Sondheim Supplement #33
A Mrs. Lovett-themed crossword, an exclusive Hamlet/Follies essay, and more...
The play’s the thing!
This week’s Supplement includes an exclusive essay on Hamlet and Follies, following on from last week’s Benjamin Stone: Hamlet essay. Our crossword, meanwhile, is Mrs. Lovett-themed! Plus, there’s more from our conversation with Charles Gilbert, Jr., a look back at last year’s interview with Anastasia Barzee, and, as always, there’s our survey of This Week in Sondheim.
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Hamlet & Follies: The Play’s The Thing
In our most recent essay, we looked at Benjamin Stone through the lens of Hamlet, focusing especially on the idea of temporal fracture. Today, exclusively for our paid subscribers, we consider another aspect of Shakespeare’s play that resonates throughout Follies.
If Hamlet interrogates what it means for time to be “out of joint,” it also shows us that when time fractures, theatre rushes in to fill the gap. Deprived of certainty, Hamlet turns to performance to make the world legible. He stages The Mousetrap not only to “catch the conscience of the king” but to test the very foundations of his reality. If Claudius reacts, the ghost was true; if not, Hamlet must face the possibility that he has been deceived, or worse, that his own mind has betrayed him. The play is supposed to deliver clarity.