The Thrilling Adventures of Ham and Dadlet

Are all of our books about daddy issues?

I know that its a stretch to consider this a daddy issue book, but everything Hamlet did was to get revenge for his father’s murder. Things Fall Apart was influenced by a father that Okonkwo was ashamed by. Oedipus Rex was a mess because of the father abandoning Oedipus. I don’t even remember a father in Crime and Punishment. All of the fiction we have read in this class (except for Beloved maybe, I haven’t finished it yet) have been influenced by daddy issues and I can’t handle that knowledge. Why do so many authors write about this? Are dads just horrible? I will never know.

Speaking of fathers, I changed Old Hamlet’s name to Dadlet for comedic purposes. That’s just what it is now.

Other than the looming knowledge that literature is based on problems, this unit made me much more comfortable with reading Shakespeare’s writing. It still invokes fear, but not the intense amount it did before. I feel much better about analyzing characters and plot for the AP exam too.

A lot was going on in the play, with a lot of themes and motifs and changing characters. I didn’t realize how much was happening until I worked on the soundtrack project. Death and suicide and incest and madness and misogyny and ears? (according to Sparknotes). And Claudius killing for power but then regretting it, and Ophelia being level-headed until her father dies, and Hamlet (affectionately referred to as Ham) deciding to get revenge and acting insane until he does nothing and actually goes insane and then dies. They all die. It was alarming.

I love Hamlet because of how dramatic and useless he is. He keeps saying he will get revenge or kill himself but he doesn’t dare to do either. In act 4 when he was inspired by Fortinbras’ army, he decided to be more violent, but he did nothing. It was both annoying and entertaining. Some of the drawings made me laugh, like when Gertrude poisoned herself and then King Claudius was just sitting there depressed. I lost my marbles (just like Hamlet). Peak comedy. I frequently had to stop reading to take pictures of ridiculous pages to send them to my friends.

I liked the To Be or Not to Be speech, only because I never knew that it was about Hamlet contemplating suicide. “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler to suffer the torments that fortune slings your way, or to take arms against those afflictions, and by opposing them, end them forever.” It’s ironic because Ham only contemplates his death and doesn’t do anything about it. He is a coward that is trying very hard to not be a coward but failing miserably. It adds to the meaning of the work because it shows how conflicted Hamlet is with suicide and how to carry on after Dadlet’s death, but it also shows his cowardice and inability to make decisions. His indecisiveness and cowardice remained throughout the play, which made him decide to delay killing Claudius, which ultimately caused his own death. This relates to a lesson of not putting things off by overthinking, and also that revenge isn’t always worth it.

Also I found this very accurate Tumblr post on Instagram that I must share so don’t mind the format.