Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and, like Oscar the Grouch, I love it. And I love Hamlet. He can’t shut up, he’s a moody as hell bisexual and gets all philosophical while wanting everyone to think he’s losing his mind triggering a self-fulfilling prophecy of his mental health actually spiraling… okay so maybe I relate a bit too much. But this play rules and it has survived as a classic for a reason even if its characters don’t survive the play. Plus who doesn’t love a good revenge story? Especially one that has become a staple plot that has also led to great retellings like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or even The Lion King and has so many elements that would later be revitalized as gothic tropes in literature and film.

This whole play is steeped in the interrogative mood that situates us in constant contemplation of ‘what a piece of work is man’ through a cavalcade of philosophical inquiries that move from sophism to existentialism. Of course ‘to be or not to be,’—one of the most quoted and recognizable lines of the play—is often considered to probe existentialist ideas long before Kierkegaard and Sartre would take up their pens and opens the play up as an investigation of identity and purpose that is, arguably, very existentially thematic. Much of the play asks ‘what is a man’ but is also Hamlet asking “who am I?” of himself as he schemes and stumbles through the ‘rotten’ state of the world. He also seems to express ideas of relativism central to the Sophists in lines such as ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ and this moral relativism coupled with a thirst for revenge adds a rather edgy and engaging texture to the narrative as it plunges forward into destruction and death.

It is also a coveted role on the stage and there is such an incredible list of people who have played Hamlet. Peter O'Toole, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Burton, David Tennant, Kenneth Branagh, Christopher Plummer, Daniel Day-Lewis, Alan Cumming and many more. Even Ian McKellen played him in a recent age-blind cast production. Who wouldn't want to play Hamlet? But Ophelia as well, one of the more interesting characters who has certainly had a life of her own across literature.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet lives on, like many of his plays, for having a rather universal quality to them that appeals to the times no matter when in history it is revisited or performed. Themes of being trapped by circumstance, themes of betrayal, themes of the in-fighting of the ruling class dooming a nation under them, and themes of struggling with identity continue to trouble people in every era and Hamlet always offers an avenue for confronting these ideas. A fantastic play that stands out even in Shakespeare’s impressive canon of works.

I feel like an heretic saying this, for since the first time I read this play I didn't like Hamlet much. And after this reread, it's still true. It's the story that fails to enthrall me, not so the characters, not the prose, not the stagecraft either.

"ما معنى الرحمة إذا لم تملك الوقوف في وجه الحقيقة، فتردَّنَا عن الشر إن نوينا، وتُقِيلنَا منه إن عَثَرنا؟ "

هاملت ...أحد روائع الكلاسكيات العالمية..
كتبها ويليام شكسبير الغني عن التعريف أكيد الذي يعد أشهر مؤلف مسرحي عرفه التاريخ ومن أشهر أعماله تاجر البندقية ،روميو وجولييت ،عطيل ،مكبث و الملك لير...

تُعد هاملت أطول المسرحيات التي كتبها شكسبير، حيث وصلت وقت عرضها إلى خمسة ساعات في النسخة الأصلية كما إنها تعتبر من أكثر الأعمال الأدبية قوة وتأثيراً في العالم و كانت من أكثر أعماله شهرة خلال حياته..
المسرحية مكونة من ٤ فصول بجانب مقدمة طويلة في بداية الكتاب بس مقدمة مهمة و ساعدتني كتير في فهم الأحداث وقد قرأتها بترجمة خليل مطران و كانت ممتازة...

تدور أحداث المسرحية حول قصة انتقام الأمير هاملت من عمه كلوديوس الذي قتل أخاه ثم تزوج أرملته (والدة هاملت) و استولي علي العرش..
علي الرغم من صعوبة بعض المفردات إلا أن الحوارات كانت رائعة و مليئة بالأسئلة الوجودية و الفلسفية...
شكسبير ألقي الضوء علي جانب مهم من شخصية هاملت وهو التردد أو الحيرة وذلك عندما قال جملته الشهيرة..أكون أو لا أكون..

"أكون أو لا أكون؟ تلك هي المسألة، أيُّ الحالتين أمْثَلُ بالنفس؟ أتَحَمُّلُ الرجم بالمقاليع وتَلَّقي سهام الحظِ الأنكد، أم النهوضُ لمكافحةِ المصائب.."

كل واحد فينا مع إختلاف الظروف بيفكر زي هاملت كتير..يكون أو لا يكون..يتكلم و لا يسكت..ياخد موقف في حياته و لا يستسلم...

