Hamlet by William Shakespeare

One of the categories in Back to the Classics this year is to read a classic play. Since I still had three Shakespeare works on my Classics Club list, I decided to work on both challenges by reading Hamlet next. This was probably the most famous Shakespeare play that I hadn't read yet, so I went into it curious to see what all the fuss was about and to see if I would like it any better than my current favorites, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. 

The plot of Hamlet follows young prince Hamlet of Denmark as he is struggling to make sense of the death of his father, the King. As the story begins, he is upset that his father has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. He is also angry at his mother, who has remarried his uncle Claudius, the new King of Denmark, only two months later. He sees this as an incestuous betrayal and has become angry and depressed at the turn his life has taken. Even the woman he loves, Ophelia, isn't responding to his romantic advances. Everything seems to have gone terribly wrong. 

Hamlet is thrown into further turmoil when the ghost of his father appears to him one night and tells him that he didn't die in a random accident - he was murdered by Claudius. The ghost asks him to get revenge for his death by exposing his uncle's crime and killing him. Hamlet readily agrees, but upon reflection, he has some second thoughts. Fearing that the ghost could be a mere trick of the devil, he decides to confirm the information about his father's death through other means. He arranges for a play to be performed at the castle which mimics the supposed murder so that he can see his uncle's reaction to the events. When his uncle storms off during the show, he knows that the ghost was real and he sets out to make Claudius pay for his crimes. 

I think that I would enjoy seeing Hamlet performed on stage more than I enjoyed reading it. I didn't dislike the play, it is iconic, after all, but I had a hard time warming up to the characters and getting invested in the story. I couldn't really get a sense of who Hamlet was. For most of the play, he is pretending to be crazy in order to distract his uncle away from his investigation (which really doesn't do anything except cause himself more trouble), but I found myself consistently wondering how much of the crazy was really an act. He was awfully cruel and inappropriate at various points throughout the play when he didn't have to be. He was also indecisive and strangely drawn to rash violence. It was consistently said of him that the people of Denmark love him, which is why Claudius doesn't murder him once he starts making waves, but nothing he actually does in the story shows him to be a likable person. I wasn't able to find the "hero" part of the tragic hero in him, unlike I could with Romeo, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. I just found him to be odd. 

Women don't fare particularly well in this play either. There are only two, Queen Gertrude and Ophelia. Gertrude is regarded with complete contempt by Hamlet, who is totally preoccupied with thoughts of her having sex with his uncle. Essentially, every time Hamlet thinks of his mother, he refers to her as a whore and makes comments about her sex life. She is not characterized at all beyond this and doesn't have many lines. I found myself wondering if Hamlet ever felt any feelings of affection for her, or if he felt split in his feelings between love and anger. This wasn't really part of the story though. Ophelia gets more lines, but quickly fades into madness when her father dies and meets with a tragic end. It's that female kind of hysteria that women from older works are often afflicted with. She eventually just wanders around the palace singing snippets of songs that show men to be faithless and cruel. These songs were tough to understand. They used a lot of wording and references from the time period. I didn't find her very compelling. 

The pacing felt strange in this play as well. Things happened incredibly quickly between scenes. There aren't many stage directions to indicate how much time is passing, so everything was jumbled together in my mind. I feel like this wouldn't be a problem if I were watching the play though, so I'm not being critical of it. It's just one of those things that happens when you are reading something that is meant to be seen.

So, this obviously wasn't my favorite Shakespeare play. There was a lot to like in it though. It felt like there was a famous line on nearly every page. This is where we get the phrases "hair standing on end," "murder most foul," and "method to his madness," among many, many others. As a Star Trek fan, I chuckled when I saw "the undiscovered country" come up. Of course, the famous "to be or not to be" speech is here too. It was fun to see so many well known words pop up and see what context they were first used in. The end was also absolutely wild. You know going into a tragedy that there will be many deaths by the end, but this was really something special. 

I'm sure that I'm missing something here. Hamlet is regarded as Shakespeare's best work by many. It just didn't reach me on a deeper level. I struggled to see Hamlet as a real person and didn't really connect with the story. It was still definitely worth reading though. The wordplay alone made it a fun experience. I still have two plays left on the Classics Club list, Julius Cesar and The Tempest. I'm looking forward to seeing what I think of those in the near future. 

Challenge Tally

Back to the Classics 2021 (A Classic Play): 8/12

Classics Club (#3 on my list): 90/100 books completed

Total Books Read in 2021: 21