Blogging Hamlet
As someone who spends a lot of time perusing the various revenge plots and sex jokes of Shakespeare, I’ve come to believe that the Bard of Avon really only wrote three kinds of plays:
1. Someone’s in love, and this is terrible.
2. There’s been a misunderstanding, and this is hilarious.
3. EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY ABOUT PASSING THE BATON OF DIVINE RULE FROM ONE MONARCH TO THE NEXT*
Hamlet somehow manages to be all three, which is why it’s one of Shakespeare’s most complex tragedies. The plot is not simply a straight shot between Point A (everything’s fine) to Point B (everyone’s dead); we have to make a few pit stops along the way at “contemplating mortality” and “someone got stabbed by accident.”
So I bet your default setting, insofar as Hamlet is concerned, is “confused.” That’s because, well, Hamlet can be confusing. I’m here to make it less confusing, or at least sort of funny.
