A friend asked me to read this because I teach Shakespeare in high school. He (the friend, not Shakespeare, who is dead and doesn't know anything any A friend asked me to read this because I teach Shakespeare in high school. He (the friend, not Shakespeare, who is dead and doesn't know anything any more) asked me to see if I thought this version of Hamlet was worth passing along to our students. I wish it was. Instead of a solid modernization of an old story, Marsden has taken an interesting psychological study of a bunch of OCD sufferers and turned it into a hodgepodge mess of point of view, random events, and anachronism. At one point halfway through the story, I was ready to stop reading, if only to give the sex-crazed and unstable Ophelia a little rest. Really, why did I need to know what she does when her door's locked, or at what point Hamlet has a bowel movement, or that Hamlet sneaks out at night and strangles geese and tears up the garden. Shakespeare leaves room for interpretation in his play, but I'm much happier with the idea of Hamlet as torn between his love and duty to his father and the life he's led so far, which has been mostly intellectual. Action - especially action as dire as murder - is anathema to him, thus his conflict. Marsden's Hamlet is a borderline schizophrenic who wears jeans but rides places on horseback or in a carriage and stews for years and years. No wonder the poor kid's crazy....more
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