"Looka Me, I'm the Force o'Wisdom and Progress!": Un-Crowning the Classic Text Through Carnivalesque Dramaturgy

Adaptation scholarship often laments the anti-adaptation biases that infuse what they call “fidelity discourse” (criticism based on the assumption that adaptations can and should be assessed only on the basis of their fidelity to the source). However, few scholars have acknowledged that since adaptors themselves are well-aware of fidelity discourse, they must somehow negotiate it; this can involve pre-empting, evading, or challenging it. This essay explores how playwright Michael O’Brien negotiates and even exploits commonplace prejudices about adaptation—especially comic adaptations—in Mad Boy Chronicle, his 1995 travesty of Hamlet. The essay examines both the carnivalesque dramaturgy of Mad Boy Chronicle, to illustrate how its ostensibly dumb comedy is really in pursuit of serious knowledge, and O’Brien’s paratextual strategies for guiding the audience’s reception of the play. While the play itself presents the generic conventions of a “stoopid” parody, O’Brien takes pains to frame it in program notes, interviews, prefaces, and other publicity material, not as a comic desecration of a masterpiece, but as an earnest attempt to resurrect the original source of that so-called masterpiece. These framing tactics serve to destabilize the assumed superiority of the “original” by revealing that Hamlet itself is only an adaptation. Thus, while the adaptation relies on and confirms the prestige of the canonical source, it also forces us to reconsider it.