An Interview With Jeremy Funke, Author and Director of 'A Counterfeit Presentment'

Recently, The Crimson had a chance to sit down with Jeremy Funke, author and director of A Counterfeit Presentment, to ask him a few questions:

The Harvard Crimson: How and why did you write your play?

Jeremy Funke: For my AP English midterm during my senior year of high school, I had to present an original artistic response, so I presented Hamlet from Hamlet’s point of view. I had three weeks to adapt, direct, produce and star in a two hour version of Hamlet. Then, last semester, my father mentioned this bizarre theory he had about Hamlet. His theory was that the lead player was hired by Horatio to play the role of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, under the assumption that Hamlet would hear the ghost, kill Claudius, take the throne and take Horatio as his advisor, which is what he originally wanted. The only evidence he had for this theory was that Horatio is the only character that lives in the end. It’s a horrible, horrible theory, and I don’t believe it for a second, so I wrote a play about it. I wrote it during the third week of first semester, and I have been editing it ever since.

THC: How is your version different from the original play?

JF: All of the characters that I took from Shakespeare more or less stayed the same, but it’s a smooth transition from my own vaguely Elizabethan lines written in verse to the lines that are clearly Shakespeare. But the lead player required a completely new character, because he has no real persona in the play. It sort of evolved from that point on. On the commuter train to Middleboro, I realized I could frame the whole story around the first person who historically recorded Hamlet’s story, a man by the name of Saxo the Grammarian. It was basically the same story, but with no depth, and the way the story ends is different. But Saxo’s story is remarkably the same in the way Horatio describes it, “Carnal, bloody and unnatural acts. Casual slaughters, accidental judgments.” I was reading Saxo’s version and in it, Hamlet had a half brother. I thought it was quite a coincidence, and thought about making Horatio into Hamlet’s half-brother. Suddenly, Horatio’s character made sense; if he is Hamlet’s half-brother, and he is a bastard son, then he can be jealous of Hamlet’s brother, which fit the story I had already written. So I added it two days before the first reading, which caught my producer off-guard, and my stage manager. That’s the great thing about doing your own work: you can change things.

THC: How did you come up with the title?

JF: The title is a line from Hamlet, and it didn’t even occur to me how perfect it was until the new addition of Horatio as Hamlet’s half-brother. It is perfect because no one is telling the truth in the play, except Hamlet and Ophelia. Everyone is presenting a counterfeit to everyone else.

THC: Obviously the story is very different, but how are you trying to make it unique from other versions of Hamlet?

JF: I was very conscious of the fact that a big chunk is from Hamlet, and part of is still very hackneyed, like “Alas, poor Yorick,” and “Get thee to a nunnery,” but these phrases have become so ingrained in our culture that it is hard to look at them differently. I looked at the word, what the characters were thinking and doing, and just let the blocking come from that. In the “To be or not to be” speech, all of it has been cut except the first line and the last line, it gives it a different approach. It prevents the audience from reciting the lines along with the actor, they have to ask themselves: “How is this different?”

THC: What is the ultimate message that you are trying to communicate?

JF: I never like the idea of saying this is what I was trying to say. I want the audience to take from it whatever they want. If they come out of it questioning their friendships, then that is a shame. I want them to think about what authorship is, because I don’t think Shakespeare wrote the original Hamlet story, I think the character Hamlet wrote the play Hamlet. I want them to think about their friendships and how people change when they are around different people. And if I can get people to think about Hamlet, that’s great too.