Hamlet - William Shakespeare

This is Shakespeare’s longest play, and of all Shakespearean characters, and Hamlet himself has more words in this play than any other Shakespeare character. It’s one of the most performed of his plays, and is one of the most quoted plays – I’m sure we’ve all heard ‘To be, Or not to be …’ even if perhaps not all have us have read Hamlet.

Hamlet is a tragedy, and the main themes are revenge and death – in the play, we get to see the feelings of five sons who have lost their fathers through murder, and in the famous to be or not to be speech, Hamlet grapples with the concept of death. At another point, he also confronts the effects of death on the body ad he looks at the skull of Yorick.

To put it briefly, the plot revolves around Hamlet, who is pulled out of his university upon hearing of his fathers death, only to find upon his return home that his mother, Queen Gertrude, has already remarried, and that worse still, she’s married the late kings brother, Claudius. The plot deepens when Hamlet is informed of a wondering ghost that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to his father, and upon meeting the ghost, Hamlet learns that is in indeed the ghost of his later father, and worse still, that his father did not merely die, but was murdered by the very same Claudius who then married Gertrude and took the throne.

Hamlet promises to avenge his fathers murder, but delays doing so , and because of his inability to take immediate action, many innocent people die in the process, and although Hamlet does finally get his revenge, it costs him his own life.

Hamlet himself is a complex character – he seems to be a man both suspicious and rational- even though he meets the ghost himself, his logic still tells him he could be being misled, and he sets about finding ways to prove the guilt of his uncle Claudius. But at another stage, we see religion and superstition taking hold of Hamlet, when he has the chance to kill Claudius but chooses not to, as he has been praying and is thus sin-free and entitled to go to heaven, a thought which Hamlet cannot bear while his father’s soul is still wondering the earth.

He’s also a very thoughtful and contemplative character, who rather than take decisive and immediate action often soliloquizes at length, and it’s for this reason he has so many words in the play. Despite this, he is still too young to have learned real wisdom, and see’s it as his job to put everything right.

Of course, Hamlet is not the only character in the play, nor is his only story contained within. As with many of Shakespeare’s plays, you see something of the Elizabethan beliefs and morals in the play, and there are many small sub-plots.

Shakespeare can be hard to read at times, and this particularly wordy piece can be quite challenging. I took it in small doses, and often had to flick back a little to understand the context of things that were said. I did find it challenging, but also rewarding, and although I haven’t gone into too much detail about the plot (which is complex, and in some places surprising) because I don’t want to reveal too much in the review, I also found it a good story, with a good mix of characters, some very sad moments, and some strong emotional scenes.

If you like reading plays and you like Shakespeare, I think you’d enjoy reading this. If you’re not used to reading plays, there are several film versions of Hamlet available that you could perhaps watch alongside reading.

I'll leave you with an anagram of one of the famous lines from Hamlet
'To be or not to be: that is the question; whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...' which becomes 'In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.'

Five stars from me.