Hamlet goes legit: archaeology, archive and transformative adaptation in "Sons of anarchy" (FX 2008-2014)

© Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22 (1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 doi: 10.6018/ijes.490781 Hamlet Goes Legit: Archaeology, Archive and Transformative Adaptation in Sons of Anarchy (FX 2008-2014) VÍCTOR HUERTAS-MARTÍN University of Valencia, Valencia (Spain) Received: 01/09/2021. Accepted: 29/01/2022. ABSTRACT Using Shakespeare’s criticism and archival theory as lenses, this article enlarges understandings of the interconnections between a complex television series and Shakespeare. Forming a Shakespearean archive, Sons of Anarchy (SOA), based on Hamlet and other plays by Shakespeare, is packed with Shakespearean allusions, rather than citations, whose impact in the overall work is yet to be explored. Shakespearean formations, identifiable in the series’ para-texts, episodes, and transmedia materials, add political weight to SOA. This intertextuality invites us to regard Shakespeare’s influence in complex television as transformative. KEYWORDS: Series; Allusions; Paratexts; Sources; Adaptations; Tragedies; Histories; Archive; Transformation. 1. INTRODUCTION Early twenty-first century presentist criticism on Hamlet seemed to lean towards timely issues: firstly, the Gravediggers scene was used as a prompt to reflect on the legacy that the twentieth century had left; secondly, the scene was also used as a cue to discuss what attitudes and commitments were needed to successfully cope with such legacy. The Gravedigger reminded Hamlet that “no matter how much we cover[ed] our earthy origins we must all undergo the ‘fine revolution’ that [would return] us to the ‘base uses’ of a ‘sexton spade’” (Kearney 2005: 183). Jacques Derrida’s and Stephen Greenblatt’s ghost-centered readings of Hamlet at the fin de siècle met with a presentist response.i Derrida and Greenblatt had mostly _____________________ *Address for correspondence: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Universitat de València, Avda Blasco Ibáñez, 13, 46010, Valencia, Spain; e-mail: victo[email protected] International Journal of English Studies IJES UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA http://revistas.um.es/ijes 42 Víctor Huertas-Martín © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 centered on the reckonings that mankind had to make with the Ghost, a fatherly figure from the past, rather than focusing on courses of action to take in the present. Presentist readers, in contrast, pointed at the revolutionary potentialities of the Gravedigger scene. One of their conclusions was that “it [was] necessary to put off [Derrida’s] princely fastidiousness […] and delve in the sometimes unpleasant muck of real history” (Halpern, 2000: 51). Kearney saw the scene as an anteroom to “a future forgiveness” (183). The revelations in the scene prompted Hamlet’s decision “to act in favor of the absolute event as a compromised agent in a compromised world” (Fernie, 2005: 203). Sons of Anarchy (SOA), a television serial appropriation of Hamlet that aired between 2008 to 2014, ii presents a relevant case study for these questions. In SOA, the members of a bikers’ club—Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original (SAMCRO)—located in the fictional Californian town of Charming, do spend seven seasons delving in the “unpleasant muck of real history.” As Sylvaine Bataille asserts, “[t]he series wallows in scenes of exhumation, in which bikers become gravediggers and do their job with a nonchalance and even a blitheness that brings to mind the gravedigger in Hamlet” (2011: 338). The bikers dig to recover bodies and remains from the past, and reckonings ensue. Such gravedigging is metaphorically extended to the protagonist Jax Teller’s search and examination of documents. These documents include journals, letters, and reports, containing secrets about SAMCRO’s history. Audiences become detectives who need to collect clues “looking both forwards and backwards, cobbling together meaning—much as Jax and Hamlet do in trying to unravel the mysteries their fathers [left] behind” (Sloboda, 2012: 95). Much of this detective work, according to some reviews, included identifying traces of Shakespeare in the series. But in SOA, mourning for the past is surpassed by the protagonist’s determination to change. In the pilot episode, on the day he finds his father’s narrative on how SAMCRO lost its sense of meaning, Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) interprets the survival of his son Abel after a heart operation as “a chance” to “free his son (and maybe himself) from his potentially deadly Teller inheritance” (Sloboda 88). Unlike his princely counterpart, Jax does not initially seek revenge but redemption from his and his family’s crimes. Watching “‘Hamlet’ on Harleys” (Carpenter 2008), audiences found in SOA an amusement that encouraged them to find a degree of bliss and perspective. Considering the potentialities of Shakespearean appropriation to foster “positive social transformation” (García-Periago, 2020: 116), it is my intention to look into the means through which Shakespearean allusions add nuance to the transformative features of SOA. SOA’s archive fractures and reassembles Shakespeare. This occurs, as Maurizio Calbi asserts, in contemporary Shakespearean adaptations which explicitly treat the plays as a “textual corpus that refuses to stay put” (2013: 100). Indeed, Shakespeare’s works were themselves adaptations of different literary, dramatic, and narrative sources. They were Hamlet Goes Legit 43 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 posthumously edited, collected, and printed, then appropriated and rewritten across the centuries. SOA is part of this Shakespearean adaptive tradition. Its length and depth, as will be shown, allow us to identify the interplay of traces of such a tradition, not only taking into account Shakespeare’s Hamlet but also sources and adaptations of the play, as well as what appears to be an unfathomable Shakespearean substratum in the series. We may assume that addressing Shakespeare in SOA involves addressing Shakespeare’s ever-increasing archive. This archive encompasses play-texts, adaptations, sources, and a wealth of related documents. Crucially, Shakespeare’s archive brings transformative effects to SOA. 2. SERIAL SHAKESPEARES: SHAKESPEARE AND SONS OF ANARCHY Initially seen as “pixelated” in complex television (Carrión, 2011: 58), Shakespeare in television series demonstrably runs, as Stephen O’Neill says, “deeper than one might first realise” (2021: 3). Elisabeth Bronfen’s and Christina Wald’s insightful monographs on Serial Shakespeares, both published in 2020, were preceded by criticism that tackled Shakespearean spectrality (Bataille 2008; Bataille 2009), transferences of Shakespearean dramatic techniques to audiovisual scriptwriting (Balló & Pérez, 2015), and transferences of Shakespearean aesthetic metaphors to series (Winckler 2017). Critics identified patterns of Shakespearean adaptation such as character “porosity” and “assemblage”. iii Additionally, it was suggested that Serial Shakespeares recurrently entered into dialogue with other Shakespearean adaptations. This last serial phenomenon called for “cross-media analyses” (Huertas-Martín, 2019: 46) and for using series to look into “a transmedial transformation of Shakespeare’s oeuvre” (Wald 4). Overall, analyses have shown that finding Shakespeare in series involves a “self-consciously operative” effort (Bronfen 9). Seminal essays on Hamlet and SOA reviewed cultural transferences between the play and the series (Bataille, 2011; Burzynska, 2017) as well as SOA’s Shakespearean character porosity (Walker 2017). One prima fascie view on SOA shared by many (Bataille, 2011: 341; Sloboda 90; Wilson, 2020: 30) is that Shakespeare dissolves and resurfaces as seasons proceed. This notion is enriched if we observe SOA’s relationship to other Shakespearean texts apart from the source text of Hamlet. In Douglas Lanier’s view, we may think of whichever Shakespeare’s text considering its “fundamentally adaptational nature—as a version of prior narratives, as a script necessarily imbricated in performance processes” (2014: 29). At least in part, these processes are observable in SOA. On the political value of the series, MaríaConsuelo Forés-Rosel perceives the SOA’s underlying “sense of abandonment experienced by a large part of American society” (2020: 100) as an activist use of Shakespeare. But, if activism is synonymous with contributing to socio-political change, one remaining task would be to identify the politically transformative role played specifically by Shakespeare in SOA. 44 Víctor Huertas-Martín © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 3. ARCHIVE AS METHODOLOGY For Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, it is the “variety of devices and modes of production and viewing that has transformed Shakespeare on screen into a digital forest” (2021: 9). This forest intersects with the greater domain of Shakespeare’s archive. For Alan Gailey, such archive includes Shakespeare-related texts, technologies and new media. It provides metaphors “for thinking about