Vaudeville Hamlet

The appearance of Hamlet in Huck Finn got me looking for other appearances of Hamlet in American vaudeville.  One resource that I found was Ray B. Browne's 1960 article entitled "Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy" from American Quarterly (Vol 12, Fall, pp. 374-391).  In it, the author cites numerous examples of Hamlet being adapted for the "popular" stage.

• "Hamlet":  a five-stanza straight-faced account of the play
• "Hamlet Travestie" a.k.a. "Zouave Johnny's History of Denmark":  in which Hamlet's "mamma" kills his father with poison
• Dan "Jim Crow" Rice's blood-curdling account of the play
• "Hamlet's Lament":  sung to the tune "Wearing of the Green"
• "Hamlet" a.k.a. "N--'s Description of Shakespeare--Hamlet":  to fit the minstrel song "Jim Crow"

Browne describes two additional productions of Hamlet on the vaudeville stage.  The first is Hamlet the Dainty.  While the plot follows closely Shakespeare's original, the cause of the tragedy is whiskey.  Hamlet's father is killed with whiskey in the mouth at Claudius' hand.  Laertes is an alcoholic, and Gertrude dies from an alcohol overdose.  Another version, Ham(om)let, Prince of Dunkirk, has considerable contemporary flavor.  Polonius, a Prohibitionist, is not mourned.  The Ghost is found working in a sulfur factory.  The skull unearthed by the gravediggers is that of temperance crusader Carrie Nation.  "Alas!  Poor Carrie!  I knew her, Horatio."  The play concludes with the "usual number of corpses" and with an angelic Ophelia grinding a contemporary tune on a hand organ.

As we have seen, one of the beauties of Hamlet is its adaptability to different settings.  American vaudeville provides us yet more examples of this flexibility.