[intro music]
Dia: I do sort of get it in a, I get the naturalist, like, this is not an affront This is not an offence. I don't understand the nudist areas that have like, incredibly like busy banks and shops and things and I'm like, this doesn't seem necessary.?
Duck: Right? I think I come down somewhere like I understand why you would do naked sunbathing. I understand why you would do naked swimming. I feel like these are activities where being naked would add to your enjoyment of the act. I don't quite understand why you would do naked shopping. Because then you're just being perceived to an unnecessary degree.
Dia: Like as someone who wears women's clothing I can confirm that not having pockets is very inconvenient at a lot of times.
Duck: It's the worst. Just--
Dia: Anyway.
Duck: …Absolutely dreadful. Anyway,
Dia: Do you want to talk about Hamlet?
Duck: Sure. Let's, let's talk about Hamlet. Welcome, dear listener to analysis roulette, where today we are talking about nudism and Hamlet.
Dia: Probably not together but I don't know where your theory has led us?
Duck: probably not. No, probably not directly in conversation with each other conceptually. Just both these things are happening. I am one of your hosts. My name is Duck, pronouns he/they. With me is Dia.
Dia: Pronouns are they/them.
Duck: Everyone say hello, Dia.
Dia: And despite our conversation up to this point, I assume we are both fully dressed.
Duck: I am wearing all of my clothes. Yes. We're not on webcam--
Dia: All at once.
Duck: Yes, I'm very round. I look like the Michelin man. It's it's the opposite of laundry day. Laundry day was yesterday, everything is clean, I'm wearing it all.
Dia: It's just me getting on a plane anywhere.
Duck: Right!
Dia: Just to avoid excess baggage charges. I am going to wear all my clothes.
Duck: Right! The Suitcase contains three pairs of boots and six books. Nothing else fits in there therefore I am wearing them. Three hoodies is fine.
Dia: Yes, exactly. You can't penalise me even on a Ryanair flight for wearing lots of clothes.
Duck: I assume this to be true. I've not flown enough to test it. But it seems like a thing that would be true. Shall we talk about Hamlet?
Dia: You would run run into hot water asking people to remove clothes before travelling. Anyway, Hamlet!
Duck: We’re instituting space flight rules where you have to register your weights, and then we weigh you and if your coat is too heavy, you can't take it with you.
Dia: Welcome to Analysis Roulette, the podcast where we really did intend to talk about Hamlet, but we're both very easily sidetracked.
Duck: The podcast, which is suffering with its intellectual focus, yes.
Dia: What if just the entire podcast we never get around to Hamlet.
Duck: That would be a very Hamlet thing to do.
Dia: Yeah, it would be it's meta.
Duck: It’s dramatic.
Dia: Yeah, no, no, what we do is we both just talk about gay thoughts we have had, and then at the very end, we go So Hamlet. Oh, yeah, that and then it ends.
Duck: That is more or less my theory of Hamlet. Yes, we will get to my theory of Hamlet. First, we should define Hamlet for the listener,
Dia: Yeah!
Duck: Who may not know what Hamlet is.
Dia: Which way round are we doing this? Because last week, we switched it round because I didn't want to explain Earthsea.
Duck: You want to explain Hamlet as a superior expert in literary matters.
Dia: Oh, crikey. My knowledge of literary matters comes to a very abrupt end circa 1408
Duck: Which is shortly before Shakespeare
Dia: Some time before Shakespeare, yes. But Hamlet, otherwise known as the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is one of Shakespeare's tragedies written at some point in the late 16th century, possibly very early 17th. One of the sort of the sort of Wikipedia roster of facts about it is it's available in a couple of different forms in different quartos. It's the longest Shakespeare play, it is set in Denmark, and it is considered one of the most powerful tragedies. There's a reason that it is the one that actors are smug about having performed, or rather are performatively not smug about having performed because you don't need to be smug because everybody knows if you were Hamlet, it's because you were the best actor available.
Duck: Yes, you can name drop that you, that you played Hamlet, obviously, it wasn't a big deal.
Dia: And also it occupies a fairly unique space within local and community theatre, which is if you played Hamlet in a great theatre, it's because you were the best actor in the country. If you performed Hamlet in a lesser theatre, it's because you were the most annoying actor in that area.
Duck: As in the person who would make everyone's life miserable if they would not cast as Hamlet. Dia: Yes.
Duck: Ah huh. Yes, I see.
Dia: But I’m gonna, I don't know if I'm going to really go in on the details of the plot because I feel like this is actually not a very plot heavy section of analysis. I will say that I reread Hamlet three weeks ago and have already forgotten which characters are which because there's a lot of people in it who are just kind of there. However
Duck: Yes, there are various things I put on the table about Hamlet.
Dia: It is a essentially a revenge tragedy. In the model of Greek tragedies, in which Prince Hamlet of Denmark's father has recently died. The previous King Hamlet. He is the nephew of the new King, Claudius, who has married his mother Hamlet's mother, not Claudius’ mother, Prince Hamlet's mother Gertrude and taken over the throne. There's a lot of background drama involving a potential invasion by Norway, until the ghost of King Hamlet appears. And the sentries who witness him as well as Hamlet's friend Horatio decide the Hamlet is the best qualified to deal with the ghost, somewhat famously within Internet meme circles, because he went to university.
Duck: Yeah, that's why they bring Horatio in. Actually, they're like, Horatio, you're a scholar.
Dia: Yes. Which is extremely relatable. Which is extremely relatable to me as someone who regularly gets Facebook messages out of the blue going, Hey, ah, weird question. Do you know anything about Norwegian witchcraft? And I have to be like, yes. Yes, I do. Or more frequently, you want to do some Latin grammar? And the answer is yes! Excitement! because I'm a very peculiar person. Where do I get up to? Oh, yeah, ghost appears. The court gathers, various court drama. Hamlet decides to see the ghost for himself. And the ghost appears to him and tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius and demands that Hamlet avenge him. I will say the next rest of play is pretty much central plot, Hamlet wrangling with this sort of mission from the dead, whilst various other court dramas occur around him, culminating in the speech that everybody knows and everybody quotes.
Duck: There are a couple of those to be fair, Hamlet is big on soliloquys
Hamlet is big on soliloqusy is but I think if you say the one everybody quotes people know you mean to be or not to be that is the question.
Duck: That is a one everybody knows although weirdly, in the copy that I'm currently searching, it's not coming up. I’m ctrl+f ing the text and it’s not here.
Dia: Oh my god, it's the Mandela Effect.
Duck: I'm sure I remember seeing it just set phrase not found. I my PDF has failed me it's not there.
Dia: I had a paper copy but I have not bought into my recording tent to avoid rustling paper noises. But I will say I once went to a seminar on Shakespeare in the modern world, where retired actor turned academic was talking about Hamlet, and he discussed that one of the best things he's ever had as an actor was when he was-- he said he always dreaded To be or not to be because it's the one part of the show that the audience probably knows better than you do. Duck: Audience is muttering along.
Dia: Yeah, he said the actual best performance that he ever did was when he only got as far as to be and somebody quite drunk in the audience of the Globe yelled or not to be. And he did the entire soliloquy as a back and forth with this drunken audience member, which he attempted to recreate.
