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Shakespeare

Hamlet
Play introduction by Don Wooten - text (PDF)
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet
Read the play online - http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/index.html

Last performed by the Genesius Guild in 2001 ~ Photos

It's hard to generalize about “Hamlet.” But that doesn't stop people from trying. Here's a rather compelling thought: it's about five young people who don't have the strength of character to disobey their elders.

Think about it. Ophelia obeys her father's order to stop seeing Hamlet, loses her mind, then her life. Her brother listens to the king's murder plot and buys into it, dying in consequence. Rosencranz and Guildenstern are only too eager to do their school chum in to please the monarch and they “go to it.”

Hamlet sets out to obey the ghost of his father, but can't quite bring himself to commit the crime of revenge. He pauses again and again, once acting compulsively, only to find he has killed the wrong man. By the end of the play, his passion is largely spent and it takes the deaths of both the queen and Laertes, his own imminent demise, and the obvious guilt of Claudius to move him to action. Had he acted immediately, everyone but Claudius would be alive.