamlet “heavenly powers restore him,” she is literally asking Hamlet to be biologically transformed somehow or even back again. Even the well-worn joke, “did you think I meant country matters?” (with the play on “cunt”) rings quite differently as an embarrassing spotlighting of Ophelia’s possible bisexuality in front of the whole court—a kind of cruel outing on Hamlet’s part.

Suggesting the transprejudice also is the fact that nearly everyone in the play refers to Hamlet as “she” except for Polonius and his family. Polonius even corrects Gertrude (Delilah Hansen)—a kind of washed-up Snow White (who struggles to activate her chest resonator)—on the pronoun usage. In this regard, the death of Polonius from behind the arras is additionally satisfying, suggesting the rat, the source of bigotry, has received his comeuppance in a way that a pretentious father and sycophant never seems to fully deserve in traditional stagings of the play. Additionally, Horatio seems to serve as a more ideal romantic partner for Hamlet than the Ren faire princess Ophelia; it is suggested obliquely throughout and then made clear in the last moments of the play. In my notes as I was waiting for Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal to begin, I asked myself whether this was going to be a ghost story, revenge tragedy, or tale of love gone awry, the usual suspects for Hamlet. That this play was so capable of encoding sexual prejudices and homophobia was a pleasant surprise that upturned my horizon of expectations. I started listening not for my favorite lines, but for moments made new under the pressure of these identity politics.

In this regard, what become most rewarding are the later soliloquies and the confrontation between Hamlet and Ophelia. You don’t realize how often Hamlet contemplates “man” and ideal masculinities until you hear a woman saying those lines. A believable aping of acceptable masculine norms seems frustratingly out of reach for Hamlet. The act two speech, “what a work is man,” brings this particular point home and cultivates a powerful sense of empathy for all of this identities we wish we could perform but can’t seem to. The giggle that follows Hamlet’s line “man delights not me” has material weight behind it rather than just philosophy: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern giggle because Hamlet is stating the obvious, and everyone knows s/he is into girls. The recurring self-condemnations of “coward” (not as brave as a boy) and having to “like a whore, unpack my heart with words” ring differently as gendered prejudices and expectations. The need to perform a man correctly for her country and for her beloved seems an impossible task. And in that strife, the task of killing Claudius (Kevin Gomez) gets a bit lost in the motivations. The directors seems to have sensed this, and so usefully problematized Claudius’s character who here seems to care meaningfully about both Hamlet and Gertrude. When he requests Hamlet not go back to Wittenberg due to her “unmanly grief,” this comes off as compellingly protective rather than cruel.

When I read the description of the production, I was imagining something more cos-play, something more ornamental in its interpretation. I do not make much of the Disney costumes and production elements here I think because in part they were so evenly incorporated into the world of this Hamlet. (That anti-transgender legislation has spread rapidly across the country in recent months no doubt has colored my reading of this production.) Denmark doesn’t have a particular cultural resonance for American audiences, so the fairyland world of tales gave it a different, symbolic richness stressing ideas over realism. I am a sucker for a play that knows it is a play, that knows that the goal is not to recreate the fallen world we already live in, but to build one in which we can meditate on a particular idea, problem or question for a time. It is a Hamlet for the current moment, and an truly excellent way to celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary this weekend.


  • Spoony Bard Shakespeare’s production of Hamlet plays at the Channing-Murray Foundation Friday, April 22 at 7:00PM, and Saturday, April 23, at 2:00PM and 7:00PM.
    • Note: I love this performance space. With only two stage entranceways and no discovery space, it recreates Tudor elite family halls that was the normal playing space for early modern troupes long before they settled in London playhouses. The recessed tabernacle space and bannister make for a natural tiring house, again imitating the spaces for which these plays were initially designed.
  • Tickets are $5 for students and $8 for non-student adults; check out the Facebook event to RSVP and to get more information.
  • Interested in more She-Hamlets? The Illinois Shakespeare Festival is also doing a Hamlet this summer with a female lead. Click here for more information.

The Suffering of Mephistopheles

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
— Romans 8:18

This past weekend the University of Illinois’ student troupe, the What You Will Shakespeare Company, tackled Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Directed by Ashish Valentine with the assistance of Danielle Strickland and Clayton Gentilcore, the play follows the life of John Faustus (Erik Wessel), a celebrated German scholar who has seemingly conquered every course of study save one. He takes up an interest in the occult and in so doing summons the demon Mephistopheles, who promises him a life of bliss in return for his immortal soul. Unlike much of Renaissance drama, the play falls relatively neatly into two halves: the first, the capture of Faustus’ soul, the second, a series of episodes illustrating what he gets in return. The production makes some subtle staging choices to recalibrate the play as one as invested in Mephistopheles’ damnation as in Faustus’.

