So I listened to this as a dramatic reading while driving to and from Cincinnati, and I think this is how I will consume Shakespeare plays from now on. The actors have had to do all the work of translating the archaic language and sentence structure into universal feeling which made the play much easier to digest. I also mostly listened to this so I could really appreciate the hidden subtleties of this skit.
Summary
The play opens up at a wedding where Hamlet’s mother is getting married to Hamlet’s recently deceased father’s brother. That was a long sentence, mom marries dead dad’s brother. But wait there is more, rumor has it that the ghost of Hamlet’s father has recently been spotted and he has some information on who murdered him. Hamlet finds the ghost, has the fateful meeting and is sent into a spiral of revenge (or justice depending on who you ask) with a side of madness.
Thoughts
I got way more into this than I was expecting, as mentioned above the dramatic reading definitely helped. As with most of Shakespeare’s plays many of the quotations have become so common most (including me) are unaware of their sources. A few in this particular play were “to thy own self be true”, “though this be madness, yet there is method in it”, “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, “the lady doth protest too much” and on and on. The “to be, or not to be” speech has been performed almost into oblivion, but you may need to check for a pulse if you can hear it without getting goosebumps. If you haven’t heard it in a while this was a good performance of it. The sentiment of the soliloquy captures so beautifully the tragedy of consciousness. You can see it being used in pessimistic schools and later on in existentialism. Most notably, in my mind, incarnated in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus where he says the most important philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. To me this speech was the high mark of the play, the rest served as scaffolding. Overall fantastic, I think it should be mandatory to witness as not only is it fundamental to so much of the succeeding western cannon, but it also still manages to be moving from across the ages. It makes sense that it is still being performed over 400 years after its inception.