Duck: Which might work with the whole ghost thing!
Dia: It worked, so he recreated it with the audience in the room at this seminar, and it was amazing. It was so good. But yes, eventually. Everybody, you know, rocks fall. Everybody's dying. Hamlet does in fact, kill Claudius, but quickly dies from aafore-delivered poison and names the prince of Norway as his successor,
Duck: Who has conveniently just invaded that minute.
Dia: Yeah, which is all very well timed. And Horatio wants to commit suicide but Hamlet with his dying breath begs him to go on, tell his story. Presumably help the prince of Norway take over the country.
Duck: Right.
Dia: And then yeah, everybody dies except Horatio. All of the invaders are there and Hamlet gets a military funeral. So I guess that's a happy ending.
Duck: I guess so. It's a very
Dia: I'm skipping over a lot of middle because I don't know which parts of it it'd be relevant.
Duck: Right. And this is the thing that I want to say because all before we get into or not sort of before we get into, but there are some things I think we need to put on the table about Hamlet the play. One of which is hardly anything happens.
Dia: It’s a lot of words.
Duck: It’s a play without a lot of movement to it.
Dia: It has a very low actions to words ratio.
Duck: Yes. A lot of people have conversations. Hamlet, the protagonist, spends most of the play kind of walking in a circle.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Not acting, not not taking action, but no one else is really taking action either. It's a play that feels to me like it has a lot of killing time in the middle.
Dia: Yeah, and it's interesting because there are a few debated-academically sources for it, but several of them are ones I've studied in the original because I'm extremely cool. Including Hrolfs saga kraka, which is a Icelandic saga in which so much happens. Oh my god, page one, murder page two another murder page three, a murder, and it just keeps going. This feels like the KidzBop version of Hrolfs saga kraka.
Duck: We took away all the offensive bits and we're left with just sort of fluff and filling.
Dia: Except that like, it isn't. And that's the most interesting thing about it.
Duck: Right, all the action-- There are several murders in it.
Dia: Oh, yeah, there's a lot of murder. It's just not like Viking murders.
Duck: No, they're weirdly comedic murders actually. Which is another thing I want to put out there on, on Hamlet is that Hamlet is not one of the comedies. And it's not sort of primarily funny.
Dia: It is quite funny.
Duck: But there is a fairly major character Polonius, who is a comic turned the whole way through. Because his whole bit is that he is a pompous idiot who is constantly giving out advice, and has the worst plans. And everyone is nodding politely and going along with his advice as he comes up with just the worst plans.
Dia: Indeed, and also there is actually just a lot of funny dialogue and don’t get me wrong, funny dialogue is one of Shakespeare's strengths in all of his plays.
Duck: Right, it's never a surprise when he has a good moment.
Dia: There's a lot of out of nowhere funny dialogue. This is not a play that shoots out the clowns. I mean, it is in a literal sense. But you know what I mean? It's not a play that sort of alternates between the funny bits and the tragic bits. It's quite funny the whole way through.
Duck: Hamlet himself has some wonderfully catty lines.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: What else is there? This is a play that is notionally set in Denmark, but everyone has Latin names. We’re just gonna have to…
Dia: I mean, to be fair--
Duck: Look, I don't know a lot about Denmark. I just feel like Claudius is not a very Danish
name.
Dia: Yeah, I just think it would probably not have done as well with the Elizabethan crowds if it had been like the story of Hroa and Helgi
B You feel like Polonius might have been more accessible at the time.
Dia: Yeah, just a little bit. I just don't think we would still be talking about the sort of tragedy of Frosti Prince of Denmark.
Duck: That's probably true. This is another thing I want to put this is a controversial opinion I have about Hamlet, I think we are only talking about it because it is Shakespeare. I think if Hamlet was by anyone else, it wouldn't have the same reach. I think nobody can agree on what Hamlet means, this could be because it is unfathomably brilliant. Or it could be because it's the opposite of that and doesn't really mean very much. But we have to analyse it because it's Shakespeare.
Dia: Bold choice to get us…
Duck: We have to approach it as part of the totality of the bard. So it has to be important.
Dia: I think it's a very bold choice to get a cancelled five episodes in.
Duck: Oh, I am getting us cancelled three or four times in this episode. Yeah.
Dia: We made it through flat earth and this is where you choose to torpedo us.
Duck: We made it through flat earth and I’m going to get cancelled over Hamlet. Yes.
Dia: I'm now really wishing I had rewatched it again within the last week, because this was originally meant to happen two weeks ago and I rewatched before that, and now I've forgotten a lot of my favourite bits in detail. So I'm going to be doing a really poor showing for the Hamlet defence squad and for that I apologise, dear listener.
Duck: I do not wish to cancel Hamlet. I come not to praise Hamlet but to cancel him. It's-- I have seen Hamlet more than once, voluntarily. So it can't be that perhaps even by my standards and whenever I have watched Hamlet I have had a reasonably good time. I have never come away from Hamlet feeling particularly expanded by the experience.
Dia: I will say while I am definitely very much on the Hamlet defence squad, big Hamlet enjoyer. I will say it is actually a play I think I prefer to read than watch. I think it is a good play to study because it is a crunchy play. But I cannot really empathise with the school of thought that this is the greatest dramatic role that any actor can ever take.
Duck: Yes, I think that in particular is something that is just reputationally enforcing itself.
Dia: I think we've just invented it, I think we have invented it entirely because holding up a skull whilst addressing it in a sort of emotionally torn monologue is a really good photo op. Even before photography.
Duck: It is cool, it is cool.
Dia: But I am personally of the opinion that it's not even the most emotionally moving role in Hamlet.
Duck: Oh, no, I if you want to do the tearjerk you want to be Horatio.
Dia: That’s right.
Duck: Horatio is the character who has all of the chances to look at the audience and be like, are you crying yet you should be crying. Especially at the end of the play, if you get the last word,
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And the last word is tragedy. It is your emotions that the people remember.
Dia: Exactly. And I will also say my first encounter with Hamlet, and this is maybe revealing why I'm like this as a person. But when I was about seven, I was given as a gift, a giant, a big box set of sort of puppet, animated puppet-style Shakespeare plays, which included most of them, I think the only ones that didn't have were the histories. And I did not understand Hamlet, aged seven.
Duck: I'm just going to step in and say, Kermit the Frog will make an amazing Hamlet.
Dia: Oh my God, Kermit understands Hamlet.
Duck: I can see Kermit doing the skull monologue and it's beautiful. You do the skull monologue, and then the next line is, the skull is stinky.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: He goes straight from the skull monologue to being like, this skull smells down and puts it down again.
Dia: Why, why is Muppet version not a school of analysis in our hat?
Duck: We can put it in next season.
Dia: It's going in next season. But my point being I will say I didn't understand Hamlet, age seven, because I did not understand a lot of things age seven.
Duck: Who has understood anything we read age seven? I guess people who read age appropriate things age seven, but I was not one of those children.
Dia: I really, I remember really liking the Tempest and I'm still not sure if that was because I liked the tempest or because I liked the visual effects on Ariel. I will however say puppet Hamlet fucked. It's just a very good puppet show. It just works, you know,
Duck: Miss Piggy would be a remarkable take on Ophelia.
