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"Hamlet" is for everybody, but not for everybody to enjoy equally. The sad truth is I am one of those who have come, through some application, to feel real appreciation for the play, yet never loved it. The fault is mine and not Shakespeare's, but it is an honest fault worth exploring.
The story is pretty straightforward on its face. The king of Denmark has died, and as his son Hamlet fights overwhelming grief, he comes to discover the father died at the hand of his successor, Hamlet's uncle Claudius. As he contemplates the enormity of this knowledge, he wrestles with the fact his friends and court advisors are in league with the uncle. Even Hamlet's mother has compromised her connection with him by marrying Claudius soon after being widowed. Through all this turmoil a cosmic consciousness slowly emerges in young Hamlet.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
It's that cosmic consciousness that's at the heart of why "Hamlet" sticks out so. At the same time, it's a revenge play, and in the end one of Shakespeare's bloodiest this side of "Titus Andronicus". "Hamlet's" murky origins are explored in an essay, "A Note On The Sources", included in the Signet edition. This discusses evidence for an earlier text of the play, before the version we have, possibly written by Thomas Kyd who penned a popular bloodbath called "The Spanish Tragedy".
Our "Hamlet" has at times a two-headed aspect; if it were a movie, it might have been co-directed by Quentin Tarantino and Ingmar Bergman. A lot of soul-searching dominates the first three acts; monologues abound, some more gripping than others. The story is kicked off very dramatically by a pair of soldiers who have spotted the ghost of Hamlet's father, but slows up to accommodate one of Shakespeare's overdone devices, the play-within-the-play. Hamlet's madness is a topic of much discussion, but is he even acting mad? It's hard to tell from the text, which has our hero going off in several directions at once. His love for the waifish Ophelia is said to be a great motivator, but all we see him do with her is blow her off.
"This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind." The 1948 film by Laurence Olivier began with that statement, but this question of Hamlet's indecision, like the madness thing, is unsatisfying reductivist. Olivier's film is terrific, in part for some judicious trims that do away with the subplot about a Norwegian invasion and focus more attention on Hamlet himself. One wonders if Shakespeare's longest play is a little too, well, long.
Who is Hamlet? I don't think Shakespeare tries to answer that. What he did was build something so enigmatic that civilization stepped in to fill and refill the blanks.
What we have from Shakespeare is an underbaked or rebaked story, many of the best lines of dialogue in English, a few puns that haven't aged as well, and achingly deep thoughts about the nature of man; alternately nihilist, existentialist, and Christian in tone - sometimes all three at once. Is man just "food for worms" in the end, or is there indeed "a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough-hew them how we will"? Shakespeare was too great an artist to attempt a definitive answer, and that's the glory of "Hamlet". But there's frustration also in the open-ended nature of its characters and narrative. Sometimes you're better off not trying to cram too much into a simple revenge story.
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"Hamlet (Spanish Edition)" Overview
This text is part of a series of selected Shakepeare texts designed for student use. The introduction provides criticsim, covering themes, characters and dramatic structure, and helpful notes are provided at the right level on every page, facing the text.
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