Tag Archives: Hamlet

Qwertyman No. 154: Politics as Melodrama

Posted on by
1

Qwertyman for Monday, July 14, 2025

I’VE OFTEN argued that our most popular literary form isn’t lyric poetry, the short story, and certainly not the novel—it’s theater, and more specifically melodrama. Born in the West in the 18th century, melodrama weaves its spell on a suggestible audience through sensational and often ridiculous plots, exaggerated action, overblown emotion, and contrived solutions—all of which viewers happily lap up, and come back looking for more. When you think about it, it also happens to describe our politics, but more on that later.

I used to bring up melodrama when I taught playwriting and screenwriting, by way of analyzing how our Filipino sense of drama works. You don’t have to be a theater scholar or critic to observe that we Pinoys love drama, which to us really means melodrama, whether onstage, onscreen, or in real life.

Subtlety and silence have never been our strongest suit. We like to shout, to scream, to declare, to explain—and to explain some more. Take, for example, our preferred methods of murder. In Hamlet, the villainous Claudius pours poison into the king’s, his brother’s, ear. In The Seventh Seal, a knight faces Death on the chessboard. That may have been thrilling for fans of Shakespeare and Ingmar Bergman—but terribly dull and anesthetic for our kind of crowd.

No, sir, we Pinoys like our killings obvious, loud, and emphatic. Poison in the ear is for sissies. We prefer knives because they mean business, are as personal as personal can get, and they produce a lot of cinematic blood. And it’s never enough to stab someone, certainly not from behind, which would be a complete waste of dramatic possibilities. We like to announce that we’re killing someone, and to explain the reasons why: “Hudas ka, Raymundo, niyurakan mo ang karangalan ng aming angkan, kaya’t tanggapin mo ngayon ang mariing higanti ng hustisya—heto’ng sa iyo!” But of course Raymundo has to have his moment, and must raise that inevitable question: “Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?” Whereupon our hero launches into another lengthy explanation, to which Raymundo offers an impassioned rebuttal, all to no avail, as he is stabbed repeatedly to the accompaniment of further oaths and recriminations.

I used to think that this kind of talkativeness and effusive gesturing was invented by us, until I went to graduate school and realized that it was all over the place in Restoration drama, where the likes of John Dryden had his characters indulge in copious speechifying in the name of love and honor before killing everyone onstage. I suppose a similar trend seized the French and Spanish theater, and thereby later ours, in the zarzuelas, moro–moros, and komedyas that provided us with both entertainment and education. The noisiness carried over to radio, and then to our movies, which never quite shook off the “Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?” habit. 

And this brings us to our politics, which is not only full of sound and fury, of unbridled verbosity, but of plot twists that strain credulity and yet which manage to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, either roaring in rage, applauding in delight, laughing deliriously, or weeping in sorrow, depending on their persuasions.

The Duterte Saga, our biggest ongoing drama, is now in its fourth act—the Sara impeachment—after the Uniteam victory, the fallout, and the Digong arrest and banishment. A professional scriptwriter could not have done better than giving the VP lines like Sara’s vengeful vows, as the media reported: “I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM (Marcos), (First Lady) Liza Araneta, and (Speaker) Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke,” Duterte said in the profanity-laden briefing. “I said, do not stop until you kill them and then he said yes.” Threatened with impeachment for that statement and for corruption, she said, “I truly want a trial because I want a bloodbath.”

To the uninitiated listener, a madwoman was merely frothing at the mouth, but to the theater-goer, she’s puffing up her feathers, going larger than life, saying outrageous things to define her character and stake out her space like a Maori dancing the haka. Her adversary, PBBM, is playing cool and coy, pretending to be occupied with work and a disinterested party in Sara’s undoing. And yet he whisks off her precious papa in the night to Scheveningen, provoking even more outbursts from the DDS faithful.

Now comes the tearful part. Melodrama moves from Olympian thunder to cloying tenderness, so our next scene, naturally, has Sara’s mom Elizabeth declaring that her estranged husband has been reduced in detention to “skin and bones.” But it’s all right, she says bravely. “And how is my son, acting Mayor Baste?” the Davao City mayor-in-exile asks in a dry croak. “He’s okay, too,” Elizabeth assures him. “His vice mayor is your grandson!” So but for the absent patriarch, all’s well in Duterteland—sort of.

Melodramas love subplots, so let’s introduce one: selling the Duterte house. Common-law wife Honeylet puts up a sign announcing the place for sale (“It’s too painful to sleep there all by myself,” she claims), but son Baste reportedly has the sign removed. Not so fast, VP Sara chimes in; Honeylet could sell her half of it but not her dad’s. Besides, where would Digong live when he returns from the Hague, if Honeylet sold the house? (Cue for hopeful, uplifting music, which tapers off into a melancholic minor key.) “Perhaps he could live with Mama Elizabeth again,” Sara muses. 

