Oh, and she’s also a queer Jewish woman. Because I say so.
I get the feeling that reading Hamlet is a rite of passage for high school seniors. One most of us don’t enjoy.
[Spoilers for Hamlet ahead, in case you needed a warning??]
The language is difficult to understand, we’re all stressed out and burned out from college applications, and on the surface, the petty drama of this royal family of Denmark doesn’t seem to apply to our lives in any comprehensible way.
AND YET…
I have a very cool English teacher this year (the one who shows clips of A Bug’s Life in her Honors seminar to explain Marxism). So, it’s no surprise that our final project for the Hamlet unit was actually engaging, silly, and made me want to put in effort in the second semester of senior year.
Here’s the basic premise:
“This project challenges you to develop your own imaginary production of the play, where you have to make the choices a director would make. Your goal is to create a Hamlet relevant to 2022. As you work to imagine your production, consider: What issues matter to you as a young adult in St. Louis in 2022? Can you find analogues or echoes of those issues in the play?... What aspects of the play would you want to emphasize and explore? Which scenes and characters would be central to exploring those aspects?”
We would then make playbills for our Hamlet productions and present them in class.
So, what would a Jewish genderqueer young adult such as myself, who reads fantasy and researches Jewish history in their free time, want to see in Hamlet?
… I think you see where I’m going with this.
(As a spoiler, I already turned this in and got a grade I’m very happy with! Now, I’m just sharing it here for fun.)
Some big changes I made right away were casting most characters, including Hamlet and Claudius, as women. And they’re not just women playing men’s parts– the characters are female and use she/her pronouns, though the names are unchanged. I don’t know, I just thought it would be cool.
But then I made another major change, and things delightfully spiraled out of control. I decided that Hamlet's father had possessed Hamlet early on in the play, and was controlling all her actions.
Excerpt from the Director’s Note I submitted:
In class discussions about Hamlet, we raised a lot of questions about the ghost of Hamlet’s father: Is the spirit telling the truth about his identity, and his accusations against Claudius? What are his motives and means for manipulating Hamlet? Who can see and hear the ghost? How lifelike is he? These are up to the interpretation of each director. For my imaginary production, the spirit gets interpreted through a distinctly Jewish lens. The result changes the themes of the play entirely.
This production of Hamlet imagines the ghost of Hamlet’s father as a dybbuk, a Jewish ghost capable of possessing the living. A dybbuk is created when a person dies without performing teshuvah (procedures for repentance). This is an entirely plausible explanation for the fate of Hamlet’s father, as he declares “I am forbid/To tell the secrets of my prison house,” leaving much room for interpretation, while his vague explanation that he is “Doomed for a certain term to walk the night / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” sounds very much like he missed his opportunity for teshuvah and consequently became a dybbuk. (See Dramaturg’s Note for further explanation of dybbuk lore.)
Learning that dybbuks are known to make sexual, inappropriate references or advances immediately reminded me of how Hamlet treats Ophelia, upsetting her because it’s not her usual behavior. For example, Hamlet embarrasses her in front of everyone at the play-within-a-play when she calls “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” and doesn’t leave her alone, following up multiple times and saying “Do you think I meant country matters?”
I find it fascinating that a character like Hamlet might be able to face her “madness” head-on, as a separate being onstage. What does the famous “To be or not to be” line mean, in a version where two characters share the same body? Do they mean, to be the ghost, absolutely versus to be Hamlet, free? Do they mean to be united in purpose and action versus to be constantly at war with each other, neither of us getting what we want?
As Hamlet’s actions really aren’t her own, she truly means it when she says “Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet… Who does it then? His madness” in her apology to Laertes in Act 5, scene 2, and we needn’t even change the he/him pronouns because Hamlet is blaming her father’s madness, not her own.
I should acknowledge that we’ve cut certain scenes that make no sense with the presence of the dybbuk. For example, the ghost of Hamlet’s father won’t appear to her in Gertrude’s bedroom while she’s with her mother, because the ghost has been inside Hamlet the entire time. Likewise, the play-within-a-play is cut out because the dybbuk feels no need to verify Claudius’ guilt.
Of course, a story is a waste of time unless you can draw multiple themes from it, so not only is Hamlet told through Jewish legend, with a cast that all have Jewish backgrounds, but this production also explores the function of gender. Since Hamlet has historically been dominated by male actors, genderbending characters challenges how characters are written and portrayed as stereotypically masculine or feminine for their time periods and also puts an LGBTQ+ spin on the romantic relationships of the show, particularly Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet and Ophelia, and Hamlet and Horatio (all played by women). What does Hamlet mean when she yells “Frailty, thy name is woman!” while Hamlet herself is a woman, and so are all her friends, lovers, and surviving family? I’ve directed this production believing that Hamlet refers to all of humanity as “woman” the way some people refer to all humans as “men”, like when Neil Armstrong celebrated “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Hamlet’s world is very frail, very human, and from what we see on this stage, very female. She doesn’t mean that comment as a takedown of one gender, but rather as a “fuck you” to all humans, and if men can assume male pronouns of a group, why can’t a woman do the same generalization for her own gender?
