i have a lot of thoughts about hamnet, a lot, and while i cannot parse them entirely at this moment, i do want to share my basic takeaway which is just something...i've felt for a long time and haven't been able to adequately put into words
basically, that i think hamlet touches so many people in so many different ways is that...everyone is hamlet. love him or hate him, he is so exceptionally human. he fails, he can be cruel, he can be wrong, he can be afraid. he is evidenced to be kind and loving! and he wants love, he wants to be loved and to give love so badly! and he tries! whenever his world is falling apart he tries to make sense of it and cope in the only ways that he thinks he can!
and most everyone has felt alone and small and afraid and cowardly and useless! many people have wished to die, even for a moment! and when you look at all of this as a whole, you know that this will end in tragedy! you know that hamlet, no matter how you look at him, will ultimately fail, even if he succeeds in his original "goal". but we still root for him! we still go back to the theatre again and again and again and we pick up the play! we re-watch the youtube video! and maybe some of us do hope for a different outcome each time! but there's so much more to it than that! it is a celebration of a person who, when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, keeps fighting. you can argue that he's egged on by the ghost, yes, but in the end it is hamlet himself who takes action and makes decisions and keeps pushing forward to an ending he KNOWS will likely kill him!!
there's something so, so painfully human about it. to see things finished. to see an end. there is so much more to this that i won't get into here! without any spoilers, it was the ending scene of hamnet that really broke me, that reminded me that each person that has been touched by this play for over 400 years has perhaps known some form of grief, of pain, of misunderstanding and shakespeare imbued this feeling into so many pregnant words and has created from it some form of bittersweet hope. each word is breathing, it is alive and these characters remain within us, because they are who we are. behind each word beat the heart of someone who suffered such heavy loss
and his heartbeat remains in each and every syllable. an actor pounds their chest on stage in time with a rhythm that has been there for ages. this story and hamlet himself, are reachable through hundreds of years, thousands of years. because it's a story we keep within us. past, present, future. it all exists upon the stage. it's no wonder that we all reach out again and again and again towards something so familiar, something so painful, something that is infinite.
hamlet says that one day we'll all be gone but words, deeds, love are enduring. they may not save us, but they were there, even at the end. and throughout history we have longed to reach out towards them
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