Dia: I remember because they were these sort of gaunt, slightly ghoulish, like they were not nice looking puppets. They were kind of zombie Punch and Judy puppets.
Duck: Oh, nice.
Dia: And it worked, man. It was just a good vibe. Anyway, do you want to talk about gay thoughts?
Duck: I do want to talk about gay thoughts about Hamlet.
Dia: So do you want to give us a rundown, before we get into our gay thoughts on Hamlet, do you want to give us a quick rundown of what we mean by queer theory?
Duck: Here's where we again suffer from me not knowing things.
Dia: Do you want to say what you think it is? And I'll correct you.
Duck: I think it is the theory that there might be queer content did things even if it wasn't necessarily written to have it?
Dia: Pretty much correct. The thing that trips people up with queer theory is, it is, I looked it up on Wikipedia just to make sure that I was like not pulling things completely out of my arse.
Duck: I did that and then forgot it.
Dia: And yeah, my favourite thing is that Wikipedia reminds me that queer theory is officially a field of post structuralism because I just I love that because what is queerness? If not saying not that?
Duck: Right.
Dia: But essentially, queer theory is kind of used as an umbrella term, officially, it's the idea that not everything is heterosexual and cisgender.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: In practice, it is. Gay thoughts, gay facts, and also rejection of norms, which are three actually very different approaches.
Duck: Yes. So my sort of uninformed reading on it is that queer theory is when you look at a text and you say, so what's going on here? And your “so what's going on here” comes with a willingness for the answer to be gay stuff.
Dia: Yeah, I think that's a very good sort of working interpretation, because the problem with academic theories is none of them mean anything. We encountered this when we did post Structuralism, we had this when we did Marxism.
Duck: We had this problem with poststructuralism, I had to get you to give me a little tutorial on what post structuralism was first.
Dia: Yeah. And like we encountered this last time when we talked about Marxism. The thing with academic theory is academic theories are buckets in which we put the thoughts people have, but no two people have the same thoughts. So we have to make really big buckets.
Duck: Yeah, the buckets can overlap, its a complicated system.
Dia: And queer theory is a bucket that contains all the gay stuff.
Duck: All the gay stuff, all of it. Hamlet is a very interesting one from this perspective, actually, because Hamlet does not contain all of the gay stuff.
Dia: I mean, I have a crowbar right here.
Duck: Well, this is what I'm saying is you can do a quick reading of Hamlet, you can do a straight reading of Hamlet. And I think you kind of have to work about the same level of, you have to work hard do either of those readings. You have to interpret.
Dia: It’s a play which does a lot, yeah. You have to interpret to consume Hamlet, it is simply not a thing that you can consume brain off in any capacity. Especially not if what you're thinking about is identity and relationships, which is kind of the linchpin of queer theory.
Duck: And this is probably partly why Hamlet has become one of the you know, the standard great plays in English, is that it gives you a lot to talk about with your friends down the pub afterwards. It's very easy to disagree in a friendly and productive way about what's going on in Hamlet in a way where, if you take some of the comedies, if you take a Midsummer Night's Dream, it's easy to argue about what was happening there, but not in an interesting way.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Just in a disagreement. Whereas in Hamlet, you can have a debate. It gives you all that.
Dia: It’s true. In many ways Hamlet was the original BBC Sherlock.
Duck: Yes, Hamlet is queerbaiting! Theres a, actually there's a case to be made that Hamlet is queerbaiting.
Dia: Okay, I know we haven't talked about how we're doing episode titles yet, but can I please suggest Does Hamlet Is Queerbaiting.
Duck: I'm happy for it to be that because let's get cancelled before we even start.
Dia: Like we've already agreed we're getting cancelled this week. Let's just go all in. Let's piss off the Johnlock conspiracy people.
Duck: There is no Johnlock conspiracy, people.
Dia: Oh, they still exist.
Duck: I know, there was a comma, there was a comma in that sentence, it's fine. Okay, so what I wanna do is sort of start by, because as you say, queer interpretations of anything comes down to the relationships. So let's just sort of frame out the relationships, we can think about it this way in Hamlet, we are going to ignore most of the bit-part characters, there's a lot of people coming and going and they play makes very careful to make sure we know their names, and then they go off and be ambassadors or whatever. Or they’reguards we only see an act one and they never come back. Yes.
Dia: And quite a lot of them a little doubles, and unbelievable amounts of paper has been devoted to analysing what their relationship with one another is.
Duck: Right, there's a lot of little pairs. Having been in plays sometimes my interpretation of this is we had a couple of guys who had really good chemistry. I could reuse the two guys as a double x repeatedly. And this was part of the humour is that it's all these two guys again, and now they've got a third set of names, because there are different double act this time. That's funny.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: They show back up as the grave diggers and there's like, oh, it's the pair of guards, who's also the pair of masters who now have a pair of grave diggers. That's funny.
Dia: In many ways, Shakespeare truly was a secondary school drama teacher.
Duck: Yes, yes, I think you have to think it's different to-- I think it is incorrect to approach Shakespeare as a writer, without keeping in mind that he was writing for a specific set of players who he worked with all the time.
Dia: Yeah. And that is a thing that has advantages and disadvantages.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: As seen in BBC Sherlock.
Duck: Right in very much the same way as Gilbert and Sullivan, part of the structure of a Gilbert and Sullivan plays that there will be a comic baritone, and he will have a patter song.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because we have someone who’s good at those. So we write him a song.
Dia: And like in modern musical theatre, you get a similar thing where if you are from one half of the Broadway West End divide, I'm just ignoring the entire rest of the world. When you listen to things that were created, on the other side of that divide, there will occasionally be a giant musical cue where some very excited character goes oh my god, guys, he's coming, the one you're all excited about. And then some guy you've never heard before in your life, starts singing.
Duck: You can just say Washington, it's fine.
Dia: It's Washington is the biggest example of this, but I at least knew who Christopher Jackson was.
Duck: I didn’t, I did know who George Washington was. So it still kind of landed.
Dia: Yeah. Contrast me. I had a pretty good knowledge of people who had been in previous Lin Manuel Miranda projects. I had never heard of Aaron Burr when Hamilton got big.
Duck: Oh, I had never heard of Aaron but I had heard of George Washington. I knew he was kind of important. So that bit I was like, Okay, I get what's happening here. It’s this guy.
Dia: I had a vague concept of which of the names I was hearing were household names. And that was not a very good concept. But yes.
Duck: Yeah, I knew who George Washington was, but I think that was more or less the one of the guys who I knew who it was. This is irrelevant to everything we're talking about.
Dia: This is not relevant.
Duck: But we should put Hamilton in the hat.
Dia: Is Hamilton not in the hat.
Duck: I don't know if Hamilton is in the hat. I can't remember. If Hamilton is not in the hat we should put Hamilton in the hat.
Dia: It will at some point be in the hat, it might not currently be.
Duck: Then we'll have to do some kind of bizarre Jungian interpretation of it and we will regret.