the transmission and preservation of literary texts […] given that an archive is at once a physical thing […] and an imaginary thing, a symbol for cultural investments in memory, preservation, and an available past” (2014: 1). Being richly cinematic, artistically dense, and substantially bookish works, complex TV series may be said, borrowing Martin Pogačar’s observations on contemporary media, to consist of “a storing or curating process, through which storytelling is essentially denoted as the result of both media archaeology and micro-archiving” (2016: 8). Shakespearean archaeological remains, archives and micro-archives are endowed with a particularly rich significance. The “affective register” produced by Shakespearean “remains” identified by Courtney Lehmann in film (2002: 2) is equally appreciated in archives of Shakespearean performance. These remains may become “sites of re-performances” (Hodgdon, 2016: 6) and might have helped early filmmakers liberate Shakespeare on screen (Guneratne, 2020: 393). They are also the bases of what Judith Buchanan has described as the “creative trans-temporal engagement[s]” (2020: 323) of productions such as the Wooster Group’s Hamlet (dir. Elizabeth LeCompte, 2007) and Silents Now (2013), a practice-led project led by Buchanan herself. These two initiatives made past performances become a means of creating new performances. Contrary to Reto Winckler’s assertion that any Shakespearean adaptation is “a version” which will be “superseded by the next one in due time” (2020: 12-13), the archive’s logic is that adaptations display interrelated layers and remains of previous adaptations and performances. The creative uses of Shakespeare’s archive in SOA may be explained through the lens of Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In this work, Foucault proposed rethinking the discipline of History by focusing on processes, not on unified views of the past (4–6). According to the French philosopher, historical documents also needed to acquire the prominence that they held in the field of Archaeology. They deserved interrogation and evaluation; they had to be grouped so that the historian could formulate the laws that determined their relations (7–9). To determine such relations between documents became a leading research goal. Potentially, the results of these enquiries would enrich and nuance established views on specific “themes, beliefs, and representations” (70) of history. Thus, following Foucault’s archaeological metaphor, historical documents were seen forming superimpositions in given domains. After identifying such superimpositions, the next step was to examine vectors which indicated transformations, shifts, continuities, and re-distributions of documents (187). The archive as a metaphor was introduced to make sense of such Hamlet Goes Legit 45 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 interplays, whether they eventually resulted in the legitimation of or the resistance to established discourses. Archives would reveal the existence of multiple subjectivities within identified fields (138). Crucially, for Foucault, archives would help “discover what mode of existence [might] characterize statements, independently of their enunciation” (139), a logic which, doubtless, explains the interest of archive-based performances, such as the ones mentioned above or, as the pages that follow will show, the interrelations we may establish between Shakespearean allusions in SOA. 4. SHAKESPEAREAN FORMATIONS IN PARATEXTS According to Lanier, the project of resituating Shakespeare on film “contributed to the general sense that Shakespeare […] might circulate freely—or at least more freely—across cultural borders” (2011: 150). SOA’s paratexts confirm this logic. The skull, a recurrent symbol in SOA, is for Bataille a feature pointing the general viewer “to the remote time of the series Shakespeare source” (2011: 340). Hamlet-like, holding a ball with an A or Anarchy printed on it, the Reaper imagery combines tragic and comic moods, stressing the playful interplay between the imagery of death and the branding of Jax’s body. This ambiguity constitutes an example of the agonistic contention between high and low culture which Lanier identifies in adaptations of Shakespeare (2002: 16), a contention which does not necessarily reduce Shakespearean iconography to parody. At least in SOA, the skull suggests a repertoire of statements ranging from the irreverent to the tragic. For Bataille, “The repeated images of the logo, visible both on Hunnam’s back and on the leather jacket, and of the actor’s body […] intensify the feeling