It’s big, it’s famous, it's hugely influential, it’s Hamlet. By far the most terrifying book I’ve ever read (it sat on a shelf in my room untouched for half a year out of pure fear that I was not ready to interact with it), Hamlet is renowned as Shakespeare’s masterpiece and, by many, as the greatest piece of literature ever written in all of human history. After reading Hamlet, all I can really confirm is that I will have to read it again, and again, and again to be able to know that for sure. But what I can say from a first read-through is that this play is definitely the play that got away from Shakespeare, as it is so unique in style, so enrapt in the complex psyche of Hamlet as a character, and so enigmatic and bizarre that T.S. Eliot would famously call it an artistic failure. However, I believe that Hamlet is far from that, and (once I re-read it, I will be able to affirm this more strongly) I believe that it is a play so powerful and carefully crafted to explore such great depth of the human condition, that the only analogue it has is Euripides’ Bacchae, which is, in my opinion, the greatest book ever written.

     Hamlet follows the titular prince as he is set by the ghost of his father on a murder-revenge quest against the new king, his uncle, Claudius. Revenge tragedies are extremely common in the Elizabethan-Jacobean Era, and so the plot of Hamlet may not seem groundbreaking or terribly unique at first. However, when you see how Shakespeare executes this revenge tragedy, the unparalleled genius of the play begins to show. Hamlet is a character who Shakespeare loves giving long, rambling monologues, seeming to prioritize scenes of Hamlet thinking and speaking his beliefs to other characters rather than prioritizing plot cohesion. Perhaps this is why Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play. However, once one can understand how deep of a character Hamlet is, the uniqueness of the plot begins to show, as Hamlet is a character so well-rounded with wit, dark humor, moodiness, potential insanity, sadness, and above all, the ability to think out loud and reason, that he always talks himself out of the revenge-murder. Hamlet is a character internally torn between reason and emotions, and I believe that makes the recipe for the most believable human characters, such as Pentheus, Jane Austen’s many protagonists, and Quentin Compson. Additionally, Hamlet’s speeches contain lots of wrangling with philosophical questions, most of which stemming from what would later be known as Nihilism and Existentialism. Indeed, Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy writes his own summary of Hamlet as he sees it, referring Hamlet’s wishy-washiness to murder his uncle as metaphorical for how no matter what actions we as humans take, it won’t matter in the grand scheme of the universe, so why act? As can be readily perceived, Hamlet was exceedingly popular in the 19th century with Romanticists and moody Nietzsches and Nietzsche-esques alike. 

     The last thing I will say about Hamlet is how I loved how much meta-theater was in the play, giving it another analogue to the meta-theater of Bacchae. Based on Hamlet’s actions such as his monologues about theater and how he would be represented as a character and having an acting troupe perform a play for his uncle shows how Hamlet seems to be, on some level, a character who is aware that he is in a play. I find this choice by Shakespeare to be really interesting, both in figuring out what Shakespeare’s true intentions were in writing Hamlet and in what it means for the play as a whole. I think this choice definitely supports the idea that Shakespeare knew he was writing something very unique and wanted to go even farther off the rails with it through this choice. Overall, Hamlet was very good to read for a first read-through, and I am excited to read it again and to read many other of Shakespeare’s plays in the future!