More on Hamlet

y thoughts are still very much occupied with the overall approach to my forthcoming ten-second animation of Hamlet. It's all very well to say, "Strip the story down to its bare essentials", but it seems to me that minor alterations in that stripping down process could lead to vastly different results.

For example, you could concentrate on the family angle: Claudius kills his brother then marries Gertrude, his sister in law. He and his new step-son then keep trying to kill each other until they both finally succeed at the same time, managing to kill off Gertrude and at least one other in the fracas.

You could concentrate on the death toll - at least nine in the play (extra points if you can name them all - one step up from naming the seven dwarves or Santa's reindeer) - which, if all of them are included in the ten seconds of the film, would make it a gore-fest like Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Alternatively, you could treat the deaths like slapstick in a Tom and Jerry or Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, and there would be some macabre humour in trying to cram so many into such a short film.

You could concentrate on Freudian psychology: Hamlet thinks he sees his father's ghost, and pretends to be mad to deflect suspicion that he knows of Claudius' guilt. He prevaricates for a long time, then kills a person hiding in his mother's bedroom whom he thinks is his step-father. His strange behaviour and his murder of her father sends his erstwhile lover Ophelia mad, and she drowns. When chancing upon her funeral, Hamlet jumps into her grave to mourn her in an attempt to "out-mourn" her brother.

So, which way to go? I'm tempted to answer by saying, "Well, I wouldn't start from here", but I've invested a lot of effort in this and I'm reluctant to switch to another book at this stage.