Review: Poor Yorick by Ryan North

Published: 2013
Acquired: September 2013
Read: October 2020

Poor Yorick by Ryan North

This is a prequel to To Be or Not To Be, North's "chooseable-path adventure" take on Hamlet; it is a short ebook (just 35 pages) that was available to Kickstarter backers. I read it very, very belatedly. You play as Yorick, trying to get a job at Elsinore entertaining Kid Hamlet so you can fulfill your role in his story-- dying so that he can hold your skull during Act V and pontificate on death.

It does not have the sprawling complexity of To Be or Not To Be or Romeo and/or Juliet. Instead, it's very linear; you are consistently presented with three choices, two of which will kill you, one of which will let you keep playing. North is a funny writer, so I was entertained, but I found that even at this brief length, the joke wore thin. Nice to read but I wouldn't rush out to find a copy. (I don't think you can get the ebook version anywhere anymore anyway, but it was reprinted as part of the collection William Shakespeare Punches a Friggin' Shark and/or Other Stories.)

Review: Romeo and/or Juliet by Ryan North

Before we get started, here's my most recent Bernice Summerfield review: Legion.

Trade paperback, 400 pages
Published 2016

Acquired June 2016

Read March 2018

Romeo and/or Juliet: a chooseable-path adventure by Ryan North and William Shakespeare and You because you decide what happens next not to mention all the Artists who made some great illustrations so really there's a lot of credit to go around here and that doesn't even mention the editors, designers, and typesetters all of whom do important work that goes unacknowledged all too often

I was effusive in my praise for Ryan North's previous William Shakespeare chooseable-path adventure, To Be or Not To Be. I was much less into Romeo and/or Juliet. What I don't know exactly is why. Romeo and/or Juliet was interesting and fun, but it felt more like work and less like joy than To Be or Not To Be. Was I in the wrong mood? Did the gag wear thin? Or is Hamlet just that much more bonkers than Romeo and Juliet, and thus a better target for Ryan North's irreverent reverence? Two teens so in love that after one day and one fuck they decide to commit double suicide seems bonkers, and North plays with a lot of the story's contrivances, but the book's bizarreness felt staid compared to the previous volume. Also some of the jokes are overused-- okay, breakfast, haha, yes I too love brunch. And while the chooseable-path-adventure-within-a-chooseable-path-adventure of The Murder of Gonzago was completely appropriate for Hamlet, the inclusion of three different ones here felt like irrelevant padding. (They're based on Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the latter has Pyramus and Thisbe nestled within it.)

That said, there's plenty of fun to be had. My favorite part was the secret character; if you "beat" the "game," you get to play as Rosaline, the woman Romeo is in love with before he meets Juliet. Rosaline's narrative is a first-person hard-bitten noir pastiche, trying to solve the mystery of why Romeo's mother conveniently died offstage just before the final scene, and it is fantastic.

I did diagram the novel again, and it did make me appreciate intellectually the work North put into the book, even if aesthetically I was less intrigued by it this time around.

Review: To Be or Not To Be by Ryan North

Trade paperback, 740 pages
Published 2013

Acquired August 2013

Read June 2014

To Be or Not To Be: a chooseable-path adventure by Ryan North, William Shakespeare, and YOU

OH MY GOD. This is the most entertaining book I've read in a long time-- a "Choose Your Own Adventure" version of Hamlet. Except way more fun than I remember any of those books actually being. You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or dead King Hamlet, trying to avenge the murder of King Hamlet. The book has a lot of fun mocking Hamlet; if you follow the "path" that Shakespeare himself did, the narrator constantly mocks you for your bad decisions. This is the only version of Hamlet that I know of not to omit the pirate battle. There is a part of the book where you are in a 1980s interactive fiction game ("look room"). If you play as Ophelia you get to invent central heating or participate in a dating simulator or play a death-chess match. If you play as King Hamlet you can use your ghost powers to revolutionize the world. If you play your cards right, you can even travel in time! And, best of all, The Murder of Gonzago is a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book within a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book! But if you die in the book, you die in real life! The delights just pour off the page again and again; if you are married, your spouse will tire of you telling them all the good bits. And so I will avoid telling you all the good bits, so you can discover them for yourself.

Also there is a picture for every possible ending, and they are delightful; a veritable cornucopia of webcomic artists provide them, from Jeph Jacques to Kris Straub, from Kate Beaton to Randall Munroe. (North himself writes a webcomic, but there's no art from him because that webcomic is Dinosaur Comics.) They're even in full color! You can get a lot of joy just paging through this and looking at the pictures.

I was so fascinated with the way this book works that I actually diagrammed it. (I think Ryan North sells diagrams, but that seems too easy. By the way, if you ever want to make a flowchart, yED Graph Editor is a great piece of free software; it was better than I could have imagined.) This gave me a new appreciation for the book, and the close reading it necessitated allowed me to uncover even more awesome features. Click on the picture, if you dare. (Minor spoilers, I guess? If looking at a bunch of numbers is spoilers?) You will note the following:

• Shapes
• Squares = normal pages
• Ovals = endpoints
• Diamonds = normal pages within The Murder of Gonzago
• Colors
• Gray = outside the game
• Blue = Hamlet
• Yellow = Ophelia
• Orange = dead King Hamlet
• Green = Claudius
• Purple = Horatio
• Parts of the book that I think of as "minigames" (tightly networked sets of small choices) are clustered into boxes.
• The path marked with skull logos (the path of the original play) is the thick line.
• Pg. 195 is where you go if you take the choice to actually kill Claudius. You will note that you get that choice a lot. But for some reason you never do it!

I mean, look at that thing. It's incredible! What an intricate achievement. When North crowdfunds Romeo and/or Juliet, I will be ready with my money.