Dia: Oh my god, Jungian Hamilton. I am so ready for it. No, no, that's going to be once Muppit AU is in the hat.
Duck: Muppet Hamilton!
Dia: I would give a kidney for Muppet Hamilton.
Duck: Anyway, relationships in Hamlet, to sort of frame out our scope.
Dia: Okay, for anybody playing along at home, now's the time to get out the conspiracy board.
Duck: Get out the conspiracy board, get out your bingo sheets, and we have Hamilton-- that's a crossover-- Hamlet himself. And his relationship with Horatio sort of going in by order appearance--
Dia: The Sherlock and John.
Duck: The Sherlock and John, very much so, Horatio is telling us this story in much the same way as diagnostically as John-
Dia: Yeah, I meant my BBC Sherlock comparison a) sincerely and b) to be continued.
Duck: Yes, Horatio is the Watson of this story. Because he is telling the story. We have Hamlet and his relationship with Ophelia.
Dia: The Molly.
Duck: I’ve have not seen enough Sherlock because to know who Molly is.
Dia: Unfortunately I’ve seen it all.
Duck: I just, I watched two episodes, and I was like, I'm not enjoying this and then I stopped. Again, cancelled.
Dia: She is Louise Brearley and she is very sad. She is what I would like to describe as the red flag of the show. Like, even if you watch episode one and think ooh, this is going places, you do encounter Molly and go ooh, it might not be.
Duck: They might be going to bad places.
Dia: Those places might be not good for women.
Duck: Yep, yep. We have the wicked king Uncle Claudius, and Gertrude.
Dia: The Moriarty. I'm gonna stop I promise.
Duck: No, no, I-- please tell me which Sherlock character Queen Gertrude is.
Dia: Oh, well, no, because then they'd have to be like three whole women in Sherlock.
Duck: That would be difficult.
Dia: Well, no, there’d have to be, have to be a woman who Sherlock couldn’t conceivably have sex with in Sherlock.
Duck: Tricky, tricky. Not a problem Hamlet has there is no suggestion of Hamlet and doing any kind of incest with his mother, you'll be pleased with the play.
Dia: I don't think Hamlet knows how to sex.
Duck: This is one of my theories actually.
Dia: Good, we’re getting into it.
Duck: Hamlet is in fact, you know, Ace King Hamlet.
Dia: And I respect that.
Duck: I think it's actually a very valid reading but we'll get to it. There is also a sort of, Horatio’s relationships with with various people are a bit. Too many names. Hamlet's relationships tend to be quite fraught. So I've sort of laid out the three romantic or possibly romantic setups there to think about, but it is worth remembering that Hamlet is just constantly fighting with everyone. The ghost turns up to tell him off for being useless. He does, he straight up murderers Polonius, he has a great big fight with his mother. He gets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed fully on purpose.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: For not exactly petty reasons. But there were other ways to handle it. You know, he could have not got them killed. He chose to get them killed. But I really want to look at that. So I'm, I'm kind of taking that we have an unambiguous romantic, if also political pairing between Claudius and Gertrude. Like that, to me reads like, yes, these are two people who are romantically and sexually involved and also doing politics and murder. Classic Shakespeare combination. You only have to look at them slightly sideways for Claudius and Gertrude to become Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
Dia: Yeah. It's the Lady Macbeth. If Lady Macbeth kept her thoughts about murder inside her head sometimes.
Duck: If she didn't have the soliloquy is because someone else was doing the soliloquies.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Yeah. Taking that as a model for what someone in kind of a similar if not identical, but you know, Horatio is, what is it with is because it's literally because I've got the script on screen and my eyes keep landing on the word Horatio. I’m gonna go to a different tab than we are. So this is kind of the model of what a correct and appropriate heterosexual relationship would look like for Hamlet, if that makes sense. I mean, not perfectly, because also, there's a remarriage shortly after a murder. And it is by, certainly religious definitions of the time, I think the taboo has softened a bit for us in these modern times. But at the time, that's just straightforwardly incestuous because, she's married to old Hamlet old Hamlet dies and then she married Claudius, who is old Hamlet's brother. And that is taboo.
Dia: This is notably, the exact thing that Catherine of Aragon was accused of being cursed over, which was not that long ago.
Duck: Right, and how consanguineous can you be and also be married was, I think, for Henry the Eighth as part of his various complications. The whole question of who kings can marry.
Dia: It was very specifically, who kings who married very specifically, the question of can someone who has married their late husband's brother produce a male heir was a major issue for Henry the eighth? Yeah. It's this whole thing you might have heard about called the Church of England.
Duck: You may have heard of the Church of England. It was it was sort of around this time.
Dia: Brought to you by Six of the musical,
Duck: It’s easy to forget that Shakespeare was writing at a time of high religious turmoil by religious turmoil. We mean, we were having a Protestant Reformation.
Dia: We had very recently been burning Catholics.
Duck: Right. We just just only just stopped.
Dia: Yes, this is a play with context.
Duck: This is a play with context. And part of the context is, how bad is it for a country if kings marry incestuous queens.
Dia: Part that context, and one that is much talked about and always talked about in ways that I think are unbelievably boring? Is the probably-recent death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet. Every single article I've ever read about how this play is full of grief and Shakespeare was potentially a grieving father whilst writing it has been terrible. But that doesn't mean it’s not good and important context. It just means that we're stupid as a scientific and academic community.
Duck: No, I think it is good context, I think is exactly the sort of thing that prompts you to write a play about grief. But then you can read too much into, you can, you shouldn't turn that into an allegory.
Dia: The thing is, the version I see most often of that context is Oh, Shakespeare based this on a play with a happy ending and he made the ending sad because he was sad, and I'm just like, oh my god, if that was the level this guy was working on, he would not have written this many plays that lasted this long, right?
Duck: Right. Thematically write a play about grief because you're grieving, fully willing to believe it. That doesn't make this an allegory.
Dia: No.
Duck: Because he was still a competent writer of plays.
D My hot take: Shakespeare was good at writing.
Duck: Whoo, now we’re cancelled.
Dia: Spicy. I know. It's gonna be unpopular with the anti English class crowd on Tumblr.
Duck: Yeah. So we have this kind of model of what is to the throne should be doing which is that they should be making heterosexual matches that are both passionate enough to be likely to produce heirs and politically viable.
Dia: Or at the very least dutiful.
Duck: Or at the very least dutiful. So we have a in a failure. We have the first kind of failure to perform that heterosexual role.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Ophelia is the daughter of one of the nobles of courtiers, Polonius’ daughter, Polonius is the comically bad advisor. But within the context of the play, he is a valued and trusted advisor who is a noble of the court. He's although comically bad, this does not reduce his status.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: She is not, quite explicitly because there's a whole chunk of the first half of the play that is about her family members telling her to ditch Hamlet, because she's not sufficiently noble for him to marry her. So he's clearly just going to spoil her reputation and jilt her. So she should make sure to put a stop to that before anything untoward can be rumoured to have happened.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Which she does. And then it becomes a very awkward time for everyone at the court because Hamlet is at this time pretending to be mad. This is unclear to me why he thinks this is going to help and indeed it doesn't. I think this is important to note about Hamlet is Hamlet's entire plan is my dad's ghost has turned up and told me to avenge him. I shall pretend to go mad. Question mark, question mark, question mark revenge.
