What I love most about Hamlet

A reflection

This post is the final installment of our series of deep dives following on from a previous discussion of the texts that shape us. I highly recommend reading that post first, if you haven’t already done so. Also, MAJOR spoilers ahead!

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In this last exploration of the texts that have made me the person and writer that I am, we’re going to do things a little bit differently. While there are specific techniques in Shakespeare’s works that make me love his writing, my reasons for loving Hamlet, specifically, are much more personal than that, and more personal than my fondness for the other texts we’ve looked at together over the last couple of months. So I’ll start off by discussing my favourite Shakespearean techniques, and then I’ll get into the bit you’re probably more interested in—nosing into my personal history.

Photo by Max Muselmann on Unsplash

Why I love Shakespeare’s writing

William Shakespeare must have been doing something right to be so widely beloved four centuries later (in addition to being well published, of course). He had a wonderful ability to paint characters with his dialogue who show strong, vibrant personalities and believable depth, even while being nebulous enough to allow endless interpretations and subtextual backstories. His ability to express his characters’ emotions and inner lives speaks across many situations and generations, leading his colleague and occasional rival Ben Jonson to declare him “Not for an age but for all time”. These praises are, in my opinion, well earned, but they are a bit nonspecific; I think I can do better than that.

(On a side note, I don’t join those who praise Shakespeare for his universal stories; he did, after all, partake in the common custom at the time of reusing popular stories instead of making up entirely new ones, and his plots are sometimes… less than watertight.)

Something that I’ve only recently considered enough to put into words is that Shakespeare was a writer who really thoroughly understood how language worked—not just in a stylistic way, but in a more technical sense. If you’re going to write speech after speech in iambic pentameter, for one thing, you’d better be able to reword and rearrange sentences to fit that metre without losing clarity. Give it a go yourself; it’s really hard!

He also knew the power of imagery and wielded it well. When, in his despair, Hamlet cries out for “this too, too solid flesh [to] melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew”, we feel his agony; Beatrice says that at her birth her mother cried, “but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born”, and we recognise her joyful spirit.

So much of the humour of Shakespeare’s works can be found in wordplay—he could pun and riff on a theme like nobody’s business. My god, the puns. I don’t even know where to begin with the puns (but I can tell you that an awful lot of them are pretty raunchy). Even in a dark tragedy like Hamlet, some levity is provided by a pair of comic gravediggers, who come out with such gems as this, playing on the double meaning of “arms” as a coat of arms and as limbs:

First Clown

There is no ancient gentlemen but gard'ners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam's profession.

Second Clown

Was he a gentleman?

First Clown

'A was the first that ever bore arms.

Second Clown

Why, he had none.

First Clown

What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture?
The Scripture says Adam digg'd. Could he dig without arms?

Some of Shakespeare’s most entertaining scenes are when he gets some really stellar banter going between characters—Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing are my personal favourites in this regard. They’re set up with a “merry war” between them, but the back-and-forth of their wits also clearly shows their compatability and understanding of one another.

To zoom back out into more of a macroscope, I also really appreciate the way that Shakespeare introduces thematic questions in just the right way to allow adaptations to come down firmly on one side of it or the other, but without commiting to either position himself; I think that’s one reason he’s considered so timeless. Was the Ghost in Hamlet really the old king, crying from Purgatory for justice, or was it just a devil leading Hamlet into greater and greater sin? Was Henry V’s conquest of France a glorious reclamation of his birthright, or a gruelling machine crushing men underfoot for the sake of political gain? Was the tragedy of Julius Caesar in the assassination of the beloved ruler, or in the failure of the assassins to fully put down the tyrant’s supporters? There’s often no certain answer, and I think that’s when Shakespeare’s at his best: when he makes you ask those questions yourself.

Why I love Hamlet

My love affair with Shakespeare started with my very first introduction to part of Hamlet when I was still a preteen. I needed to memorise an excerpt of something performative for a school project, so I tracked down an illustrated coffee-table book of Shakespeare quotes and speeches. The excerpt I chose to memorise was the first half of the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, and oh.

The words! Those words! I loved the way they felt in my mouth; the way they rolled from my tongue. Instantly, I was addicted.

That first soliloquy wasn’t enough—oh no—I had to get the play out from the library and put all of it into my brain. I therefore set about memorising it from line 1; I realised about a dozen lines in that there was no way I could get through the whole play that way before my book was due back and just read the rest, but I still remember those first lines just as clearly.

From Hamlet, I moved on to more of Shakespeare’s plays: As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth… but I always came back to my first. My familiar. My favourite.

It seems fitting that my introduction to one passion should also lead me into another. I had, in my adolescence, started doing what teenagers often do and built a personality on my favourite media (most teens pick something from the current century, granted, but I did always like to be different). So when one of my friends who took drama classes with me was signed on as an assistant stage manager for a community production of Hamlet, it was obvious to her that I needed to audition for it (a bit of persuasion for which I am eternally grateful).

There are many deep, personal reasons why that production of Hamlet is incredibly meaningful to all of us who were involved in it—reasons I won’t get into here. Let it suffice to say that the experience developed in me a depth of emotional connection to the text that will never be severed, and reading it will always remind me of my first piece of community theatre.

I spent a lot of time studying Hamlet at university from a number of angles, including one extended project where I compared and contrasted different filmed adaptations of the play. By the end of that semester, I was probably as close to having all of Hamlet memorised as it was possible for me to achieve. Ultimately, it flows though my blood, and lies dormant in my breath (quite literally, sometimes, when quotes slip out unbidden).

This is why I love Hamlet: because it is a text that didn’t just grab my attention or change my trajectory, but formed a large part of my identity during my formative years. It’s an inextricable part of me, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.