Hamlet as Burlesque

In an endnote to the Mark Twain Library edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I came upon a reference to a "fragmentary Hamlet travesty" that Mark Twain attempted in 1881.  The text of this unfinished work is found in Mark Twain's Satires & Burlesques (S&B).  Entitled Burlesque Hamlet, it runs roughly 37 pages in length and covers the action through the beginning of Act II, Scene ii of Hamlet.

Notes in the University of California Press edition of S&B attempt to explain the origins of the Burlesque.  Twain's concept was to add a new character to the play.  It was a notion given to starts and stops in the author, a notion that remained ultimately an unfinished product. The new character, named Basil Stockmar, purports to be Hamlet's foster-brother.  He is a book salesman, visiting Elsinore with the intent of selling subscriptions to one of his latest pieces.  He appears in the action of the play, but he does not interact directly with the characters.  Given to occasional asides and monologues, Basil's part in the play is entirely accidental.  Twain intended not to manipulate Shakespeare's original text, only to throw anachronism into the mix.  His primary gag in the existing Burlesque is to have Basil state that in a drunken revel he has swallowed a spool of thread and then to recite his lines while pulling "a couple of hundred yards" of thread from his mouth.

The Burlesque is an interesting idea, but one the results of which readers are left largely to imagine for themselves.  The bulk of the existing fragment of the work is mostly Shakespeare and little Twain.  It appears that Twain grew tired of the work and stopped just as Hamlet has called Polonius a fishmonger and declared conception to be a blessing.  It is for us to consider how Basil might have affected the remainder of Hamlet and how his presence could have injected humor into the tragedy.

Within the editor's introduction to Burlesque Hamlet there is a reference to another such work.  Joseph T. Goodman, a contemporary of Twain, wrote his own treatment of Hamlet and sent it to Twain.  As the editor notes, "Hamlet's Brother was packaged and filed away among Twain's papers, where it still rests today, untouched anywhere by Twain's revising hand."  Perhaps someday a trip to Berkeley, California, may shed light on what exactly is there.