Dia: We get a lot of Hamlet's inner thoughts and very little of his inner logic.
Duck: Yes, we know that Hamlet is having a bad time. But why he has chosen this path to resolving his bad time never becomes clear. Everyone around court is speculating on why is Hamlet behaving like this? Maybe he has run mad with love. Maybe this is because Ophelia dumped him. So we're going to set up chance meetings between them and spy from behind the staircases to see if he's just lovesick and then we're given sight he isn't. Because he's just really mean to Ophelia. Yeah. Consequently, or at least subsequently, Ophelia goes mad for real. And there is a deliberate ambiguity. She goes flower picking by the river, and falls or jumps in. And there is a, a textual ambiguity, the characters in the play are arguing over was this suicide or was this an accident. But the last time we see Ophelia alive, she is performing madness more, more convincingly than Hamlet is at the very least. It's not a very successful heterosexual relationship. Neither of them frankly, seem very good at it.
Dia: No.
Duck: In contrast to that, which is the sort of failed heterosexual relationship, we have this not quite gay relationship with Horatio. So Horatio is Hamlet's classmate from university.
Dia: Yes. Where he apparently studied ghosts.
Duck: Where he apparently studied ghosts in Wittenberg. Yeah.
D I mean, that is where you'd go.
Duck: Right. Obviously, Horatio has come over to the Danish court. So I had to remember whether we will in Denmark or Norway, come over to the Danish court for the old King's funeral, presumably the new King's coronation and wedding but mainly to see, and sort of to be a supportive presence for Hamlet. Which is itself a contrast with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his other classmates who he eventually gets murdered. Who have come over because the king and queen asked them to, and they're like you’re Hamlet's friends solve him, please. He's a problem.
Dia: I mean, is that not deeply relatable?
Duck: It is deeply relatable, but Horatio is written as a contrast to that because he just comes over because he wants to support his friend.
Dia: For the basically the differences Horatio brought a quiche and Goldstone Rosencrantz bought flowers.
Duck: I guess? It's more that Horatio turned up and said, I heard the news. I came right away. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turned up for the funeral, and said, Oh, your mum told us that you were having a bad time.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And it's like, well, I did put on Facebook that I was having a bad time. You should have known that if we were actually friends. But okay.
Dia: Yeah, Hamlet is just out here posting selfies with a fringethat he just got, and neither of them are sending your right text.
Duck: Right. They are not checking in with their blokes. Yeah. Horatio sticks around for the whole play. And throughout is kind of on Hamlet side of events. He's not in all of the pivotal scenes by any means. He pops up a lot as someone for Hamlet to monologue acts in a way that is distinct from a soliloquy.
Dia: Including the alas poor Yorick line, which is at Horatio.
Duck: Yes, he delivers that that speech about how Yorick is this memento mori, because
Dia: Yorick was the life and soul of the party.
Duck: Yorick was the life and soul of the party, as was Ophelia who’s, they are literally hiding in the grave watching Ophelia be buried. Hamlet doesn't go to her funeral, which I think is again, a failure to be correctly heterosexual in this context.
Dia: So to be fair, she only just got a proper funeral. It is mentioned if not for her sort of high rank and the intervention of Claudius, she would have been buried in a pauper's grave with no ceremony because she is believed to have committed suicide.
Duck: It's true. But Queen Gertrude is there.
Dia: Yes, because the royal parents, Claudius and Gertrude, intervened to get her the full burial. While Hamlet does not even appear at it.
Duck: Right. Where it's Where's Hamlet doesn't show up there, and is instead hiding out in the graveyard. revealing himself not to be as young as we might otherwise speculate. There's a line of speculation that says, Why has Hamlet's uncle inherited instead of him? One line of speculation is what it's because he's too young. And this is Regency. But that can't be true, because York has been dead for 23 years. And Hamlet remembers him.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So Hamlet has got to be like 27 minimum, which is too long.
Dia: I mean, to be fair, I am 26. And I could not run a country.
Duck: Well, we could talk about the limitations of the monarchy and other time and I'm sure we will, but we don't have time in this episode to talk about how no one can run a country.
Dia: That's fair.
Duck: Tempting as it is, we will have to do that another time.
Dia: And we will.
Duck: Because right now we need to talk about how Hamlet kind of repeatedly tells Horatio that he loves him.
Dia: He do.
Duck: He is a lot less mean to Horatio than he is to Ophelia, or anyone else.
Dia: And everyone else, yeah. It’s a real Mr Darcy moment.
Duck: Honestly the people Hamlet is nicest two are in order one, Horatio, two, the actors who show up for the play within the play who he really liked when he was in Wittenberg.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: These are the people Hamlet likes in this play his favourite actors, and his best friend. A little bit gay. As an order of emotional priorities. But you do have to do interpretation, you cannot look at this and say this is clearly a gay relationship. I think it's a perfectly plausible reading. I think it's very easy to look at this and say, I'm going to play this as a gay relationship. But you are not contradicting the text if you don't do that.
Dia: It's a deep and intimate relationship without specific direction in text.
Duck: Yeah, taking another controversial stance. People can be friends.
Dia: Well, now you just sound like someone on Tumblr talking about people of different races in a TV show.
Duck: I am taking a very anti fanfic stance that men can be friends. And it can not be a gay thing sometimes. But this is the, this is the thing about the relationship with Horatio and the relationship with Ophelia is that you have this emotionally deep on both sides. Both of them genuinely care about the other, both of them look out for the other relationship between Hamlet and Horatio. And then you have this societally sort of being pushed as the interpreter everyone around them wants to interpret the Hamlet Ophelia thing as a sex thing.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And neither of them. Neither of them seem particularly into it. Because Ophelia is like, yeah, Hamlet’s been writing a lot of love letters lately. And her brother and her dad are like you should not go there because he will ruin your reputation because that's what princes do. And she's like, Oh, okay.
Dia: Yeah, it doesn't. Ophelia doesn't, in a lot of the play doesn't express emotions towards or about other people until after they are dead.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: And Hamlet is in no way exempt from this.
Duck: Yes, it's genuinely difficult to read Ophelia as being romantically or sexually into Hamlet. She mostly seems mildly embarrassed by the whole Hamlet situation.
Dia: Really they are just two babies of opposite genders sitting next to each other on a mat while everyone around them goes oh, they're in love.
Duck: Yes. So here we come to, so I have two, well, I’m not actually going to enumerate because I haven't actually counted, I have a number of possible readings of Hamlet to offer you.
Dia: Hit me.
Duck: One of them is Hamlet is Ace okay? Or at the very least at this point in his life when he is dealing with his dad being dead and him being given a revenge quest by a ghost, not currently in that emotional place to be doing romance with anyone actually.
Dia: So BBC Sherlock core of him
Duck: Honestly because what what the Hamlet Ophelia relationship reads to me like compulsory heterosexuality.
Dia: I can see that yes.
Duck: Like that, that’s how that reads to me is that that you've got these two people who have exchanged enough words for everyone around them to go: is Hamlet your boyfriend? And at that point, it's just very awkward. And Hamlet is not a person who likes awkward, or deals with it gracefully.
