Inside Hamlet’s Head with Jeremy McCarter

What if, instead of just watching Hamlet, you could step inside the prince’s mind?

A revelatory new audio production reimagines Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy as a first-person experience told solely through Hamlet’s POV. We hear only the scenes in which he appears—every soliloquy becoming an inner monologue, every whisper a voice in our ears. With stunning binaural sound design by Tony Award–winner Mikhail Fiksel and an intimate, close-mic performance by Daniel Kyri (NBC’s “Chicago Fire”) as the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet is transformed into a deeply personal journey through grief, paranoia, memory, and resolve.

The six-episode podcast of Hamlet is produced by Make-Believe Association, an audio storytelling group based in Chicago. The production, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, includes performances by John Douglas Thompson as Claudius (and the Ghost), Sharon Washington as Gertrude, Jacob Ming-Trent as Polonius, and Anna Deavere Smith as the Player King. Daveed Diggs performs the prologue.

In this episode, adapter and director Jeremy McCarter shares how technology unlocked new layers of intimacy and urgency in Shakespeare’s play—and why, more than 400 years later, Hamlet’s questions still resonate.

>>>Listen to Hamlet at hamlet.fm or wherever you get your podcasts. Headphones heighten the experience!

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 29, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Jeremy McCarter founded Make-Believe Association in 2017 after five years on the artistic staff of the Public Theater in New York. For the company, he adapted The Lost Books of the Odyssey; co-wrote City on Fire: Chicago Race Riot 1919 (with Natalie Moore); co-created and co-wrote the acclaimed epic Lake Song (Tribeca Festival Audio Premiere, winner of three Signal Awards), and adapted and directed the audacious new take on Hamlet. His books include Young Radicals; Hamilton: The Revolution (with Lin-Manuel Miranda); and Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen (with Jon M. Chu). He has written about culture and politics for New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He is the literary executor of the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder.

Previous:
Shakespeare, Money, and Meaning-Making

[Music]

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades.]

KARIM-COOPER: What’s the most intimate production of a Shakespeare play you’ve ever seen?

Maybe you were sitting in a black box theater…

Or in front-row seats at a production in the round.

Or maybe a film version that made you feel like you were in the room with the characters.

Well, a new audio-only production of Hamlet attempts to put you directly into Hamlet’s shoes—or, maybe, his ears.

This Hamlet stars Daniel Kyri in the title role, with John Douglas Thompson as Claudius and Sharon Washington as Gertrude. Jeremy McCarter directed.

What sets this production apart is the way it tells the story entirely through Hamlet’s point of view. That means we don’t hear any scenes that Hamlet doesn’t witness. And thanks to sound design by Mikhail Fiksel, what we do hear sounds like it’s coming directly from inside Hamlet’s head.

Hamlet is a production of Make-Believe Association, an audio drama studio based in Chicago. They’ve released it as a six-episode podcast, and it’s free to listen to at hamlet.fm.

We’ll open with a clip from the first moments of the production. Daveed Diggs performs the prologue, followed by Daniel Kyri as Hamlet.

Then, director Jeremy McCarter speaks with Barbara Bogaev.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. Opening Gasp. Daniel Kyri is Hamlet]

BACKGROUND NOISE: Voices, people speaking

HAMLET: Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! 

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, end of clip]

BARBARA BOGAEV: I really enjoy how you place us right in the middle of the action in this production, in terms of the audio. I’m thinking of the in-character Shakespeare-y plea to wear headphones and that gasp right at the top and you skip to Hamlet’s, “Oh, that this two solid flesh should melt” soliloquy from Act One, Scene Two. Beginnings are so important. Maybe you could tell us how you thought about this beginning for this very particular production.

JEREMY MCCARTER: Sure. We went into this in the mood of experiments. The original impulse was to use the superpower of audio, which is that when you’re wearing headphones, the voices are not coming at you from the other side of the room, they’re coming at you from inside your head. To immerse people in Hamlet’s point of view, to let people hear the story the way that Hamlet might be hearing it, and when he’s talking to himself, it feels like you are talking to yourself, that’s what we had going into production, hoping that it was going to work.

