“A sense of timing is the mark of a genius.”
— Jenny Holzer, Truisms
“Hamlet himself is a nonstop joker.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“I’d like to have a pop at Hamlet,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge told reporters at the 2017 Evening Standard Theatre Awards. She wore a white strapless dress; cameras flashed. TV had exhausted her, she said. No more Fleabag — look for her instead as Elsinore’s tortured prince. But it never came to pass: with Hamlet perhaps on the mind, Waller-Bridge wrote Fleabag’s second season instead.
Fleabag and Hamlet have a lot in common. They both wrestle with an “o’erhasty marriage” on the heels of a parent’s death; they’re both young but obsessed with dying, alienated by grief from friends their age but at war with the adults; they’re both ambiguously responsible for the ambiguous suicides of close companions; they have dysfunctional relationships to sex and romance; they both hang out in graveyards. And they’re totally, completely obsessed with joking.
Like Hamlet, Fleabag is an outrageous wit. (“What’s your favorite period film?” “Carrie…”) And like Hamlet, her wit is her greatest weapon and her only hope in a sea of troubles. Fleabag insists that it’s sex she worships, but the role she believes sex to occupy in her life — as a coping mechanism, as an expression of power, as the cornerstone of her freedom— is more the role occupied by joking.
It’s far easier to imagine a celibate Fleabag than a mute one. That would be a true and tragic celibacy.
The second season probes exactly this question: which of Fleabag’s vices, sex or wit, is more important to her? To find out, she falls in love with the priest officiating her father’s marriage to Godmother and quits her nymphomania in his pursuit. Then, on the heels of her sexual abstinence, Fleabag’s therapist requests comedic abstinence of her as well. “It would be good not to make jokes in here, in case it gets lost in humorous translation,” says the therapist. “I don’t know if I can,” Fleabag replies, smiling. “Is that a joke?” the therapist asks. They move on: how is the abstinence progressing? “Well, I’m quite horny, and your little scarf isn’t helping,” says Fleabag, then plays in double entendre with Shakespearean mastery:
THERAPIST: There’s a particular person you’re not having sex with?
FLEABAG: No… Well, nothing’s happened. He’s not available.
THERAPIST: In a relationship?
FLEABAG: Yes, a bad one.
THERAPIST: How so?
FLEABAG: It’s the sort of relationship where one partner tells the other one how to dress?
Unwieldy grief fuels their misbehavior. Like Hamlet, Fleabag has that within her “which passeth show / These but the trappings and the suits of woe”, and lives the prince’s paradox: an authentic soul surrounded by performers, she is also the most performative and the best performer. But for Hamlet and Fleabag, joking is a way to speak truth to power—to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” in environments where speaking straightforwardly isn’t safe—and Hamlet does this when we meet him. “How do the clouds still hang on you?” Claudius asks, and Hamlet’s reply, “Not so, my lord, I am too much i’ the sun” is a joke with a landmine in it. Hamlet is too much a son: the child of the late Hamlet Sr., Queen Gertrude, and stepson to his father’s killer. Fleabag is too much a daughter.
So they aim their jokes at their step-parents. Godmother is Waller-Bridge’s answer to Claudius, though she may be eviler than the king, because Claudius is somewhat hapless, considering the destruction he inspires. Godmother is more than capable. A rapacious, scheming freak, her irrational war with Fleabag is one of the show’s dramatic engines.
“I’m going to call you a cab,” Father says to Fleabag when she turns up at his door late at night in the show’s pilot, “and please don’t go upstairs,” he adds; Fleabag waits for him to exit and then…heads right up the stairs, where she will introduce us to Godmother and steal the headless woman statue. With timing and brevity, Fleabag elevates disobedience—even silent disobedience, the disobedient act rather than statement—into wit. That’s Hamlet’s playbook. He wrote it.
The statue becomes a running joke, and its rhythmic reveal is always a punch line. “I just wondered if you had a little show planned,” Godmother says to Fleabag, pulling her inside during her and Father’s wedding at the end of season two. It’s a futile speech Claudius would give to his stepson: any disruptions I should know about? Claudius and Godmother know the answer is yes. When Fleabag insists she has no tricks up her sleeves, Godmother opens Fleabag’s wedding present, revealing the statue. I laughed.
The key to comedy is timing, and Fleabag has a gift for timing, a sixth sense for being in the wrong place at the right time. And a sense of timing is the mark of a genius.
Yes, Fleabag is a genius. (“What’s your favorite period film?” “Carrie…”) But to steer away from hyperbole—and defend against my becoming the Harold Bloom of Fleabag scholarship—we can swap “genius” for “unusually free individual,” which is what makes Fleabag so Shakespearean, anyway.
“We need to recognize that Shakespeare’s poetic personality is deeply wedded to one particular value: individual freedom,” Richard Holbrook writes in Shakespeare and Individualism. Western prizing of “fundamentally modern values” like “freedom, individuality, self-realization” and “authenticity” can be traced through the romantic poets to Shakespeare, he says. Ever stopped to think we why care about bucking trends? Making your own way? Shakespeare.
This might explain why watching Hamlet is an uplifting experience, says Holbrook, because it should be miserable to watch: nothing good happens, the main character can’t make up his mind, things go from very bad to much, much worse, and no one survives. We can ask the same question of Fleabag, another series of unfortunate events. Why is the tragedy fun?
Freedom; it’s fun because of freedom. Hamlet and Fleabag toil in existential prisons, but their genius sets them free. These are heist dramas. Watching them escape, against the odds, is exhilarating.
Both their families ask them to conform to ordinary society, but they can’t. Hamlet Sr. asks his son to murder, to quit his life as an intellectual and join the generations of warrior kings, that preceded him. Fleabag is asked, similarly, to take life seriously, to forget wit and mischief and put one foot in front of the other in the rat race, all to “become spacious” as Hamlet says of Osric, the nobleman who calls the prince to his death, “in the possession of dirt.” They are failures, Hamlet famously so, Fleabag clearly so. Their failure is a failure to conform.
Stepmonsters may prowl through public life but Hamlet and Fleabag will always be free inside their minds. Hamlet knows it: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and still count myself a king of infinite space,” he says. Three acts later he will call Yorick “a man of infinite jest” and we can draw the link Shakespeare seems to ask us to, that Hamlet, like Fleabag, achieves his infinite space with infinite jest. Fleabag and Hamlet’s deeply comic brilliance renders them transcendent, too large for their stages (as Harold Bloom says of Hamlet), and indeed, no walls can contain Fleabag; she must break the fourth, fleeing her world for ours on the wings of a joke.
This contradiction, that outside one is trapped and inside one is free, is not just present in Fleabag, it’s the thesis of the show. Because inside is where she keeps us, the viewer, the only audience to her jokes and her only friend, she tells the counselor, who isn’t a guinea pig. In having “that within which passes show” Hamlet points to a private life “invisible in public forms of communication,” says Holbrook, and for Fleabag this role is performed by the viewer: we are that literally within which passes show, invisible to the broader world, un-presentable to the public.
So Fleabag too finds “time…out of joint”, as she toggles between public and private life. Her trauma casts her into the past and back again.
Maybe this is why we love Hamlet and Fleabag: because anyone with an inner life finds time out of joint — anyone who ever daydreamed in class, who missed an email from the boss while they were staring out the window — and in the prince and his wisecracking daughter, we have some friends.