Dia: He's not very good at people.
Duck: He's not very good at people. He strikes me as somebody who will be like, I Okay, I'm writing letters to Ophelia now, that's, that's, sure. Why not, I like Ophelia just fine.
Dia: It does it very much… There are moments, I wouldn't say consistently throughout the entire play, but there are moments when Hamlet and Ophelia have very strong you are in the closet and have just been asked for your crush’s name energy, like just like, oh God, just name any man, any man, Hamlet! That's a man.
Duck: Yes, I think I would really enjoy a version of Hamlet, where Hamlet and Ophelia are giving each other awkward looks to the camera, as everyone around them keeps going on about how in love they are, and they're like, Hi. Yeah, I know. I can't make them shut up either. Just go with it.
Dia: I think in a universe with less drama, they would have made an excellent lavender marriage.
Duck: Yeah. Yeah.
Dia: They would have both had their guys, they would have both had their castle, they would have been fine. There's space.
Duck: And I think with that reading, you can also sort of account for Ophelia better because Ophelia having some kind of emotional and cognitive break, I think is the best way to describe what we kind of see in the text.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: It's really hard to believe that that's because Hamlet was mean to her because we see so little of her actually being interested in Hamlet, caring about Hamlet, rejecting in the least when told to break it off with Hamlet.
Dia: Truly, we do not see any evidence that this is an aberration of Hamlet's character as well?
Duck: No, we don't.
Dia: Like he's not awful. He's not a monster. He's not even that much of a dick. But he's not like nice to people.
Duck: He's not. But their biggest scene together is at the play when he is like performing his madness for the court. But mostly he's just sort of lying with his head in her lap being catty, and she seems more amused by this than anything.
Dia: Yeah, like I can buy that they are friends. But it does think that it does, I think, seem like he is not a person whom you would be surprised to have suddenly be rude to you writes,
Duck: And I find it an implausible reading that Ophelia’s break is because Hamlet doesn't love her. And she's lovesick. And that just doesn't seem like it's in the text.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Also not in the text, but to me much more plausible as the way people would work, Ophelia having her break, because she has realised that heterosexuality is truly compulsory, and she is never going to get to do anything else. The oh this this is in fact, the constraint of my life is am I in a relationship with Hamlet is literally going to be the it this is it, this is this is the question of this is my personality now, this is the bound of my existence is Who am I going to marry and then I have to marry them, which is going to suck.
Dia: And also like, I think, quite distinctively, Hamlet and Ophelia do have dialogue that is, I don't know how to phrase this, sexually charged without being emotionally charged. A lot of dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia is, basically has a lot of slightly smutty jokes.
Duck: Especially in public, although to be fair, that Hamlet is also very much performing at that moment when his jokes.
Dia: He is, but the thing is that they are not emotionally charged. And it's the kind of thing that we know from other plays that Shakespeare can write deeply emotionally charged lovers dialogue. Duck: Yes.
Dia: We know from other plays that he can do deeply emotionally charged lovers dialogue whilst making smutty jokes.
Duck: Yes. Beatrice and Benedick do a wonderful line in being deeply sincere and also making smutty jokes.
Dia: Yes. Hamlet and Ophelia, however, mostly make jokes at each other and then don't communicate.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Like, shall I lie upon your lap joke is pretty much exclusively responded to by Ophelia with what? No.
Duck: And then Hamlet has to spell out that he was making a dirty joke and she's like, rolling her eyes. Fine. Okay.
Dia: Like, oh, what? Still no,
Duck: Still no, but now I understand that I'm supposed to be participating in a bit.
Dia: Like, I feel like it is not nothing that Ophelia has the I don't think anything line I have no thoughts in my head about you, Hamlet. Hamlet goes, there should be nothing between your legs, which is one of the greatest lines of all time.
Duck: And then he tells her to go to a nunnery. And
Dia: There's so much going on in there, there's a lot happening. It's just that none of it is chemistry between these two characters.
Duck: Yes. And I think it doesn't ring true to read Ophelia as lovesick, but it does ring true to read Ophelia as crushed by the realisation of her inability to perform heterosexual womanhood.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: There is obviously a queer reading available of Hamlet and Horatio, we've kind of talked about that. I, you know, I'm not going to make the case that it's fully in the text. I'm not going to make the case that you can't get there from the text, you obviously can. It is less explicit than some of the other queer things Shakespeare wrote. Some of his sonnets.
Dia: Yes, there are some very gay sonnets.
Duck: There are some very gay sonnets, whereas Hamlet is like a little bit gay.
Dia: The thing is Hamlet and Horatio feel I would say like the most like a lived in day to day queer pairing in any Shakespeare.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: I would not say they're the most romantically or sexually charged queer pairing you can read into Shakespeare, but they do have a kind of easy familiarity, which is not actually Shakespeare's bread and butter romance wise.
Duck: Yeah. You can do a lot with that pairing. I don't think you can particularly, I don’t think it works very well as a sort of mutual pining thing. You can do it very well as Horatio pining over Hamlet. I think you could also do something lovely with your staging, and be like, well, when we say schoolmates, when we, when we say they were, you know, whether we're at university together, eyebrow, waggle, they were roommates.
Dia: Oh my god, they were roommates.
Duck: I think it would work really well as to be like these these guys both queer. We don’t need to define specific sub labels beyond that necessarily, but these these two queer guys totally hooked up while they were at university and are still friends.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: That would seem right to me.
Dia: This seems very plausible.
Duck: Which brings us to my other take on Hamlet. This is our for the third time of cancellation.
Dia: Oh God.
Duck: Reading Hamlet with an eye to queerness in general. Do you know what I realised?
Dia: What did you realise?
Duck: It’s fanfic.
Dia: Okay, so we're going for offending everybody. We've said Shakespeare is good. We've said Shakespeare is bad.
Duck: And now we're saying that Hamlet exists in conversation with some other play that I haven't read.
Dia: A specific one or?
Duck: A play that would have been known to the audience. This is this is a take on a story that is known to the audience. This is why we have so many specifically named characters. Why the introductions are so weird. Because we have a lot of characters here who get, we get this little potted introduction of you know, this guy, this guy's back! In a way that makes sense. If you do, in fact, know this guy. And you'll be excited to see that this guy's back. Oh, it's Laertes, we like Laertes, we know what Laertes is about, which is why he has these two fairly chunky scenes with no other characterization because he doesn't need it because we already know layout is is
this.
Dia: Is this, Sorry, is this what I believe scholars refer to as the Ur-Hamlet? I cannot pronounce Ur. I do not have an accent that allows for words to have just a U and an R in them.
Duck: I guess. But not in necessarily in the sense of a prequel. This could be a missing scenes type thing, which also would explain why there's so much futzing around in the middle of nothing happening. We're waiting for the time to pass while the Norwegians get their act together to invade. I don't necessarily mean this seriously.
Dia: I mean, it is a very serious academic theory. Right?
Duck: The reason I don't necessarily mean It seriously is I am not a serious academic.
Dia: You shock me.