And what we discovered is that there is this very delicate negotiation that we’re making with the audience. We want you to feel that the things that happen to Hamlet happen to you. And so, the first thing we have to do is to establish Hamlet, to sort of physicalize him, even though all you have to go on is, you know, what’s coming into your headphones.

The version that you’re hearing in the finished Hamlet is not the one we started with. We felt like we needed to set up Hamlet as a figure, and that’s why the breath is there. We needed to set up the fact that there’s a difference between what’s going on in the world around him, which is why we have that sort of background, crowd noise, and then set up that it’s going to be different when he is talking to himself. We mic’d it differently, you know, Daniel Kyri, the incredible performer who plays Hamlet, delivered those lines differently. And then the gasp at the beginning, I shared this with a friend of mine who knows Shakespeare inside out and just said, “Tell me what you think.” And he pointed out that there is something powerful in the original play when it starts with the ghost popping up and scaring everybody. I really took that to heart and thought, “Yeah, there should be something unsettling at the top and I don’t know what it is.”

BOGAEV: Ah, hence the gasp.

MCCARTER: Hence the gasp.

BOGAEV: Okay. And just to pick up on something, you said that he delivered the lines of the soliloquy differently. What do you mean by that? Differently than what?

MCCARTER: Than pretty much everyone who’s ever played Hamlet in 425 years. The power of Hamlet is that you are invited into his mind to hear him talking to himself.

Usually, the tradeoff you make is that you’re doing that for two thousand, three thousand people. So, the intimacy that you’re getting is an intimacy with an actor who is projecting from his diaphragm—he needs to hit the back of the theater. Or you’re seeing it in a movie where, you know, the way movies are made, there are 50 people on set, and cameras and lights and makeup, and everything else.

Daniel, in doing those soliloquies, probably is one of a handful of actors who’s ever gotten to do it where he was alone in a room, in a studio. Dim lights, just literally talking to himself. There is a kind of intimacy that we were able to achieve with this that the technology made possible. But we needed Daniel and this incredible vulnerability that he puts in his voice to create the effect.

BOGAEV: Right, that intimacy of audio. I want to talk about this binaural mic right now because there’s a really good example, also in the beginning of the play, of how you use it to put us in the scene in Hamlet’s head and in our head and kind of in the middle of the action. It’s when Claudius, and he’s played here by John Douglas Thompson, wonderfully, unctuously.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. John Douglas Thompson is Claudius.]

CLAUDIUS: (…) our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, end of clip]

BOGAEV: And he’s, “Blah, blah, God” and praising his queen and is summing up his doings in this self-congratulatory way.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. John Douglas Thompson is Claudius.]

CLAUDIUS: Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, end of clip]

BOGAEV: And we hear Gertrude’s, kind of, fake coquettish laugh in one ear and we hear Hamlet’s snort in our other ear.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. John Douglas Thompson is Claudius.]

CLAUDIUS: Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy,
(…)

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, end of clip]

BOGAEV: So, first, explain for people who don’t know what a binaural mic is what that is? And tell us about what that does for your production to be able to work with that kind of technology?

MCCARTER: Sure. It’s partly the way that you record something and then it’s the way that an audience experiences it. So, when we had Daniel performing Hamlet in the studio, he had, I think, four different microphones on. Two of them are binaural mics, which were in his ears, sort of like AirPods, almost. When the actors were performing opposite him, the sound was getting into those, so that when you listen to the playback, it sounds like you were the one standing in Daniel’s shoes and it was happening to you.

