Show Notes
What if Gertrude had more power than we thought? What if Ophelia’s fate wasn’t sealed from the start? And what does it really mean to mother a prince who might be losing his mind?
Playwright Lauren Gunderson, one of the most produced living playwrights in America, takes on Hamlet in her latest play, A Room in the Castle. This sharp, feminist reimagining follows Ophelia, her handmaid, and Queen Gertrude as they navigate the dangers of Elsinore, wrestling with the weight of survival, duty, and defiant hope in the face of chaos.
Gunderson, known for her witty and powerful storytelling in The Book of Will and The Half-Life of Marie Curie, discusses how she reclaims the voices of Hamlet‘s women, why Gertrude’s famous speech about Ophelia’s drowning might not be as simple as it seems, and how she crafted new ending that brings new light to Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy.
>> Get your tickets to Folger Theatre’s A Room in the Castle, a co-production with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, on stage March 4 – April 6
More from Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony of Santa Fe was established. While you might not immediately think Shakespeare had much to do with the Latinx experience, Shakespeare’s career and the Spanish conquest of the Americas fit into a similar timeline.
If you were Hamlet’s lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Polonius to be murder or manslaughter? These are the kinds of questions that University of Michigan Law professor Len Niehoff asks his students to consider.