Throughout James Ijames’ Fat Ham, the other characters repeatedly refer to Juicy as “soft,” using the word to imply that, in many ways, Juicy does not perform manhood or masculinity in the way that he should. But Opal, a family friend, tells Juicy that it will ultimately be his “weakness” that will “save [him].” It is Juicy’s softness, in all of the ways that it manifests within him, that helps him to resist the prescribed tragedy at the end of his Shakespearean story. Through José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, I propose that not only is Fat Ham a disidentification with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that the play disidentifies with the negative connotations of “softness” in its many uses to insult queerness, femininity, fatness, and emotional vulnerability. Juicy reinterprets what it means to be soft, using his supposed weakness instead as a source of empowerment to change the course of his story. In Fat Ham, softness takes on new meanings of hope and potential, and is ultimately what saves the characters from Shakespeare’s previously inevitable tragedy. Ijames’ play demonstrates how Shakespeare’s body of work can grow its legacy beyond the white heteronormative, transporting Hamlet to a queer, Black contemporary and creating new space where soft, Black, queer, fat bodies can be loved and celebrated.