At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters-from royals to gravediggers-and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. “It is we,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.” The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes-Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote-who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture.

The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. The many-sided Hamlet-son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger-is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. These, in their broadest terms, have been-for Hamlet, as we interpret him-the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils.

This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet, for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony.

Helmet william shakespeare