Laertes - Tumblr Posts
And another thing. This blog is 100%, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a Laertes apologist zone. He was literally just partying in France. He should've been in the club.
I’ve always been a fan of the Hamlet Sr and Claudius are identical twins for a few reasons (one, the hypocrisy of HJr when comparing the two, and two, in the months following his father’s death, HJr might occasionally turn a corner or catch a glimpse and for a moment, think he sees someone else. and then after the quick realisation that it’s Claudius, hate Claudius more for these moments. he swears the two of them are not identical to him. the difference is glaringly obvious. Hyperion to a Satyr. but although he denies it, his heart has almost stopped one too many times at the sight of someone he mistook for his father)
but I’d like you all to also consider, in a visual adaptation (I like to imagine an animated mini-series) of the play, the only difference between HSr and Claudius is that Claudius has a large, un-ignorable scar across the right side of his face. Doesn’t have to be explained, doesn’t have to be like intensely detailed or a horrible near-gaping wound or anything, just a noticeable scar across his right eye, perhaps. An easy identifier. If you were to approach him from the left, or even if you weren’t paying attention, still quite possible to mistake him for his better. (And well, perhaps a Lion King reference if you will).
Hamlet (Jr) can’t help but almost fixate on this scar. It’s bad enough as it is that it looks like he could be Claudius’s son, so he’s drawn to what sets them apart. What sets his father and him apart. Even if he won’t admit it, it’s practically the only difference between the image of his father and the image of this vile, incestuous murderer. It sticks out to him. It leers at him; it’s the difference between the idolised good and damned evil in his mind. It might re-contextualise some of the things he says, but it’s not like he hasn’t been nasty to other types of people (like women) before.
Let’s say he ends up in, I don’t know, some kind of fencing match. One where his opponent wields a blade secretly sharpened past what’s safe, for the sake of this hypothetical. If this opponent had the intent to wound him, and hadn’t had luck in the actual fencing part of duel for the past two rounds, he might be tempted to strike at Hamlet while he was unaware, and not facing him. But if Hamlet, upon hearing something slice through the air behind him, turned around; well, he might be a little too late to stop the blade’s interception, but he might be able stop the rapier from wounding his shoulder by unknowingly shielding it with his face.
And if the blade were to make contact, and one of his eyes were to go red as blood leaked into it from a fresh wound, a shallow but clean slice lengthwise along the right side, he might have a number of things running through his mind. Pain, blinding anger, shock, realisation. He might hear Horatio’s gasp from somewhere nearby, which he could take as a sign that it looked bad-
If he didn’t already know exactly how it looked. What he looked like.
Who he looked like.
feeling righteous anger on behalf of Laertes again
like he’s kind of a jerk to Ophelia at the start. but he’s also sort of right. and siblings are just Like That. they’ve only had each other and Polonius for their whole lives and goodness knows how many times they’ve come to each other to talk about Polonius behind his back or to cry on each other’s shoulder. or the teasing or inside jokes or Laertes trying to be the one to empathise with Ophelia being the only woman in the family because lord knows Polonius won’t.
when Laertes warns Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, he expects her to ignore his warning. He’s not entirely opposed to the idea truthfully- the prince does seem to like her well enough. It’s not like he couldn’t see it working out. But he’s also both overprotective and filled with the brotherly need to remind her of how much he himself can get away with, and he knows what men are like, so he tells her to keep her distance. She laughs, and says she will in a tone that suggests she very much won’t.
When he leaves for France, after the occasional scarce letter from his father about the prince’s state, Laertes expects the worst upon his return.
except he thinks the worst is that he’ll come back to his heartbroken sister, crying in her bedroom, and she’ll tell him that he was right, and he’ll tell her that all men are jerks and arrant knaves and they all suck. and he’ll offer her a tissue and maybe a lighthearted jest at their father or the prince or men again or something to improve her mood and she’ll laugh, and eventually she’ll be okay.
When he learns his father is dead, something inside him goes numb. He tries to remember what he and Ophelia used to complain about, but he can't think of anything. Polonius was all they had, after all. And for all his flaws, Laertes loved him.
When he learns his father was murdered, he swears he'll have the head of the monster that killed him.
And when he gets back to Elsinore, when he hears of the circumstances surrounding his father's death and sees the state of his sister, he burns with an anger he never knew he was capable of.