So with binaural sound, that gives us the ability to be unbelievably realistic. The moment that you’re describing, we just thought, “How do we establish Claudius just using sound?” How can we give listeners a sense of—unctuous is a good word for it—how calculating he is, the snares that he’s setting for Hamlet, just very subtly. And we thought, “Well, what if he’s sort of pacing back and forth in front of Hamlet? What if he’s being a little bit hypnotic, almost like a cobra, getting closer and closer?”

The other thing you get from binaural is the proximity. Can we make the audience feel by the end of this long speech that Claudius is giving, that you are nose to nose with John Douglas Thompson, as he is trying to coax you into not leaving Elsinore?”

The response we’re getting from people is really gratifying that you really feel like you’re there, and when John taps on Daniel’s shoulder, it’s your left shoulder that’s being tapped.

BOGAEV: And that’s true. It feels as if you’re literally in between John Douglas Thompson as Claudius and Sharon Washington as Gertrude.

MCCARTER: Right!

BOGAEV: It’s kind of beyond immersive. I always—I think of binaural miking as like a stereo on steroids.

MCCARTER: Sure. Yeah, that’s it. It’s sort of stereo where there’s a left and a right, but it’s even more dynamic than that, with your ability to place things and move things. Again, this is the layman’s understanding. Mikhail Fiksel, our brilliant sound designer, and I decided early the  division of labor—there’s a world of unbelievably intricate technical work that goes into all of this stuff. We decided early on I’m not going to understand any of that, that’s going to be his realm and my realm is going to be, as closely as possible, to listen to the sound design and say, “This is what I’m hearing. And what if we try this?” So, that all of this sort of technical stuff, that’s coming from his creativity and his inspiration, and that’s a good example of it.

BOGAEV: Well, if I can keep asking you about the technical aspect of it, because it’s just so distinctive, moving on in the play, you switched the Hamlet soliloquy ,”That it should come to this” and it’s presented as this inner monologue while Claudius is droning on, which I really love.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. John Douglas Thompson is Claudius and Daniel Kyri is Hamlet.]

CLAUDIUS: Young Fortinbras, Holding a weak supposal of our worth
Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death
Our state to be …

HAMLET: That it should come to this.
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr (…)

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, end of clip]

BOGAEV: Why don’t you tell us about those sound elements that you work with to create this feeling that we’re inside Hamlet’s head, as you said earlier? Because it is so central to the production. And there’s reverb. There’s a lot going on there.

MCCARTER: Sure. Yeah. Those first couple minutes technically are tricky. It took a couple of passes to figure out exactly how to do it. How do we make the audience understand that they’re hearing this through his ears?

So, you know, when he has a negative reaction to something and is exasperated and sigh or grunts, that you would hear more clearly than you would hear something happening across the room. And how do we create this sense of his inner reality that is more real to him than the things that are happening outside him?

BOGAEV: Yes. Because you fade down on Claudius, but he’s still in the background, and he’s sounds like how the adults sound in a Peanuts movie, like, “Wah, wah, wah.”

MCCARTER: That’s the analogy that we use—good call, Barbara. We thought, “And then Claudius goes into Charlie Brown mode and we just were sort of dimly aware.” It happens in a few instances later in the series too, where—again, the miracle of Hamlet for 425 years is, if you ask me, there is nothing in the English language that does a more powerful, more vivid job of helping you understand what it’s like to experience someone else thinking—we needed to use every tool at our disposal to be as vivid, and clear, and evocative as the text is in creating that sensation.

BOGAEV: Okay. Some big thematic Hamlet questions. We’ve had a lot of people on this podcast arguing that Hamlet only feigns madness.

MCCARTER: Yes, yes.

BOGAEV: So, what’s your take and how did it shape the production?

MCCARTER: Before we started recording, we had a number of conversations that involved obviously Daniel, Mikhail Fiksel, the sound designer, Sydney Charles, the associate director, Emilia LaPenta, the other executive producer and I. We talked about it because it’s really important, particularly when you’re recording this thing and pieces are out of order, that we’re all very, very clear on the story that we’re telling. And we took our cues from Daniel. I asked him, “Is he feigning? The way you are playing this, are you going to be pretending that you’re going mad or is it going to be real?” And the way Daniel approaches it, it’s not feigned. He thinks that his reality is under attack. His sense of the world and how it’s supposed to work is being challenged. Every scene there is something coming at him that is not supposed to be possible.

