'Enter Ghost': A Shakespearean twist in the tale

In Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a couple grieves the loss of their eleven-year-old son in a devastating outbreak of the plague in 1600s England. Struck by grief, Agnes and her husband find themselves torn apart, unable to communicate with each other. Until one beautiful moment, when Agnes witnesses what grief has led her husband to do: immortalise their son forever, in his new play, Hamlet. 

Hamnet, both book and movie, are bold reinterpretations of history. O’Farrell takes two simple facts: that Shakespeare lost his son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven, to an unknown cause of death; and that at the time, the names ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Hamnet’ were interchangeable — and spins a story that not only reimagines Shakespeare’s personal life, but also reinterprets his work.

With the context of Shakespeare and Agnes’s loss, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech takes on a new significance. In both book and film, when Agnes sees the play itself, it is an astonishingly powerful moment: it reminds us, as readers and viewers, of the power of the work to speak across time and space to reach audiences so far from its context; for the fictional Agnes, the performance has the power to speak across the veil of death itself. 

While Shakespeare plays have been adapted and reinterpreted into contexts from the animal kingdom (The Lion King) to ’90s Kashmir (Haider) to American high schools (She’s The Man), I am reminded of stories that do not just adapt the plot of his work, but engage with the thorniness of Shakespeare’s work as plays — stories that are about theatre troupes or amateur actors, who encounter the power of the plays in their engagement with them.

Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is one such: it’s both a retelling of The Tempest and about a production of The Tempest. In it, we meet Felix, a theatre director disgraced from his position, betrayed by a former colleague, and hell-bent on revenge. He takes a job at Fletcher County Correctional Institute, where he insists on teaching Shakespeare to the inmates imprisoned for non-violent offences.

“You think Shakespeare’s actors did a lot of reading?” he says, when his employers express surprise. “They were journeymen.” The inmates at the facility throw themselves into the work with gusto. And one year, Felix finally puts on his most personal play, The Tempest, where real life and stage life will collide in wholly surprising ways. Some of my favourite parts of this book are the fast-paced revenge plot, but equally compelling are the scenes where the inmates offer their own, delightful interpretations of Shakespeare. 

In a wildly different context, many years in the future, a travelling theatre company journeys across a devastated America, performing Shakespeare, in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Set years after a pandemic (and written years before the one we would experience in 2020), Station Eleven offers us a wide cast of characters, from both before the apocalypse and after, but central to the narrative is this travelling troupe, and a young woman, Kirsten.

Kirsten revels in the feeling after a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “the state of suspension that always came over her [...] a sense of having flown very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest.” Shakespeare’s words — written during the time of devastating plague — stay significant in Kirsten’s world, in a time recovering from its own plague. It’s impossible to describe Station Eleven in just a sentence — even in this paragraph, I’m offering you just a glimpse — but if it’s about anything, it’s about the power of art of all kinds, and what lengths we will go to save and savour at the end of the world. 

Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost takes its title from a stage direction in Hamlet. In it, we meet Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress who travels to Haifa to visit her sister. Once there, she finds herself pulled into the past — haunted by questions of heritage and belonging, remembering a childhood in a volatile homeland, and disturbed by present-day realities of the region. When she meets a theatre director working on an Arabic production of Hamlet in the West Bank, she begins to work with them.

Enter Ghost is unforgettable and deeply layered — a thoughtful investigation of the link between art and politics, a story of political awakening, and as with the other books I’ve spoken about here, a reminder of the power of art. 

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves. The reviewer is a writer and illustrator.