Dear Shakespeare, Could You Write A Happy Ending Please?: (de/re)stabilising the canon Tik by Tok

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‘Action is eloquence’: (Re)thinking Shakespeare

5 min readMar 11, 2021

TikTok, the short-form video sharing app, gained popularity over the last year benefiting from the COVID-19 lockdown that saw people spending more time at home looking for entertainment. The app recorded the highest number of downloads of any app ever in the first quarter of 2020 with 315 million downloads.¹ TikTok empowers anyone to be a content creator, with sounds, filters and editing tools built into the interface. Key to TikTok are trends — trending sounds, dance routines and memes. Users create and recreate content in endless iterations — imaginative, innovative or even original ideas not necessarily a pre-requisite to content creation. With videos of between 15 and 60 seconds, the micro-content is seductively easy to create — indeed, 83% of users have posted a video.² Content is curated not by what you choose to follow (as with, say, Instagram) but rather through a complex algorithm that offers a ‘For you’ page, populated with content that TikTok assesses as being ‘for you’. The more you scroll, the more tailored your feed becomes. Interacting with a TikTok, commenting, liking, sharing, or merely watching to the end informs the next seemingly random video. If you find a user you like, you can follow them to search out more content by that creator. But the app always defaults to the algorithm-curated ‘For you’ feed. This is how I found myself on ‘ShaxTok’ — or more precisely, the #ModernShakespeare Hashtag.

It is here I pause. ShaxTok. In an app that boasts ‘FoodTok, ‘DogTok’, ‘HobbitTok’ and, more surreally, ‘WoodchuckTok’, of course ShaxTok exists. I click the hashtag. Find, serendipitously, the TikTok that seems to have kicked off the trend in lockdown: user @mythicallrose’s TikTok content from early May 2020 cosplaying Tybalt.³ Lip-syncing to the feminist, queer-core, scream pop GRLwood’s defiant ‘I’m yer Dad’, her modern Tybalt is at once challenging and engaging as she implores the user to ‘suck my dick in my fast car’, the female vocal acting to undermine and reframe the act of ostensibly male aggression. Much as GRLwood’s vocal appropriates male aggression to question patriarchal oppression, @mythicallrose appropriates and reframes the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. The caption of her TikTok, ‘It’s in fair Verona where Tybalt, the most hot-headed of the Capulets, resides’, places Tybalt, rather than the eponymous star-crossed lovers, at the centre of the narrative.

I scroll. @MythicallRose’s next TikTok, Tybalt lip-syncing act 1 scene 5 dialogue taken from Carlo Carlei’s 2013 movie, notably featuring Julian Fellowes’s rewritten Shakespearean script.⁴ Scroll. Tybalt now challenging an offscreen Romeo: ‘You’re fucking delusional / So try your best to remember / You are not a pimp / You’re a borderline sex offender’. The caption adds paratextual guidance — ‘When you gotta protect your 14 year old cousin from the creeps who keep hitting on her’ — the comments on the TikTok further examining Juliet’s youth and the appropriateness, or otherwise, of her match with the older Romeo and Paris.⁵ Scroll. 1996. Lurhmann. The petrol station.[Enter Tybalt]. Onscreen captions evoke the source sound film’s aesthetic.⁶ Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. Tybalt struts to a series of eclectic sounds — captions and comments setting him up as, ‘hittin different’,⁷ channelling anime characters.⁸ Framing and reframing in endless iterations. Placing established adaptations in the same moment as reinterpretations. Both legitimising and delegitimising established canon in an instant.

Scroll.

‘Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark’. A brooding Hamlet — with more than a passing resemblance to Tybalt, and not just because he’s played by the same actor.⁹

Pause.

Connections made and unmade. Links found and lost.

Screen captures of @mythicallrose’s duet as Tybalt with @queerelfclub’s Mercutio, and @ahobbitstale’s Millais-inspired Ophelia (Image credit: @mythicallrose / @queerelfclub / @ahobbitstale)

Creators’ story arcs play out in a series of duets. @mythicallrose’s Tybalt against @queerelfclub’s Mercutio. The visual aesthetic of Harold Perrineau in Luhrmann’s 1996 film set to Michael Bublé’s ‘Sway’, fighting Tybalt in stylised movements.¹⁰ The two halves of the TikToks existing both in isolation and together, side by side, the duet function placing moments filmed, in advance and in response, both together and apart. Mercutio waits, fighting an as-yet unknown, uncast, Tybalt, waiting for a duet.¹¹

I segue into a further web of content: @ahobbitstale’s Ophelia and @mythicallrose’s Hamlet filling in the romantic relationship alluded to, but not detailed, in Shakespeare’s text. Appropriating music from cult musical Heathers, Ophelia supports the grieving Hamlet¹² — giddy in love, she gushes about finding someone who makes her feel ‘Seasick’.¹³ The pair argue, Hamlet frustrated by Ophelia’s optimism: ‘You think life is all unicorns and rainbows’ he accuses.¹⁴ Ultimately, Shakespeare’s plot plays out. And, in homage to Sir John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia, @ahobbitstale lip-syncs to Hobo Johnson’s song ‘Romeo and Juliet’ lying surrounded by flowers in her bath. ‘Dear Shakespeare’ she implores, staring out from the screen in soft focus, ‘could you write a happy ending please’.¹⁵ Her caption: ‘Dear Shakespeare, she deserved better’. And better she gets, in an alternate universe ending where Hamlet and Ophelia ‘Rewrite the stars’ to the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman.¹⁶

Which takes me back to where I started: Tybalt. The connections between Tybalt and Hamlet are not something I’d previously considered; but in this moment, as TikToks bleed into and out of each other, a moment of clarity. Tybalt and Hamlet — the sons of aristocracy, living under the domestic control of an uncle, trying to prove something to someone, everyone. Looking to defend family honour without support.

I scroll.

A sound — No Children by The Mountain Goats — Tybalt, bloodied, mouths ‘And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now / Now, Tybalt take the “Villain” back again’ — avoiding eye contact, a dejected Tybalt, drunk, maudlin — lost, drowning.¹⁷ A memory.

I scroll.

The sound.

Now Hamlet — ‘A drunk Hamlet jokes […] No one realises just how lost he already is’ — a lighting change, a mood switch, he’s drowning.¹⁸ Connections, links made and lost in an instant.

I pause.

I scroll through the TikTok #ModernShakespeare hashtag, videos out of order, out of time, the sounds echo, repeat, reflect. Cosplay characters merge, connections are made and undone. The duets allowing vignettes to be cast and recast in seemingly infinite variations — to quote Puck, ‘This is the woman, but not this the man’ (MND, 3.2.42) — as I experience and reexperience, glimpsing visions ‘bounded in a nutshell’ (Hamlet, 2.2.254). The canon stabilised and destabilised.

Challenged and upheld.

All in an instant.