Hamlet himself uses the phrase, “Thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.” And it gets to him. You can hear it the way Daniel plays it in those later episodes where there’s this, kind of like, ratcheting up of tension. More and more adrenaline. Building and building through the mousetrap and into the terrible, you know, encounter with Gertrude when he kills Polonius. And it’s just more than the guy can handle.

BOGAEV: How did you think about the sound as the play goes on and his mania? Or perhaps—definitely his madness intensifies and you do layer in even more effects.

MCCARTER: Sure. The premise is that we are going to put the audience inside Hamlet’s head. And we’re putting them inside his head when he’s not having just another day at the office. There’s a lot going on internally and externally and how do we capture the reality of that? How subjective do we want to be in this very subjective approach to Hamlet?

It was a lot of moment-to-moment decision making. I had this thought going in that I wanted to be as fastidious as I could be with the source material. So, part of it was I wanted to play it straight that Elsinore is, in a sense, a kind of snow globe where we are not going to introduce music that Hamlet hasn’t heard. There is no score per se anywhere in this. It’s only things that Hamlet has heard that he’s remembering, and that are coming back distorted. There are voices in his head, but there are voices that you heard too in an earlier part of the series, so that it’s kind of like—

BOGAEV: Oh, so, in, say, amusement park analogy, you stay within the berm, within the walls?

MCCARTER: Yeah, everything that Hamlet hears in the course of the series is something that you have heard in the course of the series, even the musical themes.

Not to spoil anything, but as his sanity cracks, as we get later and later in the story, there is music in his head but it is a distorted version of music that you’ve heard a couple of episodes back. You know, I sat for Mikhail and for Nygel D. Robinson, who were primarily responsible for the music in this, and I said, “Let’s not have this sound like Radiohead.” I love Radiohead, but I said, “Let’s try to get the effect of that kind of jagged, unsettling, disordered world, but not using the technological tools that are available to us in the 21st century. Let’s get there by changing the musical language or running things backwards or whatever.” You know, this is another one of those things that’s their realm, not mine, but how can we use the tools of Shakespeare’s era to get the effects that we want in ours?

BOGAEV: Wow. Okay, well let’s get to that editing question because you had to cut out all the scenes Hamlet doesn’t appear in and that really complicates things because we miss crucial information like Gertrude and Claudius commanding Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet. And Polonius plotting to have Ophelia spy on him. So, how did you think about maintaining coherence and depth to all of the themes but especially that theme of surveillance while you’re staying within Hamlet’s head?

MCCARTER: Sure. The first big question way back at the beginning was, “Does this work at all? It sounds cool.”

BOGAEV: Right. “Are we insane?”

MCCARTER: Yeah, it sounds cool to tell the story of Hamlet entirely from Hamlet’s point of view but you know, the text is going to make that possible or not.

So, the first thing I had to do was sit down with the texts, plural—because, you know, your listeners surely know that there are three significant versions of the play that are wildly different, one from the next, and so, most productions end up being a little bit drawn from at least two of them—and get rid of all the scenes that Hamlet’s not in and then look at what’s left and say, “Does this make sense? Does this story cohere? Will an audience be able to follow what’s going on?” And if not, then is it possible, again, using only Shakespeare’s words, to somehow construct the missing moments so that there is a through line that the audience can follow.

There’s definitely a version of this where that would not have been possible. With a different play, maybe you could do Iago this way going through Othello, maybe you could do Lear this way. I haven’t tried; I haven’t looked at it.

