i also think some of my hamlet takes/interpretations are somewhat inseparable from the fact that i read hamlet as at least fairly young, regardless of exactly how old he is, because the way the older characters in the play treat him resonates very deeply with my experience of being a mentally ill teenager. like, you know something is wrong, you know this thing you're experiencing (in hamlet's case, grief, but also the knowledge of the murder) is real and it's unimaginably painful and it might actually kill you, and yet not ONLY are the people around you telling you to just Be Normal and Get Over It, they are ALSO?? acting like everything is FINE?? they're walking around and living their lives like everything is perfectly normal and the same it's always been, and they're interacting with you like they expect you to live that way too, and at some point you inevitably hear the siren song of "just how much do i have to act out before they're FORCED to acknowledge it?" and then you put on an antic disposition and kill your situationship's dad, you know how it is.
this doesn't mean hamlet has to literally be a teenager. like, hell, you could have your thirtysomething hamlet and still lean into this reading, because it would be really compelling to highlight that a thirty-year-old hamlet is a fully grown adult being shoved into the role of a teenager/youth because the generation above him refuses to treat him like an adult or allow him autonomy. but i do think this is why hamlet as, like, Traditional Handsome Brooding Protagonist man almost always falls flat for me, because your average traditional handsome brooding protagonist man isn't being constantly infantilized, denied, ignored, told his emotions are meaningless, told he can't possibly be an authority on his own experience, etc. obviously some of this is stated in the text (particularly claudius's get-over-it speech), but in performance it falls flat for me if he's just stalking thirtyfiveishly around the castle as Some Guy Who Also Lives Here. no!!! they put that prince in the INCONVENIENT TEENAGER WE DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH box and you're gonna ACT LIKE IT
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