Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

[Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet in 2016 RSC production, screen capture] Some may think that countless high school students believe Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a girl whose dad won't let her date a certain boy, and the boy is later very, very mean to her, and he later kills her dad accidentally, and she later commits suicide, and later many other people die too, including the boy, his mom, and his uncle. Oh, and his mom's the queen of the country, and it turns out that she had wished her son would marry the girl (yes, the same girl whose dad prohibited her from seeing him). Ironic! What's with that? [Image via me.me ] Many scholars still believe Hamlet is mostly a play about a prince with mommy issues (ignoring the political contexts and frame). So what might average white people make of a mostly-black-cast, African-themed, 2016 RSC production of Hamlet, with Claudius in western military garb? What shall we make of the ghost of the king, the brother th...

This week, with the world still impacted by Black Lives Matter protests triggered by the shooting death of George Floyd in Minneapolis (about an hour north of where I live in Minnesota), I have been watching and thinking about the 2016 RSC production of Hamlet, with its mostly-black cast. [Viral BLM image, from Facebook ] Also this past week, people in the UK were able to view this production for free (and elsewhere, it can be rented or purchased for a reasonable fee ). In those 2016 performances and on tour internationally, Paapa Essiedu played the starring role as Prince Hamlet. This past week (21 June, 2020) on Twitter, he offered to hold a Q&A with viewers of the film, which you can find here . This week, rather than share many of my own thoughts on these things, I want to share excerpts from that Q&A and to amplify some of those voices. I include them here for those who are not on Twitter (and perhaps don't wish to be, or to use Twitter). I'll list nam...