But with Hamlet, it turned out you could. It’s a really lucky break. You really need to know that he goes to see Ophelia. Fortunately, she describes that encounter in great detail to her father, so it’s possible to construct a scene based on that. You need to know about his pirate adventure. You don’t get to witness it in a conventional production, but you do have the letter that he writes to Horatio describing it. So, then, in this—well, I won’t spoil it, but we come up with a solution for that.

you know, I did not entirely trust the results when I did that first pass through the script. So, I was lucky to be able to share it with a friend of mine, James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar. We got to be friends.

BOGAEV: Oh, friend of the podcast.

MCCARTER: Sure. Well, so, Jim and I got to be friends when I was on the artistic staff of the Public Theater. And literally, genuinely, the first thing I did when I had a very, very early draft script is to call Jim and say, “I have this kind of crazy idea. Would you do me a favor and just read this and tell me, are the Shakespeare police going to come and arrest me if I try to do this to Hamlet?”

He read it and he was really enthusiastic. And I’ve expressed to him many times my gratitude because in that first, very tender moment for the project, if he had said, “I don’t know about this. I don’t know. This is a little bit too far afield.” we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t have had the guts to spend two years trying to make it.

BOGAEV: Well, that’s a real endorsement. Okay, let’s talk about the biggie. Tell us about your scene setting for Hamlet’s “To be” speech.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. Daniel Kyri is Hamlet.]

HAMLET: To be, or not to be: that is the question

[Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, end of clip]

BOGAEV: I hear water. I hear horse hooves. I hear panting. I hear wading through water. I guess a scream, choking on water, maybe being underwater, and heartbeats. All of that.

MCCARTER: All of that. You got it, Barbara. That’s what it is.

I learned from some book about Alfred Hitchcock that he had this belief that if you were going to use a setting in a story, it shouldn’t just be the backdrop, you should take advantage of the opportunities that it provides you.

So, in this case, it was important to us to have a consistent picture of our Elsinore and to get it, I went and did some research and found pictures of Kronborg Castle, which is standing in Denmark today. You can Google it right now if you want. It is not the Kronborg castle that was standing in the 1590s when members of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s, Men, visited, but it gives you a sense of what it might be like if there were a castle like Elsinore in a spot like that spot where the events of this play take place.

BOGAEV: Oh wow. I am looking at it. I just Googled it. It has amazing, very skinny turrets.

MCCARTER: That’s right—and again, Shakespeare did not have that picture in his mind when he was thinking about the action of Hamlet. However, it was useful to us to have a fixed set of references to say, “This is the kind of place where this story is happening.” For something like, you know, the encounter with the ghost on the castle walls, we could look at it and say, “Hamlet and Horatio, Marcellus, might be about here and the Ghost might be about there.”

That Hitchcock rule about using the setting, you know, “To be or not to be” was a real challenge. I mean, in some ways, it’s the beginning and the end. If you can’t solve “To be or not to be” in some satisfying way, you shouldn’t bother.

BOGAEV: Oh, right. You’re sunk.

MCCARTER: Yeah, you’re sunk, you’re sunk. So, with that one, it was just, you know, I thought of a couple of ways to try to do it that would be sonically interesting and that would keep the energy going and none of them felt quite right.

I was just looking at the pictures and just really committing to the realism of it and saying—to the realism of this story about a ghost—saying like, “Well, okay, if the Ghost is going to lead him down from the top of the wall to get away from the castle, where would he go?” And you realize if Elsinore is supposed to be on the waterfront, he would lead him along the water.

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. Daniel Kyri is Hamlet, and John Douglas Thompson is the Ghost.]

HAMLET: Where wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further. 

GHOST: Mark me.

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, end of clip]

MCCARTER: They would go out along this deserted stretch of beach. Then it’s just sort of letting my imagination around, which is, well, if you’re a ghost, why do you stay on land? You could float out over the water if you wanted to, especially if you pick up the, what I take to be, this clue in the conversation with the Ghost. At one point the Ghost says, “I find thee apt.” And the way that the great John Douglas Thompson delivers that line—

[CLIP from the 2025 audio adaptation series, Hamlet. John Douglas Thompson is the Ghost.]

