As in, Alas, poor Yorick! For the record, Hamlet is my least favorite Shakespeare play, and considering I find the histories a bit yawn-inspiring, that’s saying something.

It’s the characters, see, that do me in. Hamlet is so emo. Alas, poor Hamlet, where art thou Cure t-shirt and black eye-liner? I mean, it totally sucks that his dad was killed by his uncle who shacked up with Hamlet’s mom afterward, but come on, we all have dysfunctional family crosses to bear and you don’t see any of us talking to human skulls and plotting ways to kill our new uncle-dad. Everything he does and says is cringe worthy for me. Someone get that kid a grief counselor, sheesh.

And Ophelia? Sweetheart, you’ve got a lot to answer for. No boy is worth taking your own life over, certainly not Hamlet. She’s a terrible role model, TERRIBLE, and yet her name has gathered a ring of femininity to it. Like there is something beautiful and tragic and unmistakably female about what she has done. Why is it we always cling to the wrong lessons in literature?

Every summer my city comes alive with Shakespeare marketing as Shakespeare on the Green is performed in one of my favorite parks by the college I attended. My BFF Lydia, the costume ninja, works the costumes every year. This year we’ll be enjoying some A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of my favorites of Will’s plays. We’ll also be enjoying (a lot less) Hamlet.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be performed in Elizabethan garb (AWESOME) and Hamlet….well…how can I say this without throwing up a little in my mouth? Hamlet will be re-imagined by way of Jersey Shore. I think it goes without saying that I will not be attending Hamlet. As if I could hate it more. (SEETH. HISS.) I’d rather put out my own eyeballs with a quill pen than sit through Hamlet, a Jersey Shore Production.

But there IS some good Shakespeare coming to life these days worthy of their new re-imaginings. One of them even stars Hamlet, who I actually kind of like.

Kill Shakespeare

An epic adventure that pits Shakespeare’s greatest heroes against his most frightening villains.

One of the best comics on the shelves! Hamlet is re-imagined in a way that doesn’t suck, and all of Shakespeare’s brilliant characters come to life in a huge cacophony of awesome and sword fights. You’ve got your obvious good guys and villains, but a lot of surprises and double crosses too. I think Juliet might be my favorite character, but it’s hard to pick.

Kill Shakespeare has a lot of social media happening around it too, one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve seen for comic books, who have been slower than publishing companies at embracing new technology. The staff of Kill Shakespeare have done some cool trailers, websites, twitter, and keep up a great Facebook page that even I follow, and I don’t do much with Facebook.

This isn’t your lit professors Shakespeare, but it is every bit as good.

Anonymous

Anyone who has taken a Shakespeare class in college has heard some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Shakespeare – that he didn’t write all of, or any of, the plays he is credited with. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I can definitely follow the reasoning why he may not have written them all himself. I personally think Titus Andronicus is the biggest clue since it is so incredibly different than all of the other plays. It is way beyond dark and creepy, it ventures into the hide-your-eyes realm and the writing is noticeably different. If it turned out someone else wrote Titus, I wouldn’t even gasp. I kind of want to say “Of course someone else wrote Titus. How many times does Shakespeare go in for mutilation, rape, and cannibalism in his writings?”

Anyway, there is even a cool conspiracy that Christopher Marlowe (another of my favorite writers) was the real Shakespeare, having faked his own death and a mere 13 days later began publishing again as Shakespeare. Read up on it, it’ll blow your mind. There are enough academics who believe in this theory that when Marlowe’s tribute was put up in Westminster Abbey, the date of death is a ? mark.

Anyway, the upcoming movie Anonymous follows one such theory about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s not Marlowe, which is too bad because that would have made a better story I think, but who am I to judge? It still looks awesome.