What a Piece of Work is Man

Ask someone if they can think of the name of a Shakespeare play and most will mention Hamlet. It is probably, after Romeo and Juliet, his best known play. One of the reasons for this is that the main character, Hamlet, is one of his most challenging roles in all of acting. It is considered to be the final test of acting ability, and has been played by the likes of Lord Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Mel Gibson, David Tennant, Ethan Hawke, Jude Law as well as Edwin Booth, brother of the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth. The role has even been played by a woman, the great Sarah Burnhardt.

To understand why this play seems to be Shakespeare’s most popular yet least understood play, you have to look at what makes it so different. Romeo and Juliet is about the sometimes tragic nature of young love, Much Ado About Nothing about the folly of love, Othello about envy and bigotry, The Merchant of Venice about anti-Semitism, Twelfth Night about the role of women in society. But Hamlet seems to be an enigma. It is an introspective play that makes the reader/viewer look into the nature and role of each individual within not only his own family, but within his own world as well. And in the end, there are no clear answers to the dilemmas it raises. Shakespeare himself was a bit of a “troubled prince” when he wrote this play in 1599, three years after his only son, Hamnet, died suddenly at the age of eleven.

I guess that tonight's post on Hamlet would not be complete without the two commentaries on life that Prince Hamlet makes, both different but both a piece of the same cloth of confusion that is what life is sometimes about.

What piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals!

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.