Making Slings & Arrows.

The AV Club as an interview with Susan Coyne, Bob Martin and Mark McKinney, the creators of Slings & Arrows whose first season was about a production of Hamlet:

AVC: Where did the Oliver [Stephen Ouimette’s character] come from? It’s rather unusual to have a ghost as a regular character.

BM: Well, not if the main thrust of your first season is a production of Hamlet.

MM: It was from talking about Hamlet, but a lot of Susan’s best ideas for the series she says and then goes, “Oh no, no, no. Too much, too much.” She came up with the ghost idea, which brought together about eleventy-hundred different things, in a really great way.

[Susan laughs.]

BM: The beauty of it, too, is that it wasn’t specifically a ghost. It’s really interesting to be having this discussion after you were discussing episode four [of season three] and seeing everyone wondering whether he was a ghost or just a manifestation of Geoffrey’s madness. He was always meant to be ambiguous. And remember when we had that conversation about should we have Bill Hutt see him, should we have Charles see Oliver, and how exciting that was?

My old review of Slings & Arrows is here. I really should return to it at some point.

The Guardian's Notes & Queries on Hamlet's Kingship.

A reader asks: "How was it that King Hamlet's brother, Claudius, succeeded him to the throne when he died and not his son, Prince Hamlet?"

Many answers. The last one's probably the best because as with most of Shakespeare's plays and the best of fiction, it's the rules of the world of the play (and how a production interprets them) rather than our reality which are arguably of most importance.

Hamlet: The YouTube Supercut (2013).

It had to happen eventually. Geoff Klock, an assistant prof at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York City has gathered together a couple of hundred references to Hamlet from films and television, crafting recreations of speeches, scenes and jokes about same. Too many to really comment on, but I loved the juxtaposition of Kevin Kline from Soapdish into his earlier appearance in the role [via].