Adapted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Jason Floyd
for publication and performance in, “The Conservative Manifest” blog,
and the Club’s weekly podcast, “The Conservative Hour of Power and Enlightenment Salon.”
All rights reserved ©2022
(Satirical Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with the voice of Hamlet stylistically presented in an Americanized accent borrowing heavily from that of the Sherriff of Nottingham Character presented in Disney’s animated retelling of the classic story Robin Hood … For the purpose of this adaptation Hamlet is simply renamed, “Omelet.”)
Welcome to the Ammo-Can Coffee Social Club’s Theater of the Mind. As the house lights fade, the murmuring audience quiets, the curtain rises to reveal our tragic spot-lit hero Omelet as he/him/they quietly takes a seat in a clinical looking room. A sign reading, “24-hour COVID-19 Vaccination Clinic, is prominently featured on the wall behind Omelet. He/him/they is modestly clothed in a pair of artificially destressed skinny jeans, a long blue scarf, and an ironic black t-shirt featuring the words, “John Q Public,” which is printed in a white, tastefully italicized TIMES NEW ROMAN Font. Through the magic of an off-stage narrator, we now join Omelet in his thoughts, as he considers his station in life, and muses remorsefully about slow suicide by means of mandate, mask and experimental gene therapy.
"To Mask, or not to Mask, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The asphyxiation and lunacy of the outrageous Fauci,
Or to take arms against a sea of deep-state and big-tech oligarchs
And by opposing end them.
To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we/they/them end
The heartache and the thousand executive usurpations
That tranny is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the socially-distanced rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we/they/them have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give we/us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud non-binary collective’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's corrupted delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he/him/his self might their quietus make
With a bare and gleaming hypodermic?
Who would the scornful multitude
O’social-platforms bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary culture canceled,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us/they/them rather bear those illegitimate mandates we/us here receive
Then fly to others that we/us know not of?
Thus, wokeness and compliance alike doth make cowards of us/we all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and consideration of yet
another booster,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
…Woe the ever-elusive quest for defined fullness of vaccination..."
With this trailing comment thinly echoing in the cavernous auditorium, an unlicensed FEMA nurse, wearing a lab coat, mask, face shield, blue nytril gloves and clunky high heels, noisily enters stage-left carrying a grotesquely oversized hypodermic needle bearing the number 6 and 66. The spotlight fades, the curtain drops, and a deathly silence holds sway over the audience… somewhere in the darkness a single female voice stifles a muffled-cough through she/her/their triple-layered mask and her entire row frantically tries to exit the theater.
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