The Prince and I

Author’s Note: Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601, is his longest and one of the most influential tragedies. Its story is based on an ancient Scandinavian legend about Prince Amleth, first recorded in the 12th century by the Saxon historian Saxo Grammaticus. The legend tells of a prince who feigns madness to avenge his murdered father, a tale Shakespeare adapted and enriched with Renaissance humanism and Elizabethan political themes.

The play was likely first performed around 1600, during the late years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign—a period marked by political strife and uncertainty because Elizabeth had no clear heir, paralleling the play's themes of succession and legitimacy. Early performances include one at the Globe Theatre and, unusually, a documented staging aboard the East India Company's ship The Dragon in 1607. Hamlet remains Shakespeare's most performed and studied drama, deeply rooted in the cultural and political anxieties of its time and drawing on earlier Elizabethan revenge tragedies such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.

While we were in London, during our England trip in 2017, we did see a play in the New Globe theater, but it was Twelfth Night and not Hamlet, more’s the pity. It was no less enjoyable, but I hope to get back there one day to see the Prince where he once was played. 

Also, the 2022 action drama film, The Northman, is the tale as it may have happened based on Saxo Grammaticus’ telling. Worth seeing. Those familiar with Hamlet will see the connections.

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Shakespeare, to most people, evokes a sense of someone who may have existed and written some plays and poems in another era. We typically have to read some of his works in school, but the language of the time feels full of thees and thous and references to things that make no sense to us in the modern era. He and his works don't feel relevant, may seem impenetrable, and are difficult, if not impossible, to read.

During my time in high school, we read Romeo and Juliet. I think it was chosen mainly because the “star-crossed lovers” are themselves but teens, and the “hectic in the blood” is raging with hormones and drama for us, too, so they seem relatable. Even so, despite the play's ability to make sense to students for this set of topics, it fails to really click with us. This is true of any of The Bard's plays. As I said to a friend of mine who expressed a lack of appeal in Shakespeare, mainly because it was hard to understand, you have to see the plays performed. They are meant to be acted, not read, and, if performed correctly and well by those thespians trained in the art of Shakespeare's genius, they come alive in a way where we cannot miss the themes and moral lessons built in.

I have always been a bit of a nerd, of course. I fell in love with Shakespeare in middle school, when a family member bought me a graphic novel version of Hamlet. It was suitably dark, gloomy, and with themes of betrayal, poisoning, vengeance, and ghosts that suited me right down to my Doc Martins, and it captured my imagination. It was abridged, as I would find out later, and it glossed over some of the best bits, but it was one of my favorite stories. This was when I began to understand the significance of that particular play, but also the Bard as a writer and genius generally.

When it came to learning Romeo and Juliet, in high school, Mrs. Hooven did the play justice. She managed, somehow, to make it relevant, but the sessions in class where we circled our desks and were assigned parts to read were intolerable. With no context, Elizabethan stage English is not the most clear. When we watched the Franco Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet film in class, which employed actual teenagers (and won several Oscars, as I recall), the story made sense and suddenly felt poignant and stirred emotions and other feelings, too.

That tiny glimpse of power was not felt again for me until the January term of my first year of college in Indiana, where I took a classic cinema course and we watched the 1948 Hamlet adaptation with the Prince of Denmark played by Sir Laurence Olivier. Again, my spirit was moved. Here was a tale that resounded in me. A son whose parent has died, expelled from his inheritance, and with a distracted, dramatic disposition, no self-confidence, and feeling lost and filmed moodily in deep shades of black and white. My situation wasn't exact, but it was close enough to feel a connection. Except for the “everyone dies at the end”, obviously.

This was when I started to become a Hamlet freak. I memorized the Yorick speech (“Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio”) that everyone remembers because the prince holding a skull is primarily what we think of when we think of Shakespeare. This may also be around the time when I started to feel more comfortable, more myself, like the prince, dressed all in black.

Later, I watched the Mel Gibson version, and secretly loved the atmosphere but hated Gibson's prince. He missed the nuance and the emotional anguish and, in place, gave a histrionic performance that missed even the most obvious rhythms of the iambic pentameter the play is written in. I must not pretend to have understood all this, yet. That came later, but I knew somehow it was wrong. Also, sadly, once again, the Gibson version cut out much of the original play. 

In school in Greensboro, working on my English degree (this was before I went back to my home country of philosophy), I signed up for a Shakespeare class, but two minutes in, I hated it. Here was a syllabus for dullards who had to take an English credit, not for those who respected the Bard. In a panic, because I needed the class, I asked another professor if I could do an independent study with him, about Shakespeare. Dr. Rosenblum assented and, for the next semester, we wandered the many hills and valleys of William Shakespeare's four best tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth (or, The Scottish Play). I wrote four papers, read and watched each play done in various forms (it is the vogue now to set Shakespeare's plays in other eras), and found myself absolutely enamored of the brilliance not only of the Bard himself, but also of the many, many scholars and actors and directors—like Orson Welles, for example— who have managed to perform his plays with the true dedication and respect they deserve.

The BBC made a host of made-for-TV versions of the tragedies that were not abridgements. They combined the various available versions, from folios to quartos, to make a comprehensively accurate representation of the plays, using the same minimalist staging that would have been seen at The Globe Theater in London. The best version of Hamlet, at that point, was the 1980 version, called Shakespeare Tragedies: Hamlet, starring Sir Derek Jacobi as the indecisive prince and Sir Patrick Stewart as Claudius. I cannot remember much about Macbeth or Lear, but this version of Hamlet struck me dumb, and I watched it over and over on our old VHS machine. At three hours, thirty minutes, it captured, at that time, the most comprehensive performance I was aware of.