When his sister's funeral is disrupted by the prince himself, claiming to grieve, claiming to have lost more than Laertes could even comprehend, Laertes finds his hands around his throat before he can even fully realise what's happening. How DARE he? How dare he put an end to what little service the king would allow to put his sister to rest? How dare he claim he ever loved her when his actions put her in the grave? How dare he pretend to have lost when he could not possibly understand what he put Laertes through? What he put Ophelia through?
It's only natural that less than two days later, he finds himself at the other end of a poisoned blade. A dirty play, Laertes knows, to stab at your opponent before the round starts, but Laertes is so beyond any sense of fairness or mercy by now. The prince is dead within the half hour, his sister and father revenged, justice served.
What he doesn't expect is the prince to take the blade out of his hands and return the blow. And as he bleeds, Laertes realises the fate he's resigned himself to.
What he doesn't expect is the look in the prince's eyes after his mother falls, holding her as she dies. It's a terrified, vulnerable, pained expression, the likes of which he's never seen on the prince. The kinds of emotion he was beginning to doubt the prince was capable of, even. But Laertes can see in his face that, strangely enough, they only seem to scratch the surface of some melancholy that runs bone-deep.
And of all things, Laertes can't help himself but be struck with a sense of empathy for the villain. He remembers how he felt after the death of his father. He knows how it feels to live without a mother.
He thinks of the desperation he himself felt to find out who was at fault, and he thinks about Claudius. He thinks about how quick Claudius was to encourage his vengeful plans. He thinks about how Claudius had the opportunity to stop his own wife from drinking poison, but said nothing. He thinks about how the prince acted towards Claudius in the time before he left the country. He thinks about how the prince was then, grieving over the death of his father.
Something starts to make sense.
There's not a full hour between them. Maybe, in these last moments, he won't be the only one avenged.
Laertes calls out to Hamlet and warns him of his fate, revealing Claudius' plan. Within less than a minute, the king is dead.
There never was enough time to get a further explanation from either party, but in the little time they had left, some understanding was had. Perhaps it was Laertes' empathy. Perhaps it was his realisations. Perhaps it was the dwindling clock, and the idea that he'd see his father and sister again soon.
He'd talk it out with Hamlet then. For now, his and his father's death did not come upon him, nor his on himself.
something is rotten in the state of Denmark…
Art Credits:
elena-illustration, earl-grey-tea-of-gloucester , charleshyde , fruitjuucy , bananadramaaa , stripedroseandsketchpads , John Austen (pls tag me in art of this play so I can make more edits LOL)
Audio Credits:
DT’s Hamlet (2009) , DyEdits! on YT
a marker i use to determine how ‘good’ an adaptation of Hamlet is is: how sympathetic is Hamlet as a character? Can they, despite all his flaws, mistakes, and occasional acts of cruelty, still make me genuinely empathise with a lost soul stuck in a vicious cycle of grief and loneliness? Is he humanised? Is he understandable? Do I grieve with him, for him?
The second marker i use is: how sympathetic is Laertes as a character? Is he portrayed as a self-righteous jerk, or is he portrayed as someone who’s completely right by the end of the play? Is he simply an opposing force sent to stop the protagonist or is his loss just as, if not more, heart-wrenching than Hamlet’s own? Between him and Hamlet do I view one or the other as either good or evil, or do I view them both as a contrast yet an exploration into the depth of the other? Are they merely enemies or foils?
Not that these factors are the end-all markers, but I do tend to find that my favourite adaptations will have me screaming biting banging my head into the wall all throughout Act 5
lrt been thinking again about a Hamlet Swap AU, this time about the logistics of Laertes and Ophelia sharing the Hamlet and Horatio roles of the original play. Slightly more emphasis on an Ophelia/Hamlet parallel, but both get to play the part.
Haven’t really worked things out, but the basic gist is that it’s likelier to be set in a more modern era, with both having lost their mother at a young age and having varying relationships with Polonius. But one day, Polonius dies of seemingly natural causes, and both are left in shock and grief.
Ophelia finds out, somehow, and quite probably in a non-ghost more actual-evidence manner that Polonius’s death was murder, more specifically murder via Claudius (that might have actually been an attempt to murder Hamlet Sr that went wrong). However, the evidence she finds is possibly coincidental and not conclusive enough to immediately jump to capital vengeance, so after telling Laertes of her discovery, the two agree that they must find some way to properly prove it.