Ah, such poignant moments. No one’s been stabbed yet—expect a lot of that to happen, metaphorically, if and when the Senate finds its balls and starts the impeachment trial of VP Sara. What’s theater without traitors? Sen. Migz Zubiri has already thrown down the gauntlet by declaring the trial “a witch-hunt.” But Senator Migz, ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?

Penman No. 391: Trouble in Literary Wolf-land

Posted on by
2

 

342df18374bd29cfef94b1e60aa91f14.jpg

Penman for July 6, 2020

 

IT’S NOT every day that an old guy like me learns something almost totally new about what’s happening in my literary backyard, but your attention tends to wander over a long lockdown, and one day my eyes latched onto a headline from The New York Times, which announced that “A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question.” I had to do a double-take and ask (as you probably would) “Wolf-kink what???”

I sat transfixed as I read the story, which turned out to be about a legal battle over copyright issues in what my young Creative Writing students call “fan fiction” or “fanfic,” which is a genre of literature basically devoted to, well, making new stories out of old ones. Wikipedia defines it as “a type of fictional text written by fans of any work of fiction where the author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from an original creator as a basis for their writing.”

So you could begin with, say, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and write your own version of the play (or turn it into fiction), where Hamlet asks “To be or not to be?” because he’s a gay man dying to come out. Now, I seriously just made that up, but on a hunch, I Googled “Hamlet fanfic gay,” and guess what—there’s a story on Wattpad titled “I Gave You My Heart” where you can “follow the romance between Hamlet and his ‘friend’ Horatio.” Its portentous beginning goes thus: “Hamlet looked over at Horatio, shaking his head slightly. ‘Not here, not now,’ he thought, hoping Horatio understood. Horatio nodded slightly. He understood. They headed back to the castle. Hamlet held Horatio’s hand and led him down the hall toward his bedroom.”

Hamlet_Horatio.jpg

Nope, certainly not Will Shakespeare speaking there (all the poor guy could say was “To thine own self be true”), but you get the idea. Fanfic is a literary free-for-all.

Or maybe not so free. The “wolf-kink” brouhaha was about two fanfic authors—Addison Cain and Zoey Ellis—who both wrote novels about wolves having sex—or, to put it more dramatically, “In both books, Alpha men are overpowered by the scent of Omega heroines and take them hostage. In both books, the women try and fail to suppress their pheromones and give in to the urge to mate.” Ellis was allegedly copying Cain, and the catfight was on, suit vs. countersuit, over pride and apparently quite a bit of money. Above the legal issues hovered the larger question of where does “originality” stop and begin? As the Times reported, “It’s hard to imagine that two writers could independently create such bizarrely specific fantasy scenarios. As it turns out, neither of them did. Both writers built their plots with common elements from a booming, fan-generated body of literature called the Omegaverse.”

39290719._SY475_

The “Omegaverse”? More research for another time. But the story got me thinking about how authors have indeed taken off from other people’s work to create something newish—and the “ish” there is important, because the “new” work depends precisely on the reader’s presumed familiarity with its model to make sense. But that connection is really a bonus, because the new work also has to be able to stand on its own if it’s to be any good, and, at the highest level, to be able to present new insights and to raise new questions about the original. This way, you achieve a kind of conversation across the centuries between authors and between their readers.

Unknown.jpeg

One of the most popular of these “adaptations,” as some fanfic might actually be, is the Broadway musical West Side Story, with was based on Romeo and Juliet, with New York street gangs taking the place of Shakespeare’s feuding families.

I hadn’t really thought of it this way before, but looking back, I was surprised to see how much of my own work was a kind of fan fiction. Remember James Joyce’s classic story “Araby,” which lent a memorable poignancy to the word “crush”? It’s become a masterplot which others have followed, among them NVM Gonzalez in his story “Bread of Salt.” In the early 1990s, I wrote my own version titled “Ybarra,” an “Araby” in reverse where the boy is now an old man.

Three of my plays were fanfic: “Mac Malicsi, TNT” was about a fleet-footed Pinoy in the US, taking off from Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” which in turn was an adaptation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera.” “Ang Butihing Babae ng Timog,” about bargirls and their patrons, was inspired by another Brecht play, “The Good Woman of Setzuan.” And “Kalapating Dagat,” in which Simoun returns to Manila on a ship from Hong Kong and meets a lady of the night named Augusta, relies heavily on the audience’s association of Simoun with Rizal’s protagonist in the Fili.

They may not be as exciting as Alpha and Omega wolves in heat coupling under a harvest moon, but at least no one’s sued me yet. I doubt that Brecht and Rizal or their estates would have bothered—at least until I make my first millions, which I’m still waiting for.