There is something delicious about drawing pentagrams in a church basement, and the ensemble certainly reveled in the unsanctimonious quality of performing this particular play in one of their usual spaces, the University Place Christian Church. By doubling the roles of Lucifer, Alexander’s paramour, Helen of Troy, and Lady Raymond, Celia Mueller conveyed much of what is enticing about choosing to be fallen: the straining against God’s order and relishing in overt sadism at the expense of others. By doubling all of these characters and limiting the costume changes between them, they become barely distinguishable from one another to the audience. (Mueller’s distinctive red hair also helped in marking these separate characters seem more like minor variations on a theme.) Fallenness and decadence—literally, excessive indulgence to the point of moral decline—are located in and defined by the female body. This female Lucifer offers us a thought experiment: what might Eve have looked like if she had chosen to fall from grace rather than merely breaking one rule with a bite of an apple? Mueller’s Lucifer offers an interesting potential answer as well as tracks with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century models of women’s moral and physical weakness.

I will admit that as a reader I struggle with how to envision dumb-shows and interludes within the action of an early modern play. The space they take up on the page is a poor cipher for the time they take up in the space of a play, and the distilling work they do to summarize a central concern of the action. I was, therefore, particularly impressed by the interpretation of the Seven Sins episode. A display of ghostly entertainments turns into a vehicle to torture Faustus’ page boy, Wagner. Lucifer seemingly tortures him as he changes from one sin to the next. As Wagner, Kevin Gomez displayed a compelling range of voices and affects, making each sin clearly distinguishable from one another. Each interpretation was a thoughtful and clear interpretation of what characterizes that particular sin most; the effective simplicity of his Sloth never standing up from his writhing posture on the floor is a good example. The character of Wagner is a difficult one as it can beg bafoonery. Gomez keeps his Wagner in check, not erasing the playfulness for which the text asks, but making it clear that Wagner is one of the unwitting casualties of Faustus’ choices.

Like Wagner, in this production it is very clear that the low characters serve to demonstrate the far-reaching consequences of Faustus’ turn to damnation. After Benvolio is given horns for a day and made an object of ridicule for Faustus and his royal patron, he and his friend Frederick want revenge. They stab Faustus, who then rises from the dead. The two men beg mercy but Faustus refuses to entertain it. It is an echo of the Seven Sins pageant, where Faustus looks uncomfortably on as his Wagner screams out in pain for help, but does not move to free him. Faustus orders Mephistopheles drop the two would-be murders from a great height. He has no mercy for them. For all Faustus knows, Mephistopheles follows instructions; the audience is made privy to the fact that Mephistopheles in fact saves them.

In this production, Mephistopheles is the only figure who does not revel. Played by Megan Scharlau, she does not bathe in her power, her potential for evil, or rage against an unjust God. She does not smile nor yell, but remains placid and resigned—anything but the roaring devil of German folklore. It would seem the company took one of her opening speeches at its word rather than as a scare tactic:

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul. (I.iii.302-8)

As another devil played by a woman, Scharlau’s Mephistopheles offers an interesting counterexample to Mueller’s Lucifer: one understanding the gravity of her damnation, the other reveling in rattling her prison bars. By the final act of the play, it is unclear as yet how serious the situation is for Faustus. The play seems to ask: When does someone become a lost cause in God’s eyes?

As the final hours of Faustus’ contract count down, Wagner is stabbed and killed by a group of devils. This is a marked departure from the original text, where he more ambivalently flies off on the back of a devil, hallooing all the way. The stabbing sends home the point that the stakes are high and the moral choices Faustus makes affect not only him. Flying off stage in a basement would have been a tricky thing to pull off in the basement of a church, as would have been the swallowing of Faustus by a hell mouth to mark his end. Instead, another rather brilliant staging choice: Lucifer and her devils combat Mephistopheles in an broadsword fight for Faustus’ soul. While Faustus is killed in the fray (echoing something of both Mercutio’s and Hamlet’s deaths), Mephistopheles manages to keep the Morning Star from taking his body.

The stabbings of Wagner and Faustus were smart approaches to otherwise difficult and expensive staging requirements. They also beg a new question: What about Faustus is worth saving? He allows Wagner, Benvolio and many other minor characters to suffer for the sake of his pleasure. He seems to be only capable of envisioning power as the ability to trick and enact cruelty toward others. The series of short episodes that make up the second act each provide him an opportunity to demonstrate either why he is worth of mercy or to request God’s forgiveness. Yet, Faustus wastes each opportunity. Having suffered irredeemable and unending suffering, the intervention by Mephistopheles suggests that every person is worthy of saving, regardless of proofs or whether or not we ask it for ourselves. Ultimately, our redemption or fallenness is never in our own hands.