Concept
The play Hamlet, but hamlet is a cowboy
Hamlet has spent the past few years rustling cattle in the Wittenberg territories (aka, the middle of buttfuck nowhere Idaho), until he’s summoned back to his family home of Elsinore, Nevada, after the death of his father.
Hamlet’s father had been a prominent landowner, who headed out west during the early days of the gold rush to make his fortune. Elsinore had once been a profitable mining town, until the gold began to run out a few years back. Now it sat mostly abandoned, and the founding family was becoming desperate. Instead of rain or snow, the town was plagued by constant dust storms.
The family home itself was an old wooden mansion, sitting out on the far edge of town. It towered over all the other buildings in Elsinore, both beautiful and ominous.
Claudius is old and grislied despite having had a relatively good adult life working for his twin brother. Gertrude is a hard western woman. She has seen and done some shit. She has climbed from the bottom most rungs of society to get to where she is, and she’s worked hard to protect her position and her family. Polonius is the small town of Elsinore’s only remaining preacher, who has a tendency to moralize and ramble. He becomes particularly obsessed with his daughter’s chastity after his son Laertes leaves the desolate town to continue his schooling out east. Ophelia is beautiful and kind, but she’s also one of the town’s only women of marriageable age. As a result, her father is paranoid about men trying to ~tempt~ her, and she feels immense pressure to behave as strictly and traditionally as possible, even though she’s deeply in love with Hamlet.
Hamlet is frustrated by what he perceives as a lack of grief from his family. Much of the talk at home centers around Fortinbras, another local landowner who feels his late father was cheated out of Elsinore, and is currently attempting to buy them out. Hamlet copes with his feelings of grief and alienation by dressing in all black and secluding himself from the household as much as he can (mostly by exploring the old mines or going out to the edge of the property to practice shooting).
Hamlet is followed home by his friend and VERY close “companion”, Horatio (a Mexican born cowboy with a love for literature not matched by any of his fellows).
Hamlet is informed by Horatio, as well as two of his uncles tenant ranchers, that they’ve been seeing a shadowy figuring who looks eerily similar to Hamlet’s late father lurking around the town graveyard (built near the entrance to the old mines, so that the bodies of thoes who died in cave collapses wouldn’t have to be dragged far).
The ghost appears just inside the mines, it’s form partially obscured by dust from the storms and shadow from the cave. Hamlet watches and listens from the edge of the graveyard, next to the old, whitewashed church. Surrounded by the dead on all sides.
Hamlet still fakes his madness. He comes home everyday, covered in dirt and dust and an inordinate amount of manure, and will start rambling nonsense. He shoots his gun out of his second story bedroom window for no particular reason. He plays his fathers old, beat up guitar and Horatio’s banjo and sings bawdy versions of hymns. He slides down the old wooden banister like a child and smashes dishes and irritates Polonius with nonsense.
Claudius sends for Hamlet’s childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Despite being native to Elsinore, the two have been living in Texas for the past 15 years, working as ranchers.
Instead of a traditional acting troupe, Hamlet hires a group of vaudeville actors, who are passing through to research their upcoming Wild West Show. He still stabs Polonius, hiding behind one of his mothers bedroom curtains. Claudius orders R&G to take Hamlet back to Texas with them, where he’ll be executed by local lawmen.
Ophelia still goes mad, from the news of her fathers death, from abuse. After the hearing that the man she loved killed her daddy, she’s found running around the old church, screaming and shooting off Polonius’s guns. She breaks into the family manor, through the back door. She wears a corset and a ripped up skirt. She screams and claws and bites and sings dirty songs. It’s eventually decided that she should be taken to an asylum. But Ophelia, still sane enough to realize what that would mean, hangs herself from a tree near the family home, where she knows she’ll be seen, before that can happen.
While traveling through Arizona to get to Texas, Hamlet is able to loose R&G by hiding out with a local Apache tribe. There’s no violent ransacking or anything like that. He just waits till R&G are asleep, then uses his limited knowledge of local Apache dialects to ask if he can hide out with them until R&G leave.
Hamlet makes his way back to Elsinore, and (just after having a heart to heart with the skull of Yorick, the old prospector who used to keep an eye on Hamlet as a child while his father worked in the mines) returns to find Ophelia being buried, her grave marked by a stone angle with outspread arms.
Laertes still challenges Hamlet to a duel, though this time it’s at dawn, with pistols (and poisoned bullets). Hamlet kills Laertes with a shot to the chest. Laertes trips and ends up getting Hamlet in the shoulder, but the poison does the trick. Gertrude drinks from a flask Claudius had poisoned just in case, ending it all. Hamlet forces Claudius to drink the rest of the flask at gunpoint. Horatio attempts to drink the rest of the poison from the flask, until Hamlet uses his last breaths to stop him.
Lying in Horatio’s arms, Hamlet succumbs to his wound as the sky above him begins to turn blue. Horatio cradles Hamlet’s body, surrounded only by corpses and miles of dust. When Fortinbras arrives to find almost everyone dead, he orders the bodies buried before seizing the town and all of it’s assets. It’s too late though. There’s no more gold to mine. After Hamlet is buried, along with his family, people being to leave.
He’s buried in a ghostown. It’s almost fitting.
Please somebody draw thiiiiis
I second this
Published
Relatable FE Quote or Something 