that no escape is possible” (2011: 332). But the skull, a document found by Hamlet in Yorick’s grave, can also be read as a politically productive token. As Christian Smith says, Hamlet is a “revolutionary subject, whose solid flesh dissolves in the torrent of capitalist progress [which] then erupts into action” (2021: 74). In fact, Jax’s body is an unstoppable force capable of changing the reality around him. His tough features fit the aesthetics of westerns and road movies; the latter, addressing a biker subculture standing “in opposition to the larger American culture,” also representing “some of the founding principles of [America] such as rebellion, sovereignty, and individual liberty” (Brandt & Clare, 2018: 209), factors which explain SOA’s success in producing communities of fans. The skull, a signifier of bodily decay, becomes, in Jax’s body, a sign of Jax’s, the club’s and, implicitly, the viewers’ power to transform reality. 46 Víctor Huertas-Martín © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 Figure 1 Extracted from Menu in DVD 1, Series One. Standard Edition, DVD Box Set. Cumulatively, paratexts conform schemata which continuously formalize the characters’ eagerness for spiritual redemption. This is largely on display on the DVD menus where pictures of characters such as Clay Morrow (Ron Pearlman)—SOA’s Claudius—, Gemma Teller Morrow (Katey Sagal)—SOA’s Gertrude—, Alexander Trager (Kim Coates)—aka “Tig” —, and others are depicted brooding. This pattern corresponds with the many instances of soul-searching characters across the seven seasons. In the menu for DVD 1, Clay’s earnest gaze (Figure 1) possibly resonates with Claudius’ momentary contriteness in the third act of Hamlet, which, in Clay’s case, is extended and explored in greater depth, especially in season five during the character’s exclusion from the club and later imprisonment. As documents amidst archaeological fragments, possible allusions to Shakespeare of this kind recur in SOA’s songs. As Bronfen says, Shakespeare in series is “a ghostly presence… the announcement of something still to arrive, still to be realized” (13). The summons in the song “This Life”— “The King is dead / But life goes on…”—chime with Gertrude and Claudius’ advice to Hamlet to abandon mourning (1.2.68-120); “John the Revelator” and “Hey, Hey, My, My” chime with Jax’s (and Hamlet’s) commitment not to forget the promise to the Ghost, a theme repeated in the series recaps. A highly recurrent recap is that of Jax’s entrance into the garage (Sutter, 2008). It frequently stresses the camera’s change of focus from the garage’s trash (Figure 2) to John Teller’s journal in close-up (Figure 3). But the recaps also show that SOA’s Shakespearean archive is not reduced to Hamlet. Rather, the series follows most complex television series, which as a rule, according to Wald (11), appropriate more than one Shakespearean text. Recaps include fragments from plotting scenes, murder scenes, failed attempts to avenge parents, and dethroning scenes, all of which invite us to “drill”, using Jason Hamlet Goes Legit 47 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 Mittel’s term, for “something that is already there, buried beneath the surface” (2015: 289) in SOA’s deep agglutination of sections from Hamlet and residues from other Shakespearean tragedies. Figure 2 Extracted from Sutter (2008). Figure 3 Extracted from Sutter (2008). 5. FORMATIONS IN SOURCES AND ADAPTATIONS In SOA, we can identify clusters formed by traces of sources and adaptations of Hamlet. Superimposed upon one another, they complicate SOA’s Shakespearean formations. 48 Víctor Huertas-Martín © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 Knowledge of Saxo Grammaticus’ Historiae Danicae, Françoise Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques (1572), and the Anonymous’ Historye of Hamblet (English translation published in 1608) invites associations with SOA. In both cases, the protagonist becomes leader after displacing the usurper; his delay to take action is justified by tactics, not by indecision; his troubles with foreign leaders—previous allies of the usurper—begin once he takes leadership. Violence in SOA and the sources is graphic and extreme, particularly towards the usurper, whose body is mercilessly damaged in both, while the protagonists in the sources and SOA are treated like Messianic figures who capitalize on their charisma to justify their acts of violence. Grammaticus and Belleforest found, in the uncouth life led by Scandinavian warriors, the grounds to justify the misogyny in the sagas. Addressed, like FX television