Monday, March 19, 2007

Jury Deadlocked: Hamlet Remanded to Pages of Literature

So yesterday while reading the paper I came across a little blurb describing a performance at the Kennedy Center in which Hamlet was placed on trial for the murder of Polonius. Apparently, this has been done before in various parts of the US. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was part of the Washington jury about 15 years ago and "thought Hamlet quite sane and possibly also culpable in driving Ophelia to suicide." It's an unscripted performance in which actual lawyers act as prosecution and defense. This performance was tried by an actual Supreme Court justice, Anthony Kennedy, which just totally rocks. I would have loved to see this.

Here's a Reuters story about it.

3 comments:

Faith said...

That does sound fascinating. So just out of curiosity, what would your vote have been, had you been on the jury?

Izzybella said...

I always thought he was stone-cold sane. So I'd say guilty. How about you?

Faith said...

I'd agree. His whole point, IMNSHO, was to fake insanity so that he could find the truth behind the lies. So yes, guilty, guilty, guilty! He was as cold-blooded in his murders as was Claudius, I've always felt. There was trauma, unquestionably, behind his actions, but he knew what he was doing.