Hamlet

Denmark in the middle ages.  The king is dead and his brother Claudius has taken over the throne, for reasons I haven't even bothered trying to figure out, since the king's son Hamlet is old enough and smart enough to be in college...oh, well.  Claudius has also wasted no time in grabbing the king's widow and trying to win over Hamlet the way he has won over everyone else.  Hmmm.  Anyway, Hamlet is predictably upset with all this, and on top of it all he is shown his father's ghost by his best friend and finds out that his scumbag of an uncle killed his dad.  While he's trying to figure out what the hell to do, he pretends to be crazy, which makes his girlfriend's dad Polonius just a little unnerved as well as his girlfriend Ophelia, and so in a burst of really stupid logic Ophelia is used to spy on Hamlet.  And nobody seems to find anything wrong with this.  Hamlet, the single truly smart guy in the play, then gives away his knowledge by staging a play showng his father's murder, which gets him sent to England, and in that process he kills Polonius, which makes Ophelia go nuts, and he has two of his old buddies who were spying on him killed.  Polonius' son comes back from France in a vengeful rage, and he and Claudius plot to kill Hamlet in a fencing match, which they do, with some more people dying in a sudden mass of bodies at the end, and a prince from Norway takes over Denmark, and the two living main characters left live happily ever after, I suppose.

This is one of my favorite plays of all time.  I first read it when I was sixteen and finished it at one o'clock in the morning.  You can probably guess how well I slept that night.  But I keep getting drawn back to it like a moth to fire.  It's the words, mostly.  This play has some of the most memorable language anywhere-it ain't the most famous play in the English language for nothing.  I also sympathize a lot with Ophelia, since I don't always have the best relationship with my own father.  And the fencing scene is pretty cool.  I could talk about this for pages and pages but I'll shut myself up now before you get incredibly bored.  Does Hamlet have an Oedipus complex?  No.  I could tell you why I don't even think there is such a thing, but that's another essay.  I just don't see it in the text.  And the way I see it, Hamlet's problem as well as his saving grace is his intellectualism.  It keeps him from self-destructing like Ophelia, but it gets him killed because of his delaying.  Actually, the play-within-a-play is what gets him killed because he blows his cover big time, but the reason he put it on is his intellectualism.  There is some debate about who Ophelia gives each flower to in her mad scene; each production makes descisions about it.  There is also debate about what kinds of poison are used by Claudius and Laertes and what book Hamlet is reading when he has that scene with Polonius ("words, words, words"), but that's pretty much pointless.

main / shakespeare / people / movies / books / random / jokes / star trek / x-files
writing / quotes / poetry