Hamlet
(William Shakespeare)
Can you still read Hamlet? Is it at all necessary to read Hamlet? Everyone knows what the play is about anyway, don't they? Well, do they actually? Has anyone managed to pluck out the heart of Hamlet's mistery? What is too deeply ambiguous and thereby impossible to comprehend completely and without doubts and hesitations usually becomes simplified in collective consciousness and takes the form of a stereotype. This is exactly what happened to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Well, everybody knows who Hamlet is, right? If you think so, you are terribly mistaken. If you think that Hamlet is that slender and weakly youth full of deep reflections on life and death and as such, philosophically-minded as well as given to meditations, he is no good material for a cold-blood murderer (a sweet prince), well, then you are terribly mistaken. How could one blame Hamlet for anything? It is Claudius who is the bad guy, isn't he? Yet it is Claudius who prays to God for forgiveness after Hamlet caught his conscience by presenting him The Murder of Gonzago. Claudius still feels the pricks of conscience as does Gertrude when Hamlet scorns her for marrying Claudius so quickly after the old King's death. Hamlet has the fascinating capability of revealing the truly complex personalities in others characters: he makes them repent but he at no moment is ready to forgive them. Such a thought does not enter his mind atany point in the play. Hamlet in fact seems to have no developed conscience. Although he kills Polonius and is partly responsible for Ophelia's madness and death, he never expresses any sort of regret. Polonius was anyway aninnocent victim not to mention Ophelia.Having sent to death Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet tells Horatio that his former friends are not near his conscience. But who is near Hamlet's conscience? Does he love anyone? Or does he love only his murdered father and can express this love only by hating those who forgot about the old King? Because he cannot forget: He has seen the Ghost, he has talked to him. Hamlet is the only person who has talked to the Ghost; only the Prince has managed to communicate with the dead and because of that he belongs to a different order of reality, he belongs to the dead, he is dead. That is why he cannot love anyone anymore. That is why he no longer cares that he seeds death, madness and destruction everywhere around him. But this state of being possessed by death goes much deeper; not only does it extinguish any significance in everything that mattered before but it also makes any sense of purpose vanish -- revenge has no meaning as well, and it is only gradually that Hamlet realizes this. He comes back from his sea-journey changed because it is no longer Hamlet, it is his Ghost - a messenger of death -who comes to claim what is his due, he comes to change into ghosts all the remaining characters in the play. Only Horatio stays alive - the voice of the dead. When did it all go wrong?Was it when Claudius perpetrated the hideous deed? Or was it Hamlet who didn't how to love and how to forgive?
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