Denmark: Variations

by James Tadd Adcox

Denmark: Variations proposes alternative versions of Hamlet, perpetually haunting the play in the process. Reaching back through the history of contemporary literature, from conceptual writing to Oulipo to early avant-garde theatre, Adcox creates a book of infinite (and, therefore, sometimes illegal) futures waiting to expand the boundaries of multiple creative practices.

Genres: Plays, Novella

92 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2023

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is awesome! Here's my review: https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/n...

[Luke Hillier · Rating 3 out of 5]

This way exceeded my expectations as someone who's never read Hamlet or seen it performed. Despite that, it kept me engaged enough to breeze through uninterrupted in one sitting. I really can't put my finger on why this works as well as it does. Ultimately I'm not avant-garde enough to totally love this given it's essentially a series of "What if"s but I don't regret reading it and it'll probably be the thing that finally gets me to familiarize myself with the source material.

[Garry Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few people have thought more about post-modern stagings of Hamlet - both the possible and the impossible - than Tadd Adcox. This quirky, provocative reflection on Shakespeare's most famous play purports to serve as a jumping-off point for six dozen variations on the famous play -- twice as many as Bach composed for Count Keyserling and his harpsichordist Johann Goldberg. It's a sort of "Choose Your Own Hamlet Adventure" handbook for post-structuralist directors.

Adcox admits at once that many of his imagined productions seem not only impractical but "impossible, whether for legal, moral or pragmatic reasons" (5) - leaving the stage literally littered with corpses, or cloaked in silence. In fact, "The rest is silence" could be the headnote for the collection; perhaps seven of his variations begin or end there. Other key concepts the writer explores, like a good student of Derrida and other recent literary theorists, are isolation, untranslatability, and traces or palimpsests -- all perfectly apt progeny of Hamlet.

Surprisingly, his favorite character is not Hamlet but the ghost of his father; nearly a dozen of his variations focus on literature's most famous ghost. Ophelia is another favorite - while Gertrude, Polonius, Laertes and Fortinbras provoke fewer musings. He is prone to ponder doppelgangers who seem to be always already haunting the play that Shakespeare wrote and Adcox revises in his mind's eye.

Adcox is a veteran practitioner of flash fiction, and it shows here - all of these pieces are less than a page long, sometimes as brief as a fat sentence. never more than two paragraphs. One might expect five sections, in allusion to the five-act structure of the original plays of the period, but the modern writer settles for four sections, plus pages of endnotes that are not indexed to particular variations.

Within the collection one can find hints of Godot and Everybody and Mr. Burns and Station Eleven, as well as Pinter and Paul Griffiths. Some pieces are macabre, like an oft-repeated arras-stabbing scene (46). Others are so provocative that one longs to see them staged, like the productions in which Hamlet is virtually indistinguishable from Laertes or, alternatively, Ophelia. Those are shows I would gladly pay to see. One of his ideas is currently being brought to life in London now, featuring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo and, most importantly, headphones for all in the audience. But the most poignant variation is the one in which the father who haunts Hamlet is not dead but suffering from dementia (49). That version will continue to haunt me, as I await Adcox's next fertile imaginings. May he be as richly rewarded as Bach was for his variations.

[Paul Hoehn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book helped me understand Hamlet better.