series of the period, to a male viewership (Raya-Bravo and Vasallo-Acedo, 2017: 32), SOA establishes an “operational allegiance” (Mittell, 163) between audiences and SAMCRO’s male world, whose hierarchy excludes women. Nonetheless, as noted by Inmaculada Gordillo and Virginia Guarinos (2017), as “old ladies,” women in SAMCRO hold power. Such power, I argue, finds precedents in the sources too. In Belleforest, Gerutha declares herself innocent of Horwendil’s death and allies herself with Amleth against Fengon. In Historye of Hamblet, Geruthe is ambiguous about her knowledge of the crime, but shows herself as the “meanes to hinder and impeach the shortning of [Amleth’s] life” (99). In Shakespeare’s Q1, Gertrude agrees to support Hamlet in the closet scene: “I will conceale, consent, and doe my best, / What stratagem soe’re thou shalt deuise.” iv Later in Q1, during a secret meeting with Horatio, the Queen agrees to deceive her husband to facilitate Hamlet’s return to Denmark. These moves by the Queen resemble a number of decisions made by Gemma, who, always knowledgeable of Clay’s crime, ultimately supports—even instigates—Jax’s coup d’état. The impact of Gemma’s death on Jax also finds precedent in the sources. In Albert Kranz’s Chronica Regnorum Aquilonarium (1545), the Queen poisons the protagonist’s father. Following the Ghost’s demand, the hero forces her to drink the poison draught she had prepared for him and, after her death, the young king rides away never to be seen again (Bullough, 1973: 10), an outcome to match Jax’s self-exile after retaliating against Gemma for Tara’s death. As producer Paris Barclay says, SOA’s team created “a tragedy in the Shakespearean or Greek sense” (Adrienne Tyler, 2021). Thus, Jax’s matricide is plausibly indebted to the Aeschylean and/or Euripidean assassination of Clitemenestra by Orestes. Classic sources also explain the function of Tara (Maggie Stiff), who spurs Jax to transformation. Louise Schleiner sees Horatio in the graveyard scene as equivalent to Pylades in Aeschylus, whose Latin translations may, as the scholar suggests, have been read by Shakespeare (1990). In The Choephori (450 BC), Pylades prompts Orestes to take revenge for the assassination of his father. Tara, like Hamlet’s “fellow student” (1.2.176), an outsider and an ally to the club—like Horatio and Pylades—leads Jax at the end of season one to John Teller’s grave so that Jax accepts to effect his father’s will to change the club, a decision amongst whose incalculable consequences comes revenge against Clay, later against Gemma. Hamlet Goes Legit 49 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 Some of the gender-oriented ethical problems in the series are given response by interplay with Shakespearean sources and adaptations. According to Sloboda, “female characters [are] driven into crises by relationships with Jax. He takes on several lovers and inevitably leaves them traumatized and diminished” (90). This is the case with Wendy Case (Drea de Matteo), branded, amongst other insults, as Jax’s “crazy ex-wife” (Sutter, 2008) or as a “stupid junkie bitch” (ibid). She is depicted in a similar vein to the portrayals of Ophelia that depict her as subjected. In this case, as occurs with Ophelia in Alexander Fodor’s Hamlet (2007), she is subjected to “[g]ender oppression […] synonymous with bodily addiction” (Calbi 101). SOA’s intertextual clusters, nonetheless, contest such a reading through Wendy’s eventual recovery and exile with her family and through the character of Tara, who shares traces with the Ophelia in Lisa Klein’s novel (2006). Both Tara and Klein’s Ophelia are endowed with powers and skills to heal, develop an intimate but conflictive relationship with the Queen, have children with their Hamlets, pose a direct threat to the usurper—which almost costs them their lives—and, importantly, both leave their Hamlets behind to raise their children in safety. Tara’s nuanced role may be also indebted to Queen Hemmertude, Amleth’s second wife in the sources, who ultimately turns against her husband. But rather than leaving her betrayal unexplained—as occurs in the sources—SOA presents a sympathetic portrayal of Tara, who sees herself obliged to run away from Jax for the sake of the children. A look into British University Film and Video Council’s database shows that no fewer than 40 US Hamlet films, made between 1990 and 2020, are registered. These included cartoons, musicals, education films, thrillers, high school films, surveillance films, westerns, zombie films, vampire films, gangster films and comedies, often blending genres. Despite their generic