Furthermore, by centering the story on a young woman controlled by a male dybbuk, this production introduces a new subplot: a girl fighting her father for bodily autonomy. This struggle is shown in the body language of Hamlet and the Ghost’s actors, as well as blocking and the splitting of dialogue during key scenes. When Hamlet is about to kill Claudius while he prays, it is the bloodthirsty dybbuk’s actor who gleefully shouts “Now might I do it pat, now a is a-praying” before Hamlet’s actor leaps forward, trying to persuade him otherwise. She points out “A villain kills my father, and for that / I his sole son do this same villain send / To heaven.” Hamlet may not like Claudius, but she tries to minimize the violence and stop the dybbuk, or at least buy Claudius some time with this interjection. Similarly, Hamlet regains a little bit of power during the nunnery scene, trying to warn Ophelia away from Elsinore, while the dybbuk still holds some control over their shared body. This results in a confusing and traumatic experience for Ophelia, where Hamlet is trying to save her but also physically shoving her around and shouting.
Later in the play, immediately after Polonius’ death, we’ve staged an additional, unscripted scene with no dialogue that shows the fresh ghost of Polonius turning into a second dybbuk and possessing a terrified Ophelia. Now, both Hamlet and Ophelia are daughters controlled and hurt by their fathers, a situation outsiders assume is just plain old insanity. Ophelia’s death, ending the war between herself and her father in a draw that sends both of them to rest, shows Hamlet what’s at stake in her own struggle.
This project originated from a desire to represent my Jewish community, in all its queerness, femininity, multiethnicity, and complexity, in a time of rising antisemitism. So, it started as simply a casting decision. But in the process, I realized that Hamlet as a play contains many themes that resonate with my experience becoming a Bat Mitzvah, navigating an interfaith and multiracial family, and studying Jewish history academically. Namely, it’s that Judaism is all about questioning, second-guessing, and ultimately having to put your faith in something scary and unknown. The dybbuk myth became an opportunity to completely reinterpret a famous, non-Jewish story, and then further opened the door to ask questions about gender along the way.
Excerpt from my Dramaturg’s Note (Research Note): What is a dybbuk?
The dybbuk is a trope in Jewish ghost stories specific to Jewish communities. While contained in one culture, the concept has spread between distinct parts of the diaspora over time. According to Agnieszka Legutko in “Feminist Dybbuks: Spirit Possession Motif in Post-Second Wave Jewish Women’s Fiction”, a dybbuk is “a ‘homeless soul’ of a dead person that enters a living body and possesses it and a uniquely Jewish variant of spirit possession” (Legutko, 6). Incidents of dybbuk possession have been recorded from as far back as the mid-1500s to as early as the 1900s. Yoram Bilu explains in “Dybbuk and Maggid: Two Cultural Patterns of Altered Consciousness in Judaism” that “Only mystically oriented communities, first Sephardic (in the Mediterranean basin) and then also Ashkenazi (in Hasidic Eastern Europe), were exposed to the phenomenon, and this selective distribution attests to the strong mystical basis of the dybbuk phenomenon” (Bilu, 349).
Analyzing 63 of cases of dybbuk possession, recorded in the 16th century, Bilu found that there’s a clear gender pattern. 65% of the possessed victims are female, and 92% of the ghosts that possess them are male. When these often-female victims were under the control of often-male dybbuks, they were known to display lewd, offensive behaviors with “sexual overtones,” says Legutko. The jewitches blog also weighs in, reporting that dybbuk victims “would cause great embarrassment and act in lascivious, immodest, and improper ways” (Zo).
It appears that being possessed by a dybbuk was viewed as a sickness by the community, and according to Rabbi Gherson Winkler, “special means are necessary to expel the dybbuk” (Zo)— the victim would require help to free themself, and not just anyone. Usually, a rabbi would need to follow certain rules and procedures. Meanwhile, both the dybbuk spirit and the victim’s mind would stay awake and aware, sharing the same body. But it wasn’t a peaceful coexistence. The victim would usually be very distressed, showing violent convulsions and speaking with a strange voice.
From this research, it appears that the dybbuk folklore is a reflection of societal attitudes towards gender and mental illness within Jewish communities, which then took on a mythological life of its own. Legutko’s assessment of feminist uses for the dybbuk trope has concluded that while earlier dybbuk stories written by and for men presented male rabbis as saviors and the male spirits as the main focus of the story, Jewish women fiction writers in a feminist era became more likely to center the experience of the woman being possessed.
Bibliography
Bilu, Yoram. “Dybbuk and Maggid: Two Cultural Patterns of Altered Consciousness in Judaism.” AJS Review, vol. 21, no. 2, [Cambridge University Press, Association for Jewish Studies], 1996, pp. 341–66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486699.
Legutko, Agnieszka. “Feminist Dybbuks: Spirit Possession Motif in Post-Second Wave Jewish Women’s Fiction.” Bridges, vol. 15, no. 1, Bridges Association, 2010, pp. 6–26, https://doi.org/10.2979/bri.2010.15.1.6.
Zo. “The Deal with the Dybbuk.” Jewitches, 4 Sept. 2020, https://www.jewitches.com/post/the-deal-with-the-dybbuk.
Zo. “Debunking the Dybbuk Box.” Jewitches Podcast, Jewitches, 12 July 2021, https://www.jewitches.com/podcast/episode/258b02ec/debunking-the-dybbuk-box.