
Shakespeare in the Bush (1966) - dmurray
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush
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guard-of-terra
I don't think you have to force rights, wrongs and emotions down on your
audience. You don't have to prove that what Hamlet did or thought was right or
convenient. It's enough to tell the story - and then listeners will have their
own interpretation.

Indeed, this makes any story much more believable.

Tolkien knew it in his Silmarillion; you don't have to agree with e.g. Túrin
Turambar on everything he does.

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lobster_johnson
Beautiful little essay. Read it some time ago, happy to see it here on HN.

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foxhedgehog
Usually this article is used to demonstrate cultural relativity, but I also
think that it highlights the plasticity of genre conventions.

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drostie
This is hard to summarize into a TLDR, but I'll try. The general summary: an
anthropologist gets mired in a village during a timeframe where there is
nothing to do but drink beer and talk; she therefore tries to tell the story
of Hamlet. This is complicated by the fact that their culture has a different
social structure, and a different model of the supernatural. In their model of
the supernatural there are just witches, who are always male, who can create
purely-visual hallucinations (called "omens", they cannot "walk" or "speak"),
animate dead corpses ("zombies"), afflict people with temporary insanity
("madness"), and drown people. (Yes, nobody drowns unless cursed to do so by a
witch.) The rest of this comment is a synopsis of the Hamlet variant they
create, arranged into play order.

Much like we view technology, for these people witchcraft is not necessarily
negative but can also be done for the good of others. King Hamlet (Hamlet's
dead father) thus becomes the Omen, a (veridical and therefore good!) vision
sent by some witch-elder who understood the truth of his death at the hands of
his brother Claudius, but was afraid of Claudius' new power. (There is a brief
confusion because in the original story he walks and talks, suggesting a
zombie, but they settle on him being an omen and the original story was simply
wrong about him walking or talking.) Claudius's two big sins are his sin of
fratricide in the past and later a sin of afflicting Hamlet with madness.
Notably when he marries Hamlet's mom the tribe basically yawns "yeah, and?"
\-- this is so obviously the right thing to do that they don't make any
further comment; of course your brother marries your wife if you die, for who
else is going to support her?

The tribe is okay with the nameless elder sending the Omen to soldiers and
then to Horatio, and because Horatio is a "scholar" he is therefore
automatically a witch, so it makes some sense that he can interact with the
Omen. However the tribe is surprised that he does not refer the problem to an
elder of the tribe as they need someone more wise to the dangers of
witchcraft, instead referring it straight to Hamlet. But they go along with
this, Hamlet sees the Omen which tells him that his father died from
poisoning. However Hamlet is wise enough to know that false omens exist from
evil witches, so he resolves to determine the truth of the Omen.

Now either events have to be reordered or somewhere before the storytelling,
chief Claudius bewitches Hamlet with madness. Certainly he is mad when he
interacts with his beloved Ophelia, and then he talks with his schoolmates and
comes up with the idea for the storyteller friend they've brought with them to
do a storytelling for Claudius which will determine the truth of the Omen. In
response to this story, chief Claudius in his outrage and fear apparently
continues to bewitch Hamlet with madness, but also sends Hamlet's mother to
find out what he knows -- and of course he sends Polonius the elder (still
Ophelia's father) to listen in, not trusting her to be totally honest with
him. Hamlet's criminal audacity in scolding his mother is chalked up to
madness. Then Polonius stirs and Hamlet claims that he sees a rat, but when he
says "a rat?!" it is understood as a hunter's ritual warning to potential
human victims standing in the way of the arrow, kind of like a demolitioner's
"fire in the hole!", where if you hear a response you should almost certainly
abort whatever you're doing. To save Polonius's reputation the narrator
therefore explains that he responds "It's Polonius!" after Hamlet's "It's a
rat!" but Hamlet kills him anyway because he's been afflicted with madness and
thinks it's his chance to kill Claudius.

With Polonius gone you'll remember that his daughter Ophelia drowns. But since
drowning requires witchcraft, the explanation given is that this was a
treacherous act by Laertes (Polonius's son, Ophelia's brother), who was of
course sent off to France where he boozed and gambled away his money
irresponsibly. The explanation was that when he came back home, broke and in
massive debt, he saw that his dad couldn't give him more money because he's
dead, and he couldn't sell his sister for a handsome bride price because she's
being actively courted by a chief's son and nobody wants to potentially piss
off a future chief. So Laertes did the only thing he could do to raise a lot
of money on short notice, afflicting her with the curse of drowning so as to
sell her innocent body to malevolent witches to zombify as they willed. This
is why he jumps into Ophelia's grave (to get her body out for the selling) and
Hamlet jumps in afterwards because he senses the foul witchcraft afoot.
Laertes therefore is pissed at Hamlet for robbing him of any benefit of
killing his sister.

Claudius sees that Laertes is powerful enough in witchcraft to kill his own
sister, and that is why he sets up this duel where both Hamlet and Laertes
will kill each other, one by sword, the other by the poisoned cup of victory
beer. The finale remains otherwise untouched and everyone dies, although again
Hamlet's presumably killing Claudius out of madness instilled by Claudius, and
we're never told how they reacted to a rival chief (Fortinbras) taking over
everything afterwards.