disparity, several vectors of relation may be identified between them. Some of them parodied Shakespeare’s authority, embedding Hamlet as mirror story within primary narratives. Other parodic Hollywoodian gestures at Hamlet, such as The last Action Hero (dir. John McTiernan, 1993), clashed with experimental re-visionings like Yorick (dir. Johnny Stranger) and avant-garde experimental films. Films like Shakespeare Behind Bars (dir. Hank Rogerson, 2006), The Hobart Shakespeareans (dir. Mel Stuart, 2006) or Renaissance Man (dir. Penny Marshall, 1994) explored the reparative potential of Shakespearean performance. Others, like Hamlet (dir. Scott Campbell, 2001) used Shakespeare’s tragedy to problematize post-civil war America. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the increase of reparative Shakespeares and of Hamlet films used for historical critique had been such that these two forms of appropriation were parodied, for instance, in Hamlet 2 (dir. Andrew Fleming, 2008) and Zombie Hamlet (dir. John Murlowski, 2012) respectively. Thus, one implicit challenge for SOA would be to re-invigorate historical critique and reparativeness, the latter of which is particularly at risk of being labelled as cliché. 56 Víctor Huertas-Martín © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 to make characters “stable and consistent rather than changeable identities” (133). Likewise, the Hamlet archive renews its repositories, reproductions, accruals, embedded images, fonds, finding aids, and item-levels in SOA. Some commentary is due on the convergence of Shakespearean tragedies and histories in the series. For Jeffrey K. Wilson, history plays are “the one clear case of successful television Shakespeares” (2020: 26). For Foucault, concomitance “includes statements that concern quite different domains of objects […] but which are active among the statements studied […] either because they serve as analogical confirmation, or because they serve as models that can be transferred to other contents” (64). Hamlet is, according to Margreta de Grazia, as much a history play as a tragedy (2007: 45). Shakespeare’s history plays are already identified as recurrent templates for complex television series (see Susan C. Ronnenberg, 2018; Monique L. Pittman, 2020; Bronfen, 2020). Indeed, some interplays between history plays and tragedies in these television works have been already pointed out (Huertas-Martín 2019a). What other systems of arrangement may exist between Shakespearean genres, such as the romance, the tragedy, the comedy, or the Roman play, are fertile research questions worth asking. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgements are owed to Shakespeare’s Institute/Birmingham University (JuneDecember 2018) for allowing access to library sources and facilitating the writing of this article during my research stay. Likewise, acknowledgements are owed to Instituto FranklinUniversidad de Alcalá de Henares for allowing access to library sources (March-May 2019). Additionally, acknowledgements are owed to Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona for allowing access to library sources (February-July 2020). Finally, acknowledgements are owed to Reto Winckler for his suggestions on this article. END-NOTES i Greenblatt, S. (2013); Derrida, J. (2006). Specters of Marx (The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International) (Peggy Kamuf. Trans.). New York & London, Routledge Classics (Original work published 1993). ii Sons of Anarchy (FX 2008-2014) was written and produced by Kurt Sutter, first broadcast by FX, then purchased by Netflix. Sutter admitted to having based the “bigger arcs” of SOA on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Brown, 2010). iii Porosity involves several serial characters corresponding to one Shakespearean figure; assemblage involves several Shakespearean characters converging into a non-Shakespearean one. See Wald (230). iv See Shakespeare, W. (1603). Hamlet Goes Legit 57 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 22(1), 2022, pp. 41–61 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 v The speech, like Shakespeare’s, depicts the people at the crime scene—“There’s one did laugh in ‘sleep”. Both use coordinating conjunctions as links—“And one cried, ‘Murder,’…”. Both use the gerund form—“Listening their fear” (2.2.29)—as an adjunct to larger formulations of the speaker’s inability to act—“could not say ‘Amen’” (2.2.29). In SOA’s case, the participle “done”, recurrently echoed in Macbeth, is deployed. vi Read MacCannell, J. F. (1991). 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