Duck: And I don't want to make factual claims about this, that I have not got the knowledge or expertise to start backing up. What I have done is read a lot of fanfic, and a lot of original books.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Hamlet when read with a view to is this queer felt to me, like a story told in the same mode as fanfic. Here's these characters who were minor in the original, but I want to spend more time with them. Here's these characters, and I want to see what happened to them next, here's this Canon event of Ophelia’s death that I have to put in because it canonically happened. But I don't really need to put in all the structural work to explain it, because everyone already knows that this happens. So I'm literally going to tell that scene from the point of view of these other characters over here watching it happen. And give us some emotional beats from these two characters over here who were not at that funeral in canon. It reads that way. To me, it feels that way of I have things I want to look at about this story that were not in the story I was told. So the story I am telling to you is focusing on these other characters and these other scenes, and giving you young Hamlet's perspective on these events instead of old Hamlet. Yeah, I'm bringing back some of our favourites. I'm killing off Polonius because it's really funny to kill off Polonius.
Dia: It is pretty funny to kill off Polonius to be fair.
Duck: And I'm making it just a little bit more queer than the original.
Dia: The thing is that, what appeals to me about this reading is in a lot of ways. So I read a lot of fan studies academia, and one of the things that bugs me about fan theory academia is it's very focused on the prevailance of gayness as a sort of very mechanical item. Like the two theories that irritate me most amongst popular theories of why fanfic is so gay are, one, all media is about men. Therefore, if you want to do shipping, you have to ship men. Which is.
Duck: I have heard this theory.
Dia: It irritates me
Duck: I have been in fandoms where you really don't have many other options.
Dia: It irritates me when you look at the the thing is, it's a theory that falls apart when you look at individual shows rather than a list of all the characters who are popular on AO3.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Like it's a theory that assumes all characters exists equally on equal platforms. And the process of shipping is simply arriving at a new fandom and picking the characters that match the things you like. And I don't dispute that that is how some people approach fandom.
Duck: Sure.
Dia: I think it's a push to say that is the cause of all fanfiction.
Duck: Right I think it is. I think it is an error to make that leap from fan work tends to be quite gay to the gayness is the only reason to do fan work.
Dia: It also just has big like, men-- I don't know what it's called. But the weird thing you get sort of Alpha men types talking about like men in prison or men in the army like, oh, they were situationally gay. It's like, oh my god Destial is a men's prison pairing. It just, it doesn't mean anything. It's just a very mechanical approach to an emotional problem. And the other half of the thing I find unhelpful is the idea that it's a representation thing, which I just don't I just don't think it’s the way people think on a really one to one level, I don't think, as a rule, people insert representation on purpose like that.
Duck: No, I think that there's, there's a sort of perpetually recurring, you are, the sort of perpetually recurring lecture that goes, there's not enough lesbian content you are all doing life, you're doing art wrong by not having more lesbians in it, because this is bad representation, you are over representing the men, you must all go and write more lesbians. This persuades no one to do anything, because that's not how people make their decisions on what to write.
Dia: Like, okay, maybe this is like my, obviously, like, I exist within very niche and I wouldn't say underrepresented necessarily, but like not represented demographics being like, within this smaller subset of the queer umbrella.
Duck: Yep.
Dia: I don't think I've ever watched a show or read a book, even subconsciously looking for where to put the ace rep in. And that's kind of the way that a lot of people in fan theory seem to think people insert gay subtext is just they're like, Where can I fit the gay subtext that I want to have here into it?
Duck: Yes. And I agree.
Dia: And as opposed to my lived experience, as a queer person makes me more open to readings which are queer,
Duck: Right, you don't come to Hamlet and you go, I need a gay pairing for Hamlet.
Dia: I mean you slightly did.
Duck: I slightly did. But as the person who is not reading for the purpose of doing that analysis.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: You don't yet look at the play and say, Who can I pair Hamlet with? You encounter the play, and you go, Hamlet, and Horatio got a really interesting thing going on.
Dia: Yeah, like you do not have to be wearing shipping goggles to think that whatever's going on with Professor X, and Magneto was a little bit gay.
Duck: It is a little bit gay.
Dia: Just a tiny bit gay, just.
Duck: Especially in the movies.
Dia: Oh my god.
Duck: Those two old men have got something a bit gay going on.
Dia: The introduction of, we're gonna get around to this at some point, but the introduction of the characters in the first X Men movie, where they’re on that walkway, and it's just like, there's no text. It's literally there is no text. It's just like a conversation about the plot. They just threw Ian McAllen and Patrick Stewart in there and went, you know what to do. And they went, Yeah, gay shit.
Duck: It's beautiful. It's acted beautifully, because there's literally the conversation they have is their disagreement about political tactics. And the scene they portray, is we have got a 60 year history of gay shit. And we are-
Dia: As someone in the minority camp. Like I'm very, I prefer them as divorced, then current datings I just think they're amazing.
Duck: They have a delightful tension of knowing each other's worst aspects and regrettably, still liking each other.
Dia: Truly. But my point is, what is interesting to me about the read of Hamlet as fanficcy is, it has a sense of a text which is far far more interested in the inner workings and emotions of characters than it does in the mechanical facts of the sequence of events being portrayed on stage, which is the most fanfic of energy unless you start inserting, like sex pollen.
Duck: Yes, that is exactly what I mean, this reads like a text where the audience already knows what's up with Ophelia and Hamlet.
Dia: And there are a huge number. There are a huge number of potential slash likely sources for Hamlet, including the Hamlet that I mentioned earlier when you brought this up, which is the idea that there is a previous play possibly even a previous Shakespeare play, which he's responding to, but also like I mentioned earlier, Hrolfs saga kraka because I studied at a university there's one gesta danorum, there's one in the Spanish tragedy? I want to say? Thomas Kidd? Wikipedia help me. Yes, Spanish tragedy, thought for a second I might have been French. There's a lot of believed sources. And the thing that's really interesting to me about it is that we can't pin it down to a specific source because this is just a story type that exists in this era.
Duck: Right. Right.
Dia: The bit with the vengeance of the deceased King and the pretending to be mad slash someone else slash poor. All of this is in the common parlance of literature at this time. And this is the version of that that is introspective.
Duck: Yes. This is a, these characters that we know and this this this sequence of events that we are familiar with, what's going on in the prince's head? What does it feel like to have your dad's ghost show up and tell you to do revenge?
Dia: And it is, the thing is, it doesn't need to be fanfiction, or an adaptation or a reimagining of any of these specific predecessors. In the same way that if you write a version of Cinderella which is entirely about her feelings about her, you know, abusive past. You don't need that to be a specific version of Cinderella, it doesn't have to be a response to the Disney version.
Duck: Exactly. Or in the same way, we had a rash of dark and gritty versions of superheroes. And what they were a response to was superheroes as a genre. And what if we made them dark and gritty?
Dia: Yes, and the thing that's interesting is this response to that genre has so dominated the cultural landscape that I don't think we're really capable of reading the genre without it.
Duck: We forgot the genre, yes.
Dia: It's kind of like how Blazing Saddles killed cowboy movies.
Duck: Right, you can’t play it straight anymore because now everyone's thinking about Blazing Saddles.
