I am teaching Hamlet again this year, and so I reread it this weekend to remember it before I read it a few more time to build the unit for the students. Later I will let the students review it too.
Rereading it it’s hard not to remember how funny, weird, and brilliant Hamlet is, how frustrating he is as a character, and how much he really needs to look at some of the many different foils the play offers up for ways to act. It’s also impossible not to reach the conclusion that Elsinore certainly would be better off had Hamlet simply disappeared forever in the beginning or learned to deal with the new reality. That wouldn’t be just or fair or even maybe right in the sense of the way of the world, but he, his mother, Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius, and a few others would all still be alive, and Fortinbras wouldn’t be pounding down the gates at the end. Sure, had Claudius not killed old Hamlet, the same thing would be true, but I am simply putting the stakes for our protagonist, not the villain. Also of course if Hamlet could just let supernature take its course in the chapel and killed Claudius, all the same.
It’s still the most fun early on to watch Hamlet jump in and out of his “madness” character and plot and plot and plot. The reading of the actors’ lines (as in the company of actors) still offers up a lot of toothy moments.