GHOST: I find thee apt.

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, end of clip]

MCCARTER: —It’s very clear that Hamlet has just passed some test. So, I like this idea of the ghost the entire time he’s with Hamlet is challenging him. You know, “Do you have what it takes to kill your uncle?” And part of it is, “How far are you willing to follow me?” Literally, physically. Like, “If I start leading you out into the ocean, how far will you go before you finally say, ‘I will go no further. That’s enough.’”

And then, you know, with, “To be or not to be,” there is this rich debate about why the Folio places, “To be or not to be,” as late as it does.

BOGAEV: And people move it all over the place.

MCCARTER: They do, they do. We put it earlier in the play, where for us it is this moment of him feeling like, “I can’t do this. I am not equipped to fulfill this mission. Maybe it’s better if I just end things right now.” And if he’s thinking about the mission that he received from his father on this, you know, difficult remote stretch of beach, then maybe he goes back there. If he goes back to a spot like that and he’s thinking about taking his life, well, what would he do? And so what you heard at the end of episode two of our version is our answer to that question.

BOGAEV: Did your hyper focus on audio for an audio production of Hamlet change your interpretation of the play or parts of the play or different roles?

MCCARTER: Yes, profoundly. I feel that I’ve seen Hamlet a million times. I’ve read it, studied it. I have a completely different interpretation of it than I did two years ago. I find the tragic aspects of it less compelling than I did before. All of the revenge, and the stabbing, and the poisoning. I am much more drawn to the coming-of-age story in Hamlet. I think when you commit to his point of view, and you experience the journey the way that he does, you sort of begin to feel that maybe the conventional wisdom on this play isn’t always accurate.

I’m trying to say this as delicately as I can. But for example, the Laurence Olivier notion that Hamlet is a story of a man who can’t make up his mind, which is how he opens his 1948 film adaptation, I am not sure that that’s really true, because if you only experience it from his perspective, he’s enormously active. There is a minute there where he’s spinning his wheels and can’t decide if or how to proceed, but it doesn’t actually take that long. What takes a lot of—

BOGAEV: No, he has a lot of agency, actually.

MCCARTER: He does, and what you realize is the sense of him not proceeding with his plan is partly a function of everyone else on stage standing around saying, “What’s he doing? What’s he going to do? I wonder what he’s up to?”

Hamlet is acting all that time, and I think that the specific action that he uses when he has no physical means of escape, he wants out. He is terrified of the future which, you know, is one of the messages of, “To be or not to be.” And when he is trapped, the one thing that he still has that they can’t take from him is his curiosity.

He barrages the people around him with questions. When Horatio tells him about the Ghost’s visitation, he has a million questions for him. When he encounters the Norwegian Captain on the road, he wants to know about the army and who leads the army? And why would they fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? When he meets the Gravedigger, he has tactile questions about bodies and how they decompose.

He just keeps wanting to know things so that he can understand. If he can’t change what’s happening to him, at least he can understand why it’s happening to him. I think that’s why I am so profoundly moved in ways that I’ve not been before by the place where he ends up at the end of all of that. To arrive at the place where you can say, “The readiness is all” is inspiring to me. That is not a word that I ever thought to associate with this play before. But when you are with him, as he’s going through those 17 kinds of hell, the past and the future, the paranoia, his friends conspiring against him, people trying to murder him, and he can still somehow find a way to say, “I’m at peace with it, whatever comes” I think is an actual constructive model for us to have before us in the United States in 2025.

And yes, it is the case that there’s a scene still to go at that point, and it all ends in blood and tears and poison and stabbing and everything else, but I will say that, again, feeling that there’s a different story inside this play than the one people tend to focus on, those last couple of speeches with Horatio, it feels like this new realization that he has about the world. He’s saying to Horatio, he’s no longer fearing what might be in front of him. He’s at peace with it. Even then, even at the moment when if anyone were going to chicken out and go back to the person he’d been before, he doesn’t do that.