مسرحية رائعة و علي الرغم إني قرأتها قبل كدة و في الغالب درسناها كلنا في المدرسة إلا إني أعتقد إن كل مسرحيات شكسبير تستحق قراءة تانية و بتأني لإنها حقيقي ممتعة..

"من مصائب هذه الحياة أن تحتاج أحيانًا الفضيلةُ إلى التماس الغفران من الرذيلة.."

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet



Still one of my favorite Shakepeare plays. I've probably read it 3-5 times and probably watched just as many film productions: 1996 - Kenneth Branagh; 1990 - Mel Gibson; 1948 - Laurence Olivier; 2000 - Ethan Hawke; 1990 - Kevin Kline. I love it. Every read gives me a chance to channel something else.

This is also my first exposure to the play since visiting Hamlet's castle in Denmark last summer (2016) on the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death. While we were walking through it, they were doing a "Hamlet Live" at Kronborg Castle and the Hamlet flirted with my daughter. It was definitely worth the time and the blustery weather. I saw cannons and tapestries, but alas no ghosts or floating virgins. Sad!

I also learned THIS summer while I was in Malta, reading about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that it was Coleridge who largely propelled Hamlet to the top of Shakepeare's heap. According to Jonathan Bate, "the Romantics' reinvention of Hamlet as a paralyzed Romantic was their single most influential critical act." It seemed popluar among Romantics, after Coleridge, to show a strong antic disposition for Shakespeare's psychologically complex, young Prince.

❂"We love Hamlet even as we love ourselves." - Lord Byron
❂"Hamlet's heart was full of such Misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia 'Go to a Nunnery, go, go!' Indeed I should like to give up the matter at once -- I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with." - John Keats
❂"I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so...." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Favorite Lines this read:

“O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.” (Act 2, Scene 2)

“Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.” (Act 2, Scene 2)

“Our wills and fates do so contrary run.” (Act 3, Scene 2)

“For some must watch, while some must sleep
So runs the world away” (Act 3, Scene 2)

“If your mind dislike anything obey it” (Act 5, Scene 2)

“All that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.”
Lecture XII, STC.

As much as I admire Coleridge and with the boldness of having read Hamlet only once and therefore being aware I haven’t even managed to scratch the surface of the Paragon of Tragedies, I dare to antagonize the poet and proclaim that I resist the idea of linking Hamlet’s moral idealism to reprehensible inaction.
The Prince of Denmark’s obsession is to think, not to act, and in spite of having been dethroned by his duplicitous uncle, he seems to count with the favor of the common people. But Hamlet can’t help being haunted by the sickness of life and he retreats into the abyss of his inwardness. He is plagued by endless questions that paralyze him in meditation: “What a piece of work is a man!... And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?”.
In the opening scene of Act I, a melancholic dejection has already taken hold of The Prince and, whether in self-preservation or in fear of foul reality, he engages in deluded gibberish easily attributable to a man whose reason has abandoned him.
And yet his inquisitive soliloquies are infused with the elucidating sharpness of a genius, someone with great intellectual capacity who taunts with puns and riddles that contain receding depths and layers and layers of meaning in them.

“The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant’s reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he may his full quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?”

Spontaneous philosopher or irredeemably insane?
The world of Hamlet is phantasmagorical, in constant disruption with the burdens of the past, the betrayals of the present and the falsehood of the future. Everybody around him seems to have hidden agendas. He observes, he ponders, he pretends not to see the King’s debasing lust and murderous greed, Polonius’ machiavellian maneuvers, the Queen’s disgusting shallowness, Ophelia’s gullible innocence. Yet his keen eyes discern it all…but at what cost?

“Great wit to madness nearly is allied"

The afflictions of life require greatness of spirit and Hamlet meets his fate fully aware that logic, reason and justice are not enough to disentangle the quandaries of existence. In the course of the action though, a transformation has taken place in him, the doubtful Prince has grown in wisdom and is ready to submit to providence without repudiating the world. The welfare of the Kingdom, the sense of honor, the corroding lust or ambition, all dissolve in the spectacle of beholding the spirit of man blossoming and most triumphant… in defeat.

IN PRAISE OF FOLLY!

"Thus are all things represented in counterfeit, yet without this is no living!"
Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly.

Hamlet goes nuts because he wants to somehow truly Live in a counterfeit world. He tells Horatio at the outset he's going to put on an antic disposition...

Fact is, though, seeing a Ghost has Driven him Antic! He's now crazy as a coot.

