Haunting Emotions: Visualizing Hamlet’s melancholy for students in two recent graphic novel adaptations

The study of emotion and Shakespeare and in particular emotion and Hamlet is well established. Shakespeare’s work enables us to experience emotions and their transformations as we try to understand them. From the opening of the play Hamlet’s emotions are all too clearly present; Shakespeare defines him as a passionate and emotional man plagued by melancholy. How is this human emotion interpreted and visualised by authors attempting to adapt Hamlet in the twenty-first century? In recent years visual literacy has become a prominent aspect of class room learning. In a changing, more visually dependent world, students need to learn how to properly read the visual as well as the textual. The medium of graphic storytelling can help students learn how to do this. This paper will examine two recent graphic novel versions of Shakespeare: Kill Shakespeare (2010–current) by Canadian writers Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery (alongside Andy Belanger as head-artist) and Australian author Nicki Greenberg’s Hamlet (2010). Each of these graphic novels includes the character Hamlet as the protagonist and each of these texts approaches adapting the melancholy Dane (and Shakespeare’s “text”) in very different ways. Through comparisons with Shakespeare’s canonical play text, including Shakespeare’s incorporation of humoral ideas of melancholy, we will analyse how this aspect of Hamlet’s emotions are visually interpreted and developed in these two new media adaptations. This paper will conclude that these adaptations of Hamlet work well as a text for K-12 students because the emotions Hamlet experiences are presented in a relatable way. The texts help these students to understand the emotions, and so relate to a character, whose complex personality may otherwise be lost in the difficulty of the original text.