And so, to me, you know, Hamlet is a sphynx. We can come at it from a million different angles, and that’s the glory of what Shakespeare has given us. But to me, it’s just a different play. It is a different story, different emotional valence than I ever suspected until, you know, I heard the finished product, actually.

BOGAEV: That is really inspiring. I think you’re in great company there. A lot of productions begin with a question because that’s their take as well. That this is a play of questions.

MCCARTER: That’s right, that’s right.

BOGAEV: Okay, let’s scroll way back in time. What made you want to do this in the first place?

MCCARTER: Many times during the year of post-production I asked myself that question! It was an insight about technology. I had this realization about the headphones that we can put the audience inside somebody’s head. And from that insight, which, you know, just felt like if we’re putting the audience inside somebody’s head, the best head to go inside is Hamlet’s. Everything kind of followed, like dominos falling, from there.

BOGAEV: And I did hear you listened to our podcast?

MCCARTER: Yes, I do.

BOGAEV: Thank you, first of all. And you were inspired by someone. I think it was Helen Hackett.

MCCARTER: Yes, I was.

BOGAEV: She wrote a book about the Elizabethan mind. It’s really fascinating.

MCCARTER: She did. It’s a totally fascinating book, And the conversation that you had with her directly informed what we did.

I happened to listen to that episode while we were in pre-production. I was still doing some research, and thinking about the script, and trying to answer the why now of it, and two things that really helped me answer that question.

One, again, I give credit to Jim Shapiro. You know, his book 1599, to me, is one of the most succinct, most informative things anybody could read about Hamlet and what was on Shakespeare’s mind when he was creating it. According to Jim, the version that we have now was not the first version of Hamlet that his audience would’ve heard. There was an earlier version that he rewrote because Elizabethan society was cracking up. By creating this new version of the play, he was helping his audience to register how profoundly their society was changing, all of the threats that were mounting. When I read that in the 2020s in America, it just felt very familiar. I thought there is this sense that Hamlet is in every scene facing some terrifying, impossible thing coming at him. That feels a lot like our lives every day. So, Jim Shapiro, you know, that’s one.

And then the other is Helen Hackett. When you spoke with her, she was talking about the effect of the public playhouses of London, on the work that playwrights were doing. She, in the course of that conversation, referred to great public playhouses, like the Globe, as being a kind of new technology of the imagination.

That was a real sort of lightning flash moment for us in thinking about what we were doing. Because what we’re using, everything that we’ve talked about in this conversation—binaural microphones, stereo headphones, the podcast feed that makes it possible for people all over the world to hear what we’re making—that’s also a new technology of the imagination.

So, I actually reached out to her after I heard that interview and we had a great conversation about it.

BOGAEV: I was thinking as I was listening back to conversations we’ve had on the podcast about how in Elizabethan time and Shakespeare’s time, people talked about hearing theater. You went and you heard theater. It just hammered home what that meant and kind of echoing it through time up to the present day.

MCCARTER: I mean, you know, Shakespeare, how much more clearly can he say it? He tells you what he expects of you as an audience member.

Henry V is probably the clearest, “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.” He wants us to engage our imaginative faculties to fill in the world of these massively ambitious dramas that he is writing. I think audio lends itself to that because all you’ve got is your imagination, you know?

To hear his words and then picture for yourself the waves when the Ghost is talking to him or Claudius circling him as he’s trying to convince him not to leave Elsinore.

When the story is in the words and when the words are as propulsive as they are in a Shakespeare play, you’re just setting yourself up to give your audience a richer experience.

BOGAEV: Was Shakespeare your entrée to theater?

