Listen to ‘Hamlet.' Feel Better.

New York Times

2 days ago

'It is we who are Hamlet,' wrote the essayist and critic William Hazlitt. Though that observation is more than 200 years old, the similarities between Shakespeare's bewildered, semi-deranged prince and his audience — all of us — have rarely been clearer than they are today.
His circumstances may not match yours in every particular (your newly widowed mother might not have married your uncle, who maneuvered you out of your claim to the throne) but, after the traumas of the past few years, Hamlet's sorrow is likely to feel familiar, as is his sense of powerlessness. Amid political unrest, military deployments in the streets, an unfolding climate crisis and the unforeseeable, possibly apocalyptic disruptions of A.I., who among us hasn't felt, as Hamlet does, that 'the time is out of joint'?
A boomlet in productions of 'Hamlet' offers further evidence for the perennial relevance of this bloody tragedy — the story of a young man cracking up as he discovers that his life, his family, the kingdom and very possibly the divine order are not what he thought they were. Eddie Izzard has been touring a solo version of the play; the Royal Shakespeare Company has produced not one but two high-profile revivals, including 'Hamlet Hail to the Thief,' which fuses Shakespeare's text and a Radiohead album; and this year saw the American release of 'Grand Theft Hamlet,' a documentary about the play being staged inside a video game.
This surge in popularity for the Dane need not be seen as an ill portent. Hamlet can, these days, seem like the distant forebear of a heavily scrutinized modern type — the lonely, paranoid boy prone to violent speechifying — but there's more than darkness in 'Hamlet,' and more than despair in its title character. You just need to see the story from the right angle — specifically, his.
Hamlet's despair is so pervasive, and rendered so vividly by Shakespeare, that even people who have never seen the play or only dimly remember reading it in high school are familiar with the persona of the melancholy Dane: clad in black, moping around, unable to take action. Laurence Olivier gave the definitive description of Hamlet's paralysis when he opened his 1948 film adaptation by calling it the story of a man 'who could not make up his mind.'
But there's a different way of interpreting the play. When you keep the focus on Hamlet — that is, when you omit all of the scenes when he's offstage, many of which are spent speculating on what he intends to do — you see that in the ways that matter most, he's not paralyzed at all. Contrary to what Olivier said, making up his mind is precisely the story of 'Hamlet.'
Would you like to submit a Letter to the Editor?
Use the form below to share your thoughts on this or any other piece published in The New York Times in the past seven days. If your submission is selected, an editor will contact you to review any necessary edits before publication. Most published letters will appear in both the online and print editions. Your submission must be exclusive to The New York Times. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters. Click here for more information about the selection process.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.