Ophelia hasn’t been in a particularly good state of mind after the death of her father, but she decides she’s going to pretend to be perfectly fine and that she doesn’t need help in order to get people off her back so she can explore her theories further.
All the while, Ophelia’s boyfriend Hamlet notices that she’s putting up an emotional wall and tries to talk to her. His dad’s alive and well, and besides the fact that his girlfriend’s been in a spot of misery lately and he’s only just gotten back from Wittenberg to be able to comfort her, he’s doing otherwise just fine. He’d come prepared, having asked his good friend Horatio for advice on how to empathise with those who’d lost loved ones, and Horatio had warned him that she might act different and could counter-intuitively, possibly need space. Also Horatio is totally in love with Hamlet. So Hamlet does give her some space eventually, but he’s really concerned.
Gertrude also tries to talk to Ophelia, but she brushes her off. Laertes, who’s been less present in the story so far because he’s been off trying to figure out how to gather evidence, comes back with news of something new that might help them.
This is where I start to have less details figured out.
Hamlet eventually confronts Ophelia, desperate to try and help her, and she’s alllllmost contemplating telling him the truth and asking for his help when she realises they’re being watched, by she assumes either Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet Sr, or some combination, and so she decides not to. Instead, she yells at him, accusing him of being a terrible person and not being there for her and then not leaving her alone when she asks, for only wanting to get in her pants (i’ll totally explore her objectification in this one too and this will be relevant even if it’s not really true I prommy), and almost insinuating that she’s seeing someone else in order to break his heart and get him to move on, hopefully leave, because she knows things are about to get messy. It looks like it might work, and he’s super sad about it.
Blah blah blah, equivalent of the Mousetrap, Ophelia and someone else (possibly Laertes, probably Hamlet, possibly someone else from around the castle) talk, and Hamlet Sr, hiding in the curtains, gets stabbed. Hamlet finds the body (if he wasn’t the one to talk to Ophelia in the previous scene) with Ophelia, freaks out, goes to find someone to tell them about it and walks in on his mother and his uncles totes having an affair (yikes). It’s no wonder he goes mad.
Ophelia is sent away, and Hamlet is forced to stay. He does sort of lose his marbles a little bit, but instead of singing and giving out flowers like Ophelia, he rambles about death and talks nonsensically to himself in the court. And by ‘talks nonsensically’, I mean reverts to speaking in only direct quotes from the original Shakespearean play in this modern adaptation. see Gertrude or someone remarking on how he’s clearly lost his mind and is speaking nonsense all while Hamlet is clearly and obviously reciting the ‘to be or not to be’ speech to himself.
Horatio comes quickly from England, but the very night he gets there, he’s pulled aside by Marcellus to deal with something on the roof. That something is Hamlet, shivering and wide-eyed, talking about the ghost of his father. Horatio can’t stop the prince as he follows, slips, and falls off to his death.
Meanwhile Ophelia doesn’t have a Royal Sigil on her, but she does have a brother, and Laertes comes and helps bust her out during her transport, takes care of the messengers, and brings her back to the castle. The two seal their fates together, and vow revenge.
That’s pretty much where I’ve thought up to (there WILL be a fistfight in the grave between Horatio and Ophelia about who loved Hamlet more) but yeah it’s just for the sillies
I’m bored so here’s how each hamlet character says “fuck” the most
Hamlet- “Fuck you”
Ophelia- “Fuck that”
Horatio- “Why the fuck-”
Laertes- “Fuck no”
Claudius- “Oh fuck”
Gertrude- “What the fuck”
Polonius- “Fuck is a bad word.”
How Claudius saw Laertes when he tried to take over Denmark:
Poster for my college’s upcoming production of Hamlet! :^)
what’s the fiercest line you’ve ever read, and why is it “I dare damnation”?
Do you see the vision or do I need to elaborate
Hamlet: *stabs Laertes* I forgive you!
Laertes: THAT’S NOT HOW FORGIVENESS WORKS!!
Hamlet: I met a dumbass today. It was awful.
Laertes: You looked in a mirror finally?
Hamlet:
Hamlet: Someday you will have to answer for your actions and God may not be so merciful.
I genuinely aspire to be as confident as Laertes I'm not even kidding