“It’s not really fair to say, ‘Look at this guy who died 400 years before I was born. He certainly had different opinions than me about the value of women.'” North says. “There’s stuff that doesn’t age as well, and what you do is you either adapt it so it works better now, or you ignore it.”

For the purists, the original storyline remains in To Be Or Not To Be. A Yorick skull, one of the most iconic elements of the play, appears next to each choice that takes the reader through the original plot — the choices that Shakespeare made (as North jokes, “when he plagiarized my book”). —

Don’t Like Hamlet? Now’s Your Chance To Rewrite It : Monkey See : NPR.