la_marquise | Hamlet and Homophobia

There's a problem with your link, but I sought out the review anyway.

Oh, my.

Thank you -- will fix it.

It's possible the problem is at my end, sorry. Something is wonky.

Yep. Apologies. It was me. Firefox extension conflicts.

Edited 2011-09-07 10:30 (UTC)

Good grief....

It makes me sad. Back when I was first trying to write, OSC's books on writing sent me in the right direction, and revealed him to be a playful, humane fellow - the kind you would enjoy having a beer with. He even gave an example of how he potrayed a gay character in a positive way.

Now... it just makes me sad. Has he been got at? Has he got dementia? Is he taking drugs?

I never got on with his stuff, but I can see how painful this is for his fans.

I loved his stuff when I was younger. I think he does understand teens. But the Mormon church is losing its young (even as it is amazing at recruitment) and I wonder if his growing homophobia is part of a reaction.

I may have been just too old for him, possibly. But I found Hart's Hope, which was the first one I read, both distasteful and unpleasant when I read it.

Whereas that is the only one I didn't read. Maybe I should keep it that way.

I balked over the Mormons in space series.

Hart's Hope was pretty dire. But it is sad that the person who wrote Songbird and Ender's Game and Wyrms should end up the way he has.

I was never a great fan, though I enjoyed his books. I remember being quite moved by one or two of his short stories.

Before, I thought - oh well, he's a Mormon, his social views reflect his religion. But it's one thing to believe in witches, another to queue up to join the Witch Finders.

A thoughtful and intelligent review of a bad and silly book.

Teasing out unlikely interpretations from Shakespeare is a longstanding academic game but you're meant to actually base it on something in the play and acknowledge the things that don't fit your theory - presumably Card doesn't understand the reference to "country matters" in Hamlet's scene with Ophelia?

Card should read Erica Jong's "Serenissima" and weep.

Even the "Portia as tv game show hostess" Merchant of Venice production I saw had some basis in the play and makes the valid point that playing games about your relationship really isn't that clever.

It's a very silly book indeed.

I linked to the review from Amanda's post this morning and scanned it. I had never heaqrd of this person before. Sometimes you get lucky I guess.

The idea of the book would be funny if it weren't so deeply offensive AND unjustified by the text. As Ms-Cataclysm says, playing with different interpretations of Shakespeare has a long and honourable history. I once saw a Hamlet in NYC set in a drug squat. BUT the interpretation must exist within the bounderies of the text. The play described in this review is an abomination and has nothing to do with Shakespeare.

hamlet is my play. i love it. i read it as a child, love it. saw it in theater (hard on my bum) but loved it. to remove all of it's sadness and leave hamlet a shell is a crime
and then to use it so be homophobic is just atrocious!
:( im saddened in truth. that people would mess with other people's work to preach their own crap.

It does seem disrespectful: I'm never really comfortable with books that rewrite older works.

no. im ok with books that show another side, like wide sargasso sea, for instance. or wicked. showing a character's side that we haven't seen. but i don't think you can rewrite someone else's work.

If kids do actually read the book and then read or see Hamlet they are going to get a shock!

And I thought 'the curtain' Hamlet was pretty dire as it tried to force the play in general and Hamlet himself in particular into being a meditation on Catholicism, when it is plain that part of what the play is about is the conflict between the Protestant and Catholic view of what happens t'other side of death.

Edited 2011-09-07 11:45 (UTC)

In an effort to mediate the overwhelming wave of nausea and disgust that someone would butcher the Bard that badly, I would treat it exactly as it deserves: like fanfiction. Really bad fan fiction. There are reasons why fan fiction summaries have "out of character" warnings clearly posted.

From the review it seems like OSC boiled Hamlet down to the essentials, decided that he didn't like the taste of them and so replaced everyone with pod people instead.

That seems like a good summary.

Aside from attempts to rewrite Shakespeare for misogynists, he should also be done for crimes against dialogue:

"I don't have time for Laertes. He must know I didn't mean to kill his father," Hamlet said.
"It's not his father," said Horatio. "It's his sister."
"Ophelia? I didn't touch her."

Would embarrass a GCSE student...

Eek! That stinks on so very many levels.

I prescribe . View immediately and repeat as required.

(I believe it was written in response to a workshop session on how any story can be told in 3 verses. It was certainly used to teach school kids.)

I haven't read any Card since about 1989. Colin Greenland put Ender's Game on the City Lit's SF class' course in, I think, 1987. He thought very badly of it because it was space-opera. The class fought back on condemnation of the form, and Colin eventually wrote space-opera himself.

But the class didn't like the book. The psychological mutilation of children wasn't something we could enjoy, and the twist was obvious before it happened. I read Speaker for the Dead a bit later, and it wasn't so blatant, but there was still clearly an unpleasantly twisted mind behind it. Than a story in F&SF about dead children buried under a house ... and that was enough. No more.

ugh. My guess (and totally without anything but a pop-psychology foundation) is that Card was abused as a child and it's starting to come out in awful ways. A colleague of mine teaches Ender's Game in her developmental psych class, and lent me a non-sf card book. It was a thriller, and about young boys who were being stalked and were about to be (I think -- I stopped reading, because I don't need to add that sort of squick to something I want to entertain and enrich me) kidnapped and misused. I'm guessing that the Mormon church, like many highly organized religious institutions, is particularly good at blaming the victims and pathologizing the wrong things.

Elsewhere on LJ, Hamlet slash. Swiped from Papersky.

Speaker for the Dead has a plot hole a mile wide in it, and a misogynistic one at that.

At a local con years ago Card was the GOH. I was on a panel with him -- I've forgotten the exact topic, but it had something to do with using real history in fiction. Keep in mind that this was happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the end of the panel, Card remarked that he thought the Vietnam War was a noble cause. You can imagine the uproar. The poor moderator . . .

Him and John Wayne, then. Predictable, but... Yep, poor moderator.

"Hamlet Had An Uncle" by James Branch Cabell is as far as I am concerned the last word on "Hamlet" commentary (I enjoyed "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" but found it a little emotionally self-indulgent).

Card I stopped reading some decades ago, having got the distinct impression that he Had Issues and was using his fiction as therapy therefor.

I slightly prefer the Stoppard, but yes, those are where the sensible readers go.

I also prefer the Stoppard, but it had a different aim than the Cabell.

I have seen Hamlet and Othello re-written as Mills-and-Boonesque romance, but got rid of my copy of the former many years ago. Very badly written.

My favourite use of Hamlet, though, is Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes, one of my all time favourite detective stories.

Hamlet and Homophobia

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