When the counterfeit world forces is into a corner at our Coming of Age - and we're labelled from that point on - the world WINS. We don't like it, but there it is.

The freedom of childhood now gone, we either pay obeisance to the True and Counterfeit State of Things or - like Hamlet - act weird over in a corner, as Dostoevsky's Underground Man does.

What's WRONG with Hamlet, folks? Better yet, what's RIGHT with him? All's well, he says, with him. Logically he just HAS to be nuts in a loony tunes world.

He knows cause the World knows. And he drops out of polite society, which sugarcoats its hidden knowing. So, out of spite, the World gives a label to such noncompliant ones.

And Hamlet? Freud says he has an unresolved Oedipal complex. And T.S. Eliot says his emotions have no "Objective Correlative," which means, I guess that he cannot link any FACTS together to express his anxiety.

But, dear Sigmund and dearer Tom, our world is skewed - and you know it. It doesn't FORGIVE. Because the State of Denmark is in charge. And that state is rotten.

So, bottom line, as the great philosophe Jacques Derrida says, our consciousness - Hamlet's, and Ours - is APORETIC. The world is unjust. It favours the Phony.

Not the Authentic. And Hamlet is Authentic.

Which means he's a tangled knot!

Therefore the Bard never successfully resolved the incredible Tensions of his play - hence, only four stars. You see, he never sugercoats it. But, man oh man, did we 18-year-olds dig our teeth into its words and its plot back in 1968!

We loved it. THIS, guys, was COMING OF AGE. No wonder I was a dud.

My friend Brian bought a powerful motorbike, Robert Pirsig's chosen weapon of Resistance. Camus wrote Resistance, Rebellion and Death. If the Establishment had a bone to pick with us real items our lock was Pick Proof.

For me too. I buried myself in existentialism. And that's the main reason MY consciousness has Remained aporetic all these years. I had no choice. If I couldn't win, I had to resist. And Bad luck has hounded my every act ever since.

I've been perched on my aporia for 50 years.

I loved this play because it showed me how to find a peaceful hiatus from its storm, now and then:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet (I said)
Nor was meant to be!
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, and a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, Almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I'm other words I SAW THROUGH myself, all the way to the Emptiness.of all play acting.

Those words of T.S. Eliot heralded the beginning of long-delayed precarious peace for me.

The key, to me, was in the Gospel: "resist not evil." On a personal and not, however, international level - which remains in God's hands. That we can only pray about.

Resist not evil, because violence breeds further violence. KNOW that there's a solution for our pain. That solution is an outsider's authenticity.

Its way of Fractured Peace is best...

Even if its aporia has to be a personal MARTYRDOM:

For such is, in the end, our Unbalanced Purgatory and its final product, Everlasting Peace.

Re-read 9/9/18. Still probably the best thing ever written.

Last New Year's Eve, I was the designated driver for my group of friends. After ringing in the new year with lots of champagne (for them, not for me), I dutifully and responsibly drove them all home, making multiple stops all over town. By 1:30am, I had dropped off the last person and was a block away from my own home when another vehicle veered into my lane and blinded me with extremely bright lights. I swerved... and hit a vehicle parked on the street that I didn't even see until it was all over. My car was totaled, the car I hit was totaled, I had a broken hand and foot from the airbag and the impact of the collision, and the drunk MFer without a designated driver that caused the entire thing drove off in his not-wrecked white Honda Pilot with a smiley face bumper sticker. One block from my house, damn it.

I was pissed. This street is not a through-street; 95% of travelers on this street live in this neighborhood. Once I became mobile again, I became obsessed with finding this asshole. I drove around the neighborhood every chance I could looking for that SUV. I had fantasies of finally locating him and smashing up the Honda Pilot with my rental car. Then, when he came outside his home to investigate, I would demolish his hand and foot with a baseball bat and then take off. Truth be told, that was the first fantasy scenario. The more I obsessed about it, the grander the revenge fantasy became. Torches, snakes, and poison were all part of the revenge plot at some point.

A few weeks later, I saw it. White Honda Pilot with a smiley face bumper sticker was sitting in the driveway of a home a few streets away from mine. I pulled over on the side of the road and sat there for a very long time rehashing my revenge plots and figuring out the minute details. Then I started my car and drove home.

Because revenge is complicated. If I had gone through with the plot, I could have hurt myself. I could have hurt someone else. I would have most definitely received an even larger increase in my car insurance than I was already getting. God wouldn't have been happy with me because of the whole "Vengeance is mine" thing. I couldn't bring myself to do it. There could only be one result of my action or my inaction -- an accident that already happened and increased my car insurance rates.

