A Midnight Fantasy — Themes and Context

From Boston Common to Verona's Balcony

The opening pages establish a precise, atmospheric Boston: the Old South Church drowsily sounding eleven, the Somerset Club as a possible house of Capulet, the clambering vine like a silken ladder. The narrator's mind drifts from the play he has just seen to a procession of ill-assorted marriages—little Alice chained to old Bowlsby, Lucille linked to the dwarf Perrywinkle. These are not Shakespearean characters but contemporary types, and they prepare the ground for the central conceit: that Hamlet, having survived Elsinore, might escape his own tragedy by falling in love with Juliet. Aldrich does not explain how this is possible; he simply lets the narrator's reverie become the story.

Hamlet Without the Inky Cloak

Once the fantasy takes hold, Aldrich's Hamlet sheds his sepulchral gloom and appears in a doublet of insolent splendor, looking like a dagger-handle newly gilt. The transformation is comic and deliberate: this Hamlet is not paralyzed by thought but decisive, counting every minute a hundred years until he sees Juliet. He carries letters from Horatio and Queen Gertrude as proof of his identity, and old Capulet blesses his stars that he did not give Juliet to Paris. Even Tybalt and Paris recover their serenity and go arm in arm to pay respects. The destructive elements of both plays are neutralized; the only mystery is the disappearance of Romeo, who has fled after Juliet's rejection.

Juliet's Coquettish Candor

Juliet is given a voice that is neither tragic nor naive. She confesses her former lovers to Hamlet with an ineffable smile, explaining that young Romeo was too demonstrative. The balcony adventure is reduced to a piece of gossip, and the family opposition to Romeo is presented as a practical inconvenience. Aldrich's Juliet is a creature of sunny charm and coquettish candor, a sharp contrast to the star-crossed figure of the play. The romance proceeds without obstacles: no poison, no feigned death, no misdelivered letters. The fantasy is, in effect, a deliberate undoing of Shakespeare's tragic machinery, replacing it with a light, almost satirical courtship.

Readers familiar with Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet will recognize the liberties Aldrich takes: he borrows names and situations but discards the fatal logic that drives both plays. The result is a playful thought experiment, not a scholarly intervention. The excerpts break off before the story concludes, so it is unclear whether the fantasy holds to its comic premise or introduces new complications. The pleasure lies in watching Aldrich dismantle two of the most famous tragedies in English and reassemble them as a romantic comedy set partly in Boston.

I keep thinking about that odd little fantasy where Hamlet wanders off to woo Juliet, how it turns all that heaviness into something almost playful, like a private joke between old friends. It reminded me of another long afternoon spent with The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 06 — Key Ideas to Explore, where the tilting at windmills feels less like madness and more like a tender refusal to let the world be ordinary. Both linger because they ask what happens when solemn stories take a breath.