‘Nothing from nothing’: All the Shakespearean references in season three of ‘The White Lotus’

Caution: Major spoilers ahead.

“Is this a bit ‘You killed my father, prepare to die,’ kind of?” asks Chelsea, the horoscope-obsessed Brit played with charm by Aimee Lou Wood in season three of The White Lotus.

Chelsea may be thinking of The Princess Bride (1987), but we’re firmly in Hamlet territory. Her partner Rick (Walton Goggins) soon sets off to avenge his father’s death and kicks off a chain of violence that ends, inevitably, in blood and tragedy.

Mike White’s luxury-hotel-meets-moral-decline drama, The White Lotus, has always toyed with highbrow references. Season two gave us Madame Butterfly meets commedia dell’arte (a genre of early Italian theatre replete with wealthy lovers, greedy old men, duplicitous servants and glamorous courtesans).

Season three shifts the setting to Thailand. There, the show’s satire of super-wealth is framed through not only the lens of Buddhism, but also through many of Shakespeare’s great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear.

Enter Rick, our sullen Hamlet. He’s been raised on a tragic fairy tale. As a child, his mother told him that his saintly father was murdered by a corrupt Thailand-based hotel-owner, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn). Rick insists this theft of a parent is the root of his suffering. But...

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