And that's Hamlet in a nutshell. Shakespeare quite brilliantly turned the revenge play upside down. Hamlet, the young man seeking revenge, can't bring himself to do it. Hamlet knew that it was expected for him to seek revenge for an honor code violation, but he also knew that religion opposes revenge and could place his soul in jeopardy if he were to carry it out. So, he convinced himself that the ghost of his father might not be real and that he needed more proof. When he got his proof, he talked himself out of his revenge plot when he had the perfect opportunity because he convinced himself that killing a murderer while the murderer is praying would result in sending the murderer to heaven. He obsessively and continuously overthinks everything, even the fact that he overthinks everything. He doesn't know what to do because he realizes everyone is a liar and everyone is hiding something, and he hates that, but he does the same thing in order to figure out what's going on. He was driving around the neighborhood looking for a white Honda Pilot for the entire play.

In the graveyard scene, though, Hamlet finally gets it. There could only be one outcome whether he took his revenge or not, and that outcome was eventual death. Regardless of what we do or don't do, death is coming for all of us. One day we will be nothing but a skull without a tongue with which we can tell our stories. We all need excellent and loyal people for friends who can be our tongues when we are no longer able to speak for ourselves. Long live the Horatios of the world.

Hamlet is about the complexities of the human personality: the internal ups and downs, the thoughts that go through our heads when we're trying to sleep at night, the constant struggle to figure out what we are supposed to be doing. It isn't about a conflict between multiple people; it is about the conflicts we experience within ourselves. No wonder this is thought of as the best thing ever written. It is about putting on one face for the world and another for our alone time. It is about finding out that people you trust aren't that trustworthy. It is about that search for the white Honda Pilot that ends up with your lying in bed at night wondering if you're doing the right thing. After all these years, Hamlet is still relatable. Hamlet is all of us on any given day. And maybe even every day.

Because the figure of Hamlet has so fascinated successive generations, the play has provoked more discussion, more performances and more scholarship than any other in the whole history of world drama.

this is just one big episode of the office

Hamlet is one of my favourite pieces of literature of all time. I have referenced so many times and re-read often, why?

Not because of the story. Yes, it is another brilliant play by the genius that is William Shakespeare, but more importantly I fell in love with the many quotes, expressions and profound statements that the book is peppered with, which have made their way into our daily lives, in common dialogue and means of expression.

A play / book that has stood the test of time and is one of the most quoted books in history. The magic lies in it’s ability to use a few words that would take the rest of us a hundred words to explain, and yet it is written so eloquently and succinctly without ambiguity.

My father taught me a lot of these phrases growing up and I was using them in my daily life without knowing that they had originated from Hamlet. So I keep a copy of Hamlet close to me in memory of my father and because this book has found its way into my heart. You have to connect with Shakespeare's language to enjoy but for me Hamlet is a beautifully written masterpiece.

Some of my favourite quotes are:

"this above all, to thine own self be true",
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”
“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
"to be, or not to be: that is the question",
“To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream",

Everyone should read Hamlet once. It is not long but its effects are long lasting. A stunning piece of literature.

hamlet x horatio
that's it.
that's my review.

Maybe it's just me, but I always experience disconnect when reading Shakespeare's plays. A group in catching up on classics decided upon a buddy read of Hamlet and I attempted to join in, and got through Act I only and skimmed through the rest. It's not the language- I actually only read Shakespeare to sharpen my skills. And it's not the story or even reading plays. Something about the Bard I find it hard to get through and I still can not pinpoint it.

That being said, even Act I included some talking points. A young prince who wants revenge for the murder of his father, going as far as calling his mother's relationship with his uncle to be incest. In Jewish law a widow is obligated to marry one of her deceased husband's brothers unless they preform a ritual ceremony freeing her. This brings up the timeless question visited in commentaries of A Merchant of Venice- was the Bard Jewish? Regardless, even if Hamlet was seething at his uncle's attempt to seize the throne, in some circles the marriage is perfectly legal.

And of course, there is the love interest Ophelia whose father tells her to proceed with caution. Yet even this is not enough for me to read through one of Shakespeare's finest. Is it the lack of female strong characters other than A Merchant of Venice and MacBeth, my two favorites? A dated setting? Outdated references? I still can't pinpoint it but suffice it to say I will leave the reading of the Bard to others and move on. As classic as his plays are, they just are not my taste.