I passed the class with an A and suddenly, as Dr. Rosenblum had predicted, the play was lodged in my soul. Later, but around that same time, I bought a book with the play in it, which had a dramatized radio version of Hamlet on a CD in the back cover. I ripped the CD, so that I could listen to the performance while choring. This Naxos version is now my absolute favorite and, in my opinion, the best. It stars Anton Lesser as Hamlet and has excellent Foley theatrics, pacing, and honor of the music that followed the several songs in the performance. Around that same time, I bought a book at the Friends of the Library Bookshop, downtown, called The Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet, a complete and annotated version of the play with every historical reference footnoted, the music, the means and timings, and the various folios and quartos. 

I also have Dr. Rosenblum's four-volume series called The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare, the massive Globe Illustrated Shakespeare, with The Complete Works Annotated, and volume two of Shakespeare for Students: The Tragedies. The only other truly faithful performance of Hamlet, based on all of these various versions (and depending heavily on the criticism by authors like Harold Bloom and Isaac Asimov—yes, that Asimov—of which I also own several copies, is Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version. This four-hour symphony gets almost everything right, accompanied by an all-star cast. It's not perfect, but it is well done and enjoyable. Branagh, who plays the ghost-addled prince, is too old (as were Gibson, Olivier, and Lesser) to capture a believable youth struggling with “an antic disposition,” but it serves as an excellent teaching mechanism for those not familiar.

When Elliott was learning about Hamlet in high school, and struggling, I was able to quote several passages “trippingly on the tongue,” obeying Hamlet's instructions to the Player King to a ‘T’. He kept asking questions because the play didn't make sense to him. It doesn't seem like a big thing to us, these days, perhaps because we're not monarchical or pestered by ghosts, but there is, as yet, a deeply moving story and one that “hath been taught us from a primal state”.

Hamlet, set amidst the looming stone walls of Elsinore Castle in Denmark, opens with a world unsettled by grief and suspicion. Prince Hamlet, reeling from the death of his father, is forced to confront a court reshaped by his mother’s hasty remarriage to Claudius, the new king, his uncle, and the suspected architect of his father’s demise. The supernatural makes its mark early: Hamlet’s late father’s ghost appears in the midnight gloom, urging his son to unveil the truth behind his “foul and most unnatural murder,” a command that changes Hamlet’s course and sets the shadows of revenge threading through the palace corridors.

As Hamlet grapples with the moral and existential weight of this revelation, the play becomes a study in delayed action and tangled emotions. Hamlet’s keen intellect and skepticism lead him to devise a play-within-a-play—“The Mousetrap”—meant to catch the king’s conscience, exposing Claudius’s guilt before the assembled court. All the while, the prince’s relationships fray: Ophelia, his lover, becomes collateral damage as Hamlet’s erratic behavior spirals and his trust in those closest to him—except Horatio—dissolves. As tension between outward appearances and inward truth grows, spies and double agents fill Claudius’s ranks, until nearly every character’s motives are suspect.

The tragedy explodes in the final act as the carefully set traps and grudges fester into violence. Poisoned chalices, rigged swords, and desperate confessions culminate in nearly universal destruction—royalty and innocent bystander alike. Hamlet, dying, finally enacts the ghost’s vengeance, but too late to save Denmark or himself. Amid the carnage, the play’s legacy sharpens: Hamlet’s struggle is both intensely personal and brutally political, highlighting the murky lines between action and inaction, justice and revenge, and the constant, restless search for truth in a world full of deception.

Like all of Shakespeare's plays, there are secondary and tertiary plots. After hastily—and accidentally—killing Polonius, while confronting his mother, Hamlet is set to be exiled to England, where he will be executed. Laertes, Plonius’ son and Ophelia's brother, returns from France in rage at his father's death and his sister's subsequent madness and questionable demise. Claudius and Laertes plot to kill Hamlet and make it look like an accident when he reappears on Danish soil. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, school friends sent by Claudius to spy on Hamlet, wind up on the chopping block in England, in the prince's stead. 

Meanwhile, the son of the king of Norway, in a posture of war toward Poland, invades Denmark under the cover of permission he had to cross the land, and usurp the Danish crown, but what he finds leaves him distraught, a hollow-eyed Horatio and the corpses of Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, and, sadly, Hamlet himself.

The family is set up on a stage as a warning against all their sins, and so the play ends.

Despite the apparent differences in usage. Shakespeare's words from all his plays populate our language. His coinages are uncountable. We don't even know all of them. There are so many from Hamlet that I could write three essays, just listing them.

However, I feel compelled to share a few of my absolute favorites, and I encourage you to listen to or watch Hamlet again. Yes, I know it is gloomy, and everyone dies at the end (except Horatio), but you may learn something of value. And maybe, if you're lucky, you will find that it speaks to your soul.

Enjoy these quotes, but feel free to find ones that speak to you.

“So full of artless jealousy is guilt, it spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

“Sorrows come not in single spies, but in battalions.”

“Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honor's at the stake.”

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.”

 “Let the Devil wear black, I'll have a suit of sables.”. This one needs explanation: Hamlet is saying that the Devil may come ready for mischief, but that he (Hamlet) will be even more ready and better dressed in black fur.

“Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems." 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.” 

Esse quam videri about sums it up.