Continuing with our list of 100 books to read, we read Shakespeare's Hamlet.
DID YOU KNOW?
Back in the time of traveling acting troupes, often times they would put on Hamlet as a last minute addition, since it's the Bard's shortest work. Cramming it into an already packed rehearsal schedule, mixed with the rather morose and poetic prose found in the play, caused many actors to overact many of the parts, especially Hamlet, who goes on and on about death and revenge and the like. From this situation do we get the term "Ham" for an actor who overacts or is otherwise cheesy.
But, I found that I really enjoyed this play. This is the first Shakespeare play that I've read outside of a classroom setting. I had previously read Romeo & Juliette in my high school English class and I thoroughly enjoyed it when I had a definitions guide readily at hand. The version of Hamlet I read had tons of footnotes to help me with understanding.
The bulk of the story, you already know if you've seen the Lion King. Uncle kills King, Prince seeks to kill Uncle for killing King. Everyone dies at the end.
This play, however, brought up some fun existential crises that a lot of people have to face at some point or another. The first, of course, is if there really is an afterlife. Hamlet's famous speech, "To be, or not to be" basically covers all the possible outcomes of suicide and rules it as a Catch 22. Is it better to endure the tortures and torments of mortality and inherit an afterlife or to kill oneself and thereby ending the pain and torment. But, he goes on, that only works if there is no afterlife. What's the point of enduring this all if this is it? And what if there is an afterlife and I'm punished for taking my own life?
The story constantly plays between the fear of the afterlife and the inevitability that comes with death. His own mother reminds Hamlet to not be so sad about his father's death, since everyone dies eventually. (Try telling your children that at the next funeral they have to attend. Don't worry Sally, everyone dies, so there's no point in being sad!) What's more is the delightful, even comical, insanity that Hamlet puts on. It makes you wonder how great it would be if you could pretend to be crazy, and thereby getting a free pass on anything you say to people?
Hamlet is approached by his dead father who tells him that his uncle killed him, so Hamlet, wanting to make sure that he wasn't hallucinating anything, sets up a situation to unnerve the usurper king if he was really guilty. In here we find a bit of scathing denouncement of other forms of entertainment that were stealing patrons from Shakespeare's plays, as Hamlet bemoans the plight of the actors who are top-notch having to resume traveling to make any money. It's one of those moments, where you really start to see these actors as people and not just words on a page.
Finally, I think it's interesting how everyone ends up dead. Poison. Poison everywhere. Hamlet accidentally kills a man whose son teams up with the usurper king to kill Hamlet. They'll duel with rapiers, one of which is tipped with poison. As a backup, the usurper king also poisons the wine Hamlet will drink. The queen toasts to Hamlet after the first round and drops dead. Hamlet gets poked by the poison-rapier and, in the scuffle, also pokes the would-be assassin with the same weapon. Then everything stops and he's all, "Bro, I'm sorry it ended this way. Please forgive me, if I forgive you for killing my father. The King put me up to this." And Hamlet is all, "Yo dawg, we cool. But this rapier is poisoned? Shiggidy SHANK." And then he stabs the usurper king. So everyone dies and the person who was framed for killing Hamlet's father ends up inheriting the kingdom in a brilliant turn of irony.
Also, it's hard to write Hamlet a bunch of times without writing once, Ham Melt, and now I'm all hungry.
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