MCCARTER: Actually, it was, come to think of it. I haven’t thought about this in a long time, but my first theatrical memory of any kind, except for, you know, little school skits and things that I was a part of, I may have been nine or ten years old, I don’t know exactly but I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I have this fleeting memory of going to the Hershey Theatre with some other students and we saw a production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

So, some people I think, you know, are bitten by the Broadway bug and that’s the kind of model of theater that they hold before them all the time. And I love Broadway. I’ve enormous affection for Broadway. But I guess looking back, I’m really grateful that that first picture I got in my brain of what you’re supposed to do when you put actors on stage can look like Midsummer, which even now, coin toss, right?, either that or Hamlet are my favorite play.

BOGAEV: And back then, do you know what it was about Midsummer that just grabbed you like that as a kid?

MCCARTER: I can’t remember. I don’t know. The fact that I still have that memory, that fleeting picture in my head, I think, is telling. As for what it is, I don’t know. I mean, the thing I love best about theater, and I think the reason why audio drama feels like theater but more so, is because of the way it engages your imagination. I really love that.

I’m not the biggest fan of kitchen sink drama. I feel like movies do that really well. The theater that engages me the most, you know, is the kind where you are actively filling in the picture somehow.

Tony Kushner, this is his insight, not mine, but the most profound thing anyone’s ever said about the theater and how it works is at the top of Act Five of Midsummer. When they come back on stage after hearing the story that the four young lovers have told about what happened the night before Theseus and Hippolyta to have that debate.

BOGAEV: Well, that really makes sense that you called your company Make-Believe.

MCCARTER: Right, yeah. Barbara, thank you for this. I can skip therapy this week. You’ve helped me sort it all out.

BOGAEV: What is next for you and your Make-Believe company? You know, Twelfth Night from the perspective of Toby Belch? Midsummer?

MCCARTER: Never say never, but I do think this is probably our first and last Shakespeare. As I said, it took a very specific set of circumstances for this to work. I mean, even something as minor as the scene in the graveyard, when very specific things are happening. The grave digger is tossing skulls out of the grave and Hamlet is talking about them.

Thank god Shakespeare has Hamlet talk about the skulls because if that were just in a stage direction and he never said anything about it, you’d have no idea what’s happening.

And then at the end when the funeral procession arrives, he tells Horatio, he narrates to Horatio what he’s seeing. I have no idea why he does that, but if he hadn’t written that, those lines, I don’t know that the entire project works. You sort of need enough visualization to be in the dialogue for the whole thing to work.

So anyway, all which say, Hamlet, you know, we got away with one on this one. I don’t think there’s another Shakespeare. As for what’s next for Make-Believe, I don’t know. But I never know, when we finish a project.

The company’s been around since 2017 and there was a fork in the road very early on where is this thing supposed to be a formal institution that has divisions and programs and there’s a lobby or should it be something a little lighter on its feet? To me, the latter is much more interesting. I didn’t want it to feel like some big edifice. To me, you know, Make-Believe at its best feels like a band where there are these artists, and we get together every now and then when there’s an idea good enough to take our time and we work really hard for as long as it takes to put it out into the world.

So now we finished Hamlet. Now we get to recover from Hamlet, which is not always an easy thing to spend a year on. It’s pretty dark sometimes. Then we look for, you know, where does the next idea come from? I don’t know yet, but you know, I’m excited to try to find it.

BOGAEV: Well, I wish you happier times, maybe, and some comedy. I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Thank you so much for talking today.

MCCARTER: Thank you. It’s a real pleasure.

———

KARIM-COOPER: That was Jeremy McCarter, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

You can listen to all six episodes of the Make-Believe Association’s Hamlet on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Tightrope Studios in Chicago and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love to hear from you. While you’re there, be sure to hit “follow” so you get new episodes as soon as they come out.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

If you’re in Washington, DC, come visit the Folger on Capitol Hill. Come face to face with a Shakespeare First Folio in our exhibition halls or take in a play in our theater or enjoy our Quill & Crumb cafe. We’d love to see you. For more information visit our website, folger.edu

Until next time, thanks for listening!