Artist/writer/graphic novelist Nicki Greenberg guest blogs for Readings to tell the story behind her epic adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Hamlet is an enormous beast. It is Shakespeare’s longest play, and in its exploration of doubt, truth, fate, meaning, and the slipperiness of reality, it plunges us into the great questions about being human. Hamlet is also a play about obsession, and as centuries of readers, actors and directors have discovered, grappling with it tends to engender obsession. Admittedly a certain compulsive tendency is required to embark on a 430-plus page graphic novel in the first place. But coupled with the intensely absorbing nature of the play itself and the questions it raises, it is little wonder that Hamlet took over my life for the three years I spent working on it.

In my Hamlet the page layouts are based around the idea of a theatre stage, and the visual language of the theatre informs the book’s structure, design and illustration style. I chose this approach not only because Hamlet IS a play, but because the motifs of acting, pretending, performing, “masks”, and the nesting of plays within plays are central to Hamlet. A curtain opens onto each scene and the actors speak their parts in real time. But in the space around the panels we have the non-literal realm of the mind - imagination, fears, memory, delusions and, of course, ghosts. There is a lot of interplay between the concrete and the mental realms on the page, and even the blackness around the panels becomes personified and takes a role. The membrane between these two dimensions - inside and outside the panels - is not just permeable; it is an illusion. And this is the essence of my interpretation of the play.

To add a further dimension, at the end of each scene, the reader can "flip" the stage around by turning the page, and discover a parallel (and silent) revenge tragedy being played out backstage. At the end of the book, these two realities collide in a surprising twist. Plays within plays within plays invite us to return to one of Hamlet’s fundamental questions: which side of the stage is real?

Deciding how to portray the characters was a long process, involving months of filling up sketchbooks with experimentation. I knew from the outset that I wanted the characters to be inkblots with removable “masks” as faces, and that their forms would not be human. The inkblots are a reminder of the constructed nature of the play and the physical elements of that construction: ink on paper. They also suggest the subjective, non-fixed nature of personality and interpretation. But their most obvious attribute is their malleability: the characters can stretch, splatter, melt, fuse together and assume strange and monstrous forms, and this was a particular joy to play with. I wanted to really plumb the expressive possibilities of the ink-actors’ bodies so that they felt alive and engaging on the page.

Designing the characters’ physical forms went hand in hand with the more complicated process of deciding how to play each of their roles and, most crucially, the role of Hamlet himself. It is said that “we are all Hamlet”, not only because of the universal nature of his philosophical and existential struggles, but because when we approach this play, whether as actor, director or reader, we each bring our own perspective to the character and to every line that Shakespeare gave him. When Hamlet begins his first soliloquy, “O, that this too, too solid [or sullied, or sallied] flesh would melt...”, we each utter those words in our own way. How do you speak it? With resignation? With anguish? With bitterness? With disgust? These were the kind of decisions that I weighed up for every line in the play and for every drawing in the book.

My Prince of Denmark is not a delicate study in melancholy, but leans more toward the muscular, the playful, the dangerous and charismatic. But he is also charming, damaged, tender in friendship, and full-hearted in his passions. Hamlet is a deliberately mysterious and ambiguous creature, and inhabiting, questioning and trying to understand the role was probably the most absorbing and demanding aspect of making this book.

After deciding who my Hamlet would be at any given moment, I then had to get him to play that role convincingly on the page. A real-life actor has a limitless grab-bag of devices for conveying his or her vision of the role: the infinite variety of vocal tones, postures and movement, the weight and placement of pauses, and the spirit, attitude and presence of the player. Performing on the page offers a whole different bag. We do not have real sound, movement or vocal modulation at our disposal. But we do have some other dramatic and narrative devices that are unique to this medium, including the shape and layout of the page and the panels within it, the visual echoes and resonances of composition, different ways of timing the performance (including the impact of the page-turn), speech bubbles, and of course the ability to bend the laws of biology and physics. Bodies, space and time can do things on the page that would be impossible in real life or on film, even with the benefit of lavish special effects.

The painted backgrounds and larger-than-life botanical “props” also played a large role in the storytelling. The eight backgrounds, which represent different locations in the castle, are designed to operate as surreal theatre sets, where perspective is fluid and ambiguous. The sets themselves can twist and fracture, grow eyes, and meld with their inky surrounds. Before settling on acrylic inks as the medium for painting the sets (each of which took weeks to paint), I tried out a range of other media: pencil, paint on canvas, watercolour, and digital painting. This process of experimentation was very time-consuming, but all those hours at the desk allowed me time to turn the play over and over in my mind, and this “percolation time” was invaluable.

The backstage sets are not painted, but are constructed from a collection of found objects - old books (my favourite is the perfectly titled “Enquire Within Upon Everything”), hand-made paper, Folies Bergere albums from the 1920s and 30s, peacock feathers, silk scarves, old boxes and bottles of ink, nibs, dyes and pills, sequins and so on. These collages were assembled digitally in Photoshop, and were enormously fun to do.

A great deal of reading and research went into the book, and I continued to read and to wrestle with the possibilities of the play even after completing the detailed rough draft, and right throughout the final work. A performance can be tweaked and finessed endlessly, and the need to “get it right” feels quite pressing when each gesture takes significant time to commit to the page. One of the books that I found most helpful was Marvin Rosenberg’s enormous, extremely comprehensive The Masks of Hamlet, which examines how different actors, directors and scholars have approached every line of the play. Mary Z Maher’s Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies, a fascinating collection of interviews with actors who have played Hamlet, was also immensely useful, given the dramatic importance of those big speeches.

Of course it was the biggest speech of all - the “To be or not to be” soliloquy - that was the most exciting part of the book to draw. To be grappling with perhaps the most famous piece of dramatic speech in history was a thrilling challenge, which saw me pacing the room, gesticulating, plotting visual maps and changing my mind almost as often as Hamlet himself. My “To be or not to be” is not quite a soliloquy, though. It is a dialogue between Hamlet’s inky body and his face, which taunts him from the end of his outstretched arm - an emblem of the questions at the heart of this fascinating play.

Hamlet by Nicki Greenberg is out now.