Let’s talk about The Lunatic, The
Lover, and The Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes, because this book blew my
mind. Be warned there may be SPOILERS in this post.
I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Books that have well-rounded bisexual characters are few and far
between anyway, and this novel’s locating its 2011 Lambda Literary
Award-winning bisexual character within an exceedingly thorough
re-imagining of William Shakespeare’s
Hamlet made this a must-have
inside my greedy little brain.
Hermes gives us a love triangle between
Hamlet, Horatio, and her original character Adriane, Baroness of
Maricourt. It’s not a love vee, in which Hamlet and Horatio are
each separately in love with Adriane. Horatio is in love with Hamlet,
Hamlet is in love with Horatio, Horatio is also in love with Adriane,
and Adriane is using them both in an intricate chess game for her own
literary and personal ends.
Adriane. Oh, Adriane. She’s a
difficult woman, and she tries extremely hard to turn Hamlet and
Horatio against each other (at the same time she’s trying to make
their love immortal in poetry), but you can’t end up hating her.
Like Lady Macbeth before her, she has to do what a woman has to do
for her ambition’s sake. Unlike Lady Macbeth, she won’t have to
live to regret it, and she won’t be punished by the author for it.
Recognizable lines from Macbeth are
woven into the dialogue and narration of this novel, as are lines
from a number of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets and other plays.
Sometimes they’re consciously created by the characters as they’re
creating art within the context of the novel, and sometimes they come
up in more organic ways from the plot. Sometimes Shakespeare feeds
Myrlin A. Hermes a straight line and she turns it into a dirty joke,
in the same way that Shakespeare plays with his characters.
That’s some of the beauty and
brilliance of Hermes’ writing. Although it’s written in prose,
the whole thing feels like poetry in blank verse. This is astounding
work.
Ophelia still gets the short end of the
stick, alas.* She doesn’t drown, and she does live long enough to
marry Hamlet and become Denmark’s queen. She even produces an heir,
although the little boy dies from an accidental wound. It’s implied
he may have hemophilia, which of course is something that
historically affected the real royal houses of Europe, after too many
centuries of intermarriage between cousins.
Incest is a creeping theme throughout
the novel. Hamlet is rumored to have an incestuous relationship with
his own mother, although Hermes never gives the reader any reason to
believe this is true. Gertrude is certainly unsure which brother is
Hamlet’s biological father – Hamlet the Elder or Claudius –
although this doesn’t make any genetic difference, since they’re
identical twins. The cheeky undertaker at the end of the novel tells
Horatio, in unnecessarily vague terms, that the king is marrying his
sister – what he means is that King Claudius is marrying his
sister-in-law.
Yet it may actually be the case when
Hamlet marries Ophelia that he is marrying his own half-sister. A
small portion of this novel is told by Polonius talking to Laertes.
Polonius – whose name literally means that he is a Polish guy –
tells his son that he, Polonius, was a minor prince in his native
land, although he was the youngest son who was never going to inherit
any kind of throne. When Hamlet the Elder conquered Poland, not only
did his men kill all of Polonius’s older brothers on the
battlefield, but Hamlet the Elder also took Polonius’s wife,
Aphelia. Polonius and Aphelia were married but, because she was still
a young teenager, their marriage wasn’t consummated. Aphelia became
Hamlet’s concubine, and it’s possible Laertes and his sister
Ophelia are both Hamlet the Elder’s biological children.
Hamlet the Younger marrying his bio
sister? Sounds like an acting job for Benedict Cumberbatch, who has
both played Hamlet on stage and, as a character in the film version
of
August: Osage County, has unknowingly had a sexual affair with
probable his half sister. (And not even in a bad way. Ivy and Little
Charles and two of the only humane characters in that grim Tracy
Letts play. ‘Tis pity they are whores*.)
Someday I’ll discover why Letts keeps
setting his plays in the Plains States, which he is from and seems to
hate.
Hamlet isn’t my favorite of
Shakespeare’s tragedies – I understand and enjoy
Macbeth better.
(I recently saw the 2015 film adaptation with
Michael Fassbender and
Marion Cotillard. I thought she was gorgeous and brilliant as Lady
Macbeth, but I didn’t want Duncan to die, not only because he
doesn’t deserve it but also because he was
David Thewlis, the actor
who played Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter movies. I still have
issues with Remus and Tonks’ sad deaths.) That said, I found myself
heavily invested in the romantic relationship between Hamlet and
Horatio. I’m glad they got to be together long after Ophelia’s
unprocessed grief over her child’s death sent her to a nunnery for
long-term mental health care.
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At first Horatio is conflicted about
his own bisexuality. He’s wildly attracted to Hamlet when Hamlet
dresses as a female character in the play Horatio has written, but
rejects Hamlet’s amorous advances out of deference to his
upbringing in the church, even though Horatio is not a religious man.
Later, when he believes Hamlet has drugged them both with belladonna
and intends to kill them both, sex becomes a lifeline for them.
Horatio eventually has to admit he loves Adriane physically, but the
lifelong commitment of his heart he reserves exclusively for the
Danish prince. Lady Adriane is Horatio’s first love, but Hamlet is
his true love. Hamlet, surprisingly (for he is infamously fickle with
Ophelia, including in this version), reciprocates the depth of
Horatio’s feeling.
Get that: They are two bisexual men who
commit themselves to each other, and neither one of them has to be
killed off violently and tragically. See, TV? Writers can do that.
It’s possible to let same-sex lovers grow old together and die of
natural causes.
This is a beautiful, poetic, and sexy
book, with complicated characters we think we know exposed from
entirely new angles.
*I'm not really judging them. That’s me showing off that I know
the plot of the 17th-century John Ford play ‘Tis Pity
She’s a Whore includes a brother-sister pair who commit intentional
incest. In August: Osage County, only Ivy knows her cousin is
probably also her brother.
John Ford is probably not related to
Ford Madox Ford, the English poet, novelist, and critic who wrote
Parade’s
End, a novel series turned into a
Downton Abbey-esque drama for
British television. The protagonist, Christopher (“Chrissie”)
Tietjans, marries a monumentally inconsiderate woman who is pregnant
with a child that may or may not be his, then falls in love with a
saucy Women’s Suffragist. It’s an Edwardian disaster and possibly semi-autobiographical. I’ve been watching it in
small doses.
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Because Benedict Cumberbatch.
