Bookshelves are deceptive; they make books look static, mute, orderly, easily wrangled — all things they’re not. Within a human mind, books can’t file themselves in rows; from earliest childhood they exist not in a library but in something closer to an atrium, in which they fly and collide, escape and return.
Books are alive, too, in the sense that they give birth: They beget more stories. It feels urgently important to show young people that stories have survived and procreated for thousands of years while the world around them has burned and rebuilt and burned again; that the books they read are at once ancient and new, resilient against time and against chaos.
Take J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” and its ancestors. Tolkien fished in the deep waters of Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur,” and borrowed Plato’s Ring of Gyges, which makes the wearer invisible. His most obvious influence was Wagner’s “Ring” cycle — which we know he closely studied — though he publicly disavowed it. “Both rings were round,” he wrote, “and there the resemblance ceased.” He loathed how Nazi propaganda had co-opted and distorted the Norse myths, and he sought through his seminal work of fiction to seize back control of these noble stories corrupted by tyranny.
Sometimes knowing the source material transforms a text. The plot of Alan Garner’s middle grade fantasy masterpiece “The Owl Service” revolves around a teenage girl conflicted in love and the discovery of a set of old dinner plates whose pattern can be interpreted as either owls or flowers. Gloriously opaque and strange, it makes considerably more sense if you have read the 12th-century Welsh epic the Mabinogion. (I read Garner’s novel at the age of 10 without context or warning, in a state I imagine to be very similar to that of having taken magic mushrooms in a primary school library.)
Perhaps the best example, though, of a story with a vast and ever-expanding family tree is my favorite piece of writing, “Hamlet,” a tale that draws you into the teeth of despair, then offers you the sword to fight your way out.
Shakespeare reached far into the past for his source material. Saxo Grammaticus’s “Gesta Danorum,” written around 1200 A.D., includes the tale of Amleth, a prince who plots to kill his uncle, Feng, now the king, after Feng murdered Amleth’s father and married Amleth’s mother, Gerutha. Amleth feigns madness and slays an eavesdropper in his mother’s room. His foster sister is a precursor to Ophelia. Saxo himself had cast backward to the saga of the semi-mythic sixth-century Danish king Hrólfr Kraki and his clan. When Kraki’s grandfather King Halfdan is slain by his brother, one of Halfdan’s two sons assumes a childlike disposition to evade suspicion and goes by the false name of Ham.
But Shakespeare also added new details to freshen the old. When I was teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates, the “Hamlet”-like story they most relished involved the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, a precursor to Johannes Kepler. In 1566, at the age of 20, Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel over a mathematical formula, and for the rest of his life he wore a prosthetic; portraits suggest his fake nose was made of brass, with gold for state occasions.
In order to call attention to his cosmological work, he cultivated a reputation as an eccentric. He kept an elk as a pet, which he sent out as an emissary to entertain noblemen. While visiting a castle, it supposedly drank too much beer, fell down the stairs and died.
Brahe’s death in 1601 touched off a minor scandal. While the cause was purportedly a ruptured bladder — due to his refusal, out of politeness, to leave a banquet to relieve himself — rumor had it he’d been having an affair with the Danish queen, King Christian IV’s mother, and there were whispers that King Christian might have ordered his assassination.
Another Danish prince who murdered the man who slept with his mother? It’s possible that contemporary reports of Brahe’s death, filtered through diplomats’ letters, reached Shakespeare, who was fascinated by news about the cosmos. Eleven years earlier, Brahe had sent a letter to England, to a friend of a friend of Shakespeare, in which he enclosed copies of an engraving of himself standing beneath the family shields of his great-great-grandparents: Sophie Gyldenstierne and Erik Rosenkrantz.
“Hamlet” thrilled London when it was first performed there. Just a few years later, in 1605, a footman named Hamlet in the comedy “Eastward Hoe” charged onstage and was saluted with the words, “Sfoot! Hamlet, are you mad?” From there, the power of Shakespeare’s play blazed through time: to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” in which Stephen Dedalus “proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father,” and David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” in which Elsinore is reincarnated as the Enfield Tennis Academy.
Then there is “The Lion King,” the Sistine Chapel of Disney movies. In an early version of the film’s storyboard, Scar is briefly victorious: He brutally murders Simba with the words “Goodnight, sweet Prince” before being consumed by a fire that lays waste to Pride Rock. Disney ultimately chose not to go with this ending, presumably on the grounds that “Bambi” had already inflicted enough lasting horror on the global childhood psyche.
With my fantasy novel “The Poisoned King,” I wanted to tell a story that would take a girl’s rage seriously; that would applaud her hunger for justice and acknowledge her thirst for revenge, in a world in which girls are rarely permitted their fury. So the book is based loosely on “Hamlet” — very loosely, in that it has more talking dragons than Shakespeare’s original.
I hope that my child readers will one day come to “Hamlet” and feel a small spark of recognition that they have been there before. Now more than ever I would love for them to know that they stand within a living network of stories that insist on the value of the human heart, beating back against nihilism and welcoming invention, onward to eternity.
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