Ophelia Needs A New Boyfriend
Dating Hamlet by Lisa Fiedler
Dear Saralinda:*
Today I write not to share with you the joys of a good book, but to warn you away from a poor one. There are so many worthwhile books in the world that it would be a shame to waste your time with such a tepid, predictable, and stilted tale as Lisa Fiedler's Dating Hamlet: Ophelia's Story.
Now, yes, I'll confess to a touch of snobbery here. I adore Shakespeare-especially when your Uncle Richard is performing it. I've watched him and his fellow actors bring such fire and life into the Bard's tales that I'm continually mesmerized.
But I'm not a purist. I enjoy seeing the stories twisted, re-interpreted and retold. There is a richness and a depth to them that make them ripe for reharvesting. There are many people who have retold the stories well. Perhaps the best example is West Side Story, though Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is a personal favorite of mine (though definitely on the risqué side.)
So I don't think it is an over devotion to pure Shakespeare that makes me loathe this book. It is rather a desire for solid writing and good storytelling and an impatience for their lack that makes me toss this book aside as unworthy of recommending or re-reading.
In many ways, Dating Hamlet follows the traditional play. Like the traditional play, Hamlet's father appears as a ghost, proclaiming that he was murdered by his brother Claudius-the brother who is now married to his wife, Gertrude. Hamlet, urged by the ghost, plots revenge. He corrals some players to perform a re-enactment of the murder. Claudius reveals his guilt and quickly sends Hamlet off to England, though not before murders and madness take the stage. The plot spirals toward the end where we will have a stage littered with bodies, all fallen victim to vengeance.
The book, of course, diverges in many ways. For starters, Ophelia turns out to be the mastermind behind all of Hamlet's actions, staging most of the action and subterfuge. In the play, she is the spurned girlfriend who goes mad after Hamlet's rejection and her father's death. Dating Hamlet is much too cheerful to allow any of the tragic elements of this tragedy.
From the opening chapter I became suspicious of the book. The main protagonist as someone I knew was destined to die halfway through the story. Either the book would end with her decline into madness and death, or a subterfuge would be introduced to negate all the deaths of those characters we like. While the latter sounds appealing, it robs the story of nearly all of its power. It turns it into a fluffy nothing.
I attempted to withhold judgment. Perhaps Fiedler would find a way to work her plot so that it was entertaining, original, and clever-and not merely write in a happier ending out of an insipid desire to avert tragedy with no lessons learned or character gained.
I was to be disappointed. Fiedler constantly made obvious choices and produced the most predictable plotline possible. Anything that might not have been predictable early on was foreshadowed so heavily you felt like you were being slapped across the face with a dead mackerel. Even the one unusual twist was merely inserted as a way of severing a tie with a despicable character to bring in a more sympathetic and interesting one, thereby increasing his importance and involvement. It felt like cheating.
Even a poorly plotted book can be entertaining if it is well-written or has interesting characters that are strongly drawn and developed. Here again, Dating Hamlet fails. Fiedler intersperses original Shakespeare text with her language and then tries to manufacture dialogue to match the tone and rhythm. It fails. Her dialogue has none f the lyrical quality of Shakespeare. In fact, there are lines where Ophelia sounds like she is in a modern corporate boardroom spewing clichés rather than in Ellsinore. Fiedler seems to think it is sufficient to string together silver-dollar vocabulary words rather than create sentences that take flight with originality and power.
The love affair between Hamlet and Ophelia was supposed to be passionate, charming, and affectionate. At least, that's what I think Fiedler was attempting. But it felt faked and false. I didn't believe in their love even though I was constantly told how true it was. Instead, it just felt sappy and trite. The inability to stick to one era was also jarring. It's one of the biggest challenges modern writers face when writing period pieces. Let me see if I can explain. Sometimes when you go to see a play, there will be actors who say all the right lines with all the right emotions. Their performances will still be marred by their inability to walk like their character. They'll keep their own idiosyncrasies and develop none for the character. This book gave that sort of performance. The characters and action were set in medieval times and attempted to speak the language, but they often acted as modern people would and shared our modern values. At least, the characters we were supposed to like shared our values while the others behaved in stereotypical piggish fashion.
Further, there is no explanation for why the sympathetic characters have values and ideas that are so out of step with their contemporaries. Fiedler dismisses their values with a wave of the hand. Values such as the distinction between classes, bloodlines, filial duty, incest, and religious obligations are dismissed without ever giving cause or reason. Why should these characters so easily shrug off the traditions of their day? Fiedler never gives us a reason to believe it or a cause for the change. We're simply supposed to believe it on her say-so and accept that it causes the characters no conflict or self-doubt.
For example, we're supposed to believe that Hamlet is so smitten with Ophelia that his father's murder is only a minor distraction. Later, his loss of his kingdom is of so little note that no one bothers to inform him nor does he comment upon it. No such thing as the noblesse oblige in this supposed prince. And again, Fiedler never even attempts to convince us why this should be so.
What further distressed me was that Dating Hamlet ended by setting the stage for a sequel, a sequel that would be set in one of Shakespeare's other plays. This one installment was bad enough, I'd rather not see another play marred.
Fiedler's cowering from any sort of bold choice makes me unwilling to read such a sequel. The classics are not "improved" by whitewashing them of all horror-even if it is an effort to add pluck and spunkiness to a character frequently portrayed as weak and foolish. Fiedler underestimates her audience by sugar-coating everything.
There have got to be better fictionalizations/modernizations of Shakespeare out there. I'll keep looking.
Love,
Aunt Bridgette
Three years ago I began searching out books that my then 13-year-old niece would enjoy. In an effort to help her enjoy the books more, I determined to write letters to go with each one. I wasn't always able to write as many letters as I gave her books, but a few were written. After stripping out the strictly personal information, I've posted them here as reviews. After all, my goal in the letter is to get her to read the book (or in this case, NOT read the book), perhaps I can do the same for you.
* I've changed my niece's name to protect her identity. The name I borrowed from another beloved children's book, the princess in James Thurber's The 13 Clocks.