Dia: Exactly like sometimes a response to genre, so overshadows the genre that it becomes, as we said, in the Howl’s Moving Castle episode, Mount Fuji?
Duck: Yes, yes.
Dia: Hamlet is gay Mount Fuji: discuss.
Duck: Hamlet is gay Mount Fuji. That's our thesis.
Dia: Okay, new episode title, new episode title, forget what I said before.
Duck: Should we-- I think we should leave it there. I think we've said we've made our thesis we've come to a point where we agree on an analysis, which is nice. Shall we draw -
Dia: We haven’t discussed Sherlock.
Duck: Okay.
Dia: I'm not actually going to do that. I think BBC Sherlock might actually already be in the hat so we can get back to that later. However, I will say I don't know offhand who originally played Hamlet, but I bet he wouldn't have said weird aphobic shit in public. So Benedict Cumberbatch, how does it feel to be less woke than someone from the Renaissance? Okay, first things first, actually, is Hamlet going back in the hat, holder of the hat?
Duck: I think we should put a different Shakespeare in because my memory is that we originally wrote Shakespeare and then we narrowed it down to a specific text. I think we should put in a different Shakespeare
Dia: I’m into it. Do you have a preference?
Duck: Just on the basis of fame it should probably be Macbeth. But if you don't like Macbeth, we can do one of the others.
Dia: I was gonna say should we switch to a non tragedy?
Duck: Should we do a comedy should we do like Midsummer Night's Dream?
Dia: I love Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Duck: We could do Midsummer Night’s Dream because you love it or we could do Much Ado About Nothing because I love it.
Dia: I adore Much Ado, it's my favourite Shakespeare!
Duck: Let’s put Much Ado in, let's let's treat ourselves.
Dia: Let's, for a treat, we can have Much Ado.
Duck: For a treat, let’s have snarky chaos bisexuals.
Dia: Okay, give me a second. I'm gonna put Much Ado About Nothing. And then I'm going to roll some dice. Typing noises typing noises typing noises. My laptop has very loud keys.
Duck: They’re not coming through. It's all right.
Dia: Yes, I’m in a recording hut, which which makes everything loud.
Duck: When it cools down, the recording hut will be nicer.
Dia: Yes, it's quite warm in here. But I have just spent a week in Italy. So I'm sort of used to just having rivers of sweat flowing down my back at all times.
Duck: Podcasting is a glamorous profession,
Dia: Extremely glamorous. Okay, so how many hats are we on? 20?
Duck: Yes, I think so.
Dia: Yeah. Okay, I am going to generate a number. I do not have I actually I do have a 20 sided die could use that. Number eight.
Duck: What is number eight?
Dia: Number eight, religious allegory! This could go really really well or really badly.
Duck: My favourite, my favourite form of interpretation?
Dia: Well, you got to have queer theory, so I get to steal your baby.
Duck: I did. It's alright, we can put it back in the hat.
Dia: Oh, 24. Okay, I think that puts us squarely in classics. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Elder Scrolls. That's probably doable, but it means I have to learn about Elder Scrolls,
Duck: It's doable, but you probably don't have to actually play them.
Dia: Good because I will not. I categorically refuse. I don't even play video games I like.
Duck: That's fair. If a little tragic. But actually, the Elder Scrolls is great. There are prophecies in this thing.
Dia: Yeah, no, that's probably good for religious allegory. I just refuse to play video games.
Duck: We'll find you a nice let's play.
Dia: We will have to, because I
Duck: Will not otherwise be experiencing these games.
Dia: Video games are a really bad genre for somebody who has troubles with spacing out, chronic migraines. And poor laptop quality. It's kind of a holy trifecta.
Duck: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair.
Dia: I'm genuinely pissed off that I got Elder Scrolls. Because I was hoping I was very much hoping you would get it so I could just passively consume it rather than have to think about it.
Duck: You poor thing. But on the other hand, you signed up for this.
Dia: God dammit. I did sign up for this. Yeah. And then you put Elder Scrolls in the hat.
Duck: I put it in--
Dia: I read, I read Perne last time.
Duck: I watched Shazam.
Dia: Okay, Shazam was one movie.
Duck: Yes, but movies are hard.
Dia: There is so much Elder Scrolls. There is so much. Let’s plays are harder. Name one less player who doesn't have an irritating voice.
Duck: Look, are you gonna do it or not.
Dia: I'm gonna do it. I'm just gonna bitch about it a lot.
Duck: Okay, that's fair. But we'll see you next week.
Dia: Tune in next week for me complaining incessantly about Elder Scrolls.
Duck: Look, this sucks is a valid take for any of these media.
Dia: I don't think it sucks. That's the thing is if it sucked, I could say that. It's just that it's very not for me.
Duck: You'll have you'll have fun because you'll be doing a religious allegory about, you know, the prophesied defeater of hell.
Dia: I just wanna say, I was one number away from getting to Tamora Pierce.
Duck: Tortall will still be there.
Dia: Homohobia in action. Yes, but it would have been so much easier to do a religious allegory of Tortall-- I was two away from the Matrix. Do you have any idea how easy that would have been?
Duck: That would have been great. We're gonna get there. Here is my prediction for you. Actually. The reader is now going to write us many angry emails about how we should have done the Matrix anyway.
Dia: Oh, they really are. Okay, we will get to the Matrix. And there are so many schools of analysis we can get for the Matrix.
Duck: There is no possible school that is bad for the Matrix.
Dia: It might even be the Muppet adaptation.
Duck: I would see that 16 times.
Dia: I would go broke. You know how I said that I would grow broke watching art house Shazam.
Duck: Both two things can be true at once.
Dia: I have equally strong feelings about the Muppet matrix.
Duck: If there are any billionaires out there who would like to waste their money in a non lethal manner? Please commission art house Shazam and Muppets matrix.
Dia: Hire me. I've been writing art house Shazam in my head ever since we've made that episode. Duck can confirm because I've been messengering him about it.
Duck: It's true. You have. You've been having such a good time.
Dia: Usually while I was supposed to be working,
Duck: Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I write art house Shazam on company time.
Dia: DC hire me.
Duck: Then you could write art house Shazam on company time officially.
Dia: Look, I have still not emotionally recovered from finding out that I knew more about Moon Knight than any of the writers of Moon Knight. The fact that I have not been hired to write any superhero adaptations is an affront and a crime. I have more nerd cred than any of you bitches.
Duck: You heard it here folks.
Dia: Anyway. Tune in next week for my feelings about Elder Scrolls.
Duck: Good luck.
Dia: And the fact that I've been forced to consume it.
Duck: Join us next week for Dia’s feelings on the matter of being forced to have feelings about Elder Scrolls.
Dia: God damn it.
Duck: Bye!
Dia: Bysie bye!
[outtro music]
Duck: You've been listening to analysis roulette, a podcast applying a randomly selected mode of analysis to a randomly selected creative work just to see what happens. Your hosts have been Dia and Duck. You can find us on Spotify or on YouTube. And if you'd like to get in touch, you can send us an email at analysisroulette@gmail.com. And remember, if you like our show, share it with your friends. And if you don't like our show, share it with your enemies. Thanks.