Adapting Atwood (original) (raw)

South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play

Playing Hamlet is different from reading Hamlet. To play Hamlet—whether an interactive book, or any of a host of computer games—is to be promised choice. Yet, as more than thirty years of Hamlet video games demonstrate, such freedom evaporates in practice: players choose among arbitrary moves, shaped by gameplay’s own unpredictable structures of constraint. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that to play Hamlet is to depart from Hamlet, to leave behind plot, character, language, and theme and head south into a murkier territory of adaptation, remediation, and transformation. Inviting reflection about “play,” these Hamlet games return us to a metaphor that runs throughout both their source text and literary studies generally. In critical use, the word often elides its theatrical sense with broader imaginative pleasures (the “play” of meanings, the imagination, or interpretation). Yet Hamlet’s text puts it under different denotative strain, entwining three ostensibly ludic practices (drama, music, and fencing) in relations of power and control. The relations that Hamlet considers under the sign of “play”—genre, the ludic, and relations of power—have become central to thinking about how we use Shakespeare and the Shakespeare network, posing questions of the relationship between interpretive freedom and the vast structures of capital, knowledge, and privilege that limit and shape such freedoms. Contemplating playing Hamlet, this essay imagines a playful criticism that takes flight from both Hamlet games and a larger conversation in game studies about adaptation, freedom, and choice. What might it mean to think of the play of reading and of interpretation not as wholly unconstrained, but rather as akin to other types of play in their tension between freedom and rule? In their very invitation to leave Elsinore, to get lost in paratextual forests and wrestle with nonShakespearean cruces, these games materialize pressing questions shared between game studies and Shakespeare studies.