to Be or Not to Be

? That is the question - as Hamlet soliloquizes in one of the deepest, most biting reflections on the absurdity of life. His father has been murdered, his mother is married to the killer - which is the slain king's own brother, and Hamlet, writhing under the agony of inaction and helplessness, ponders lyrically over whether he should end his own ridiculous existence. He is wary of the uncertainty of death and attributes it to the only reason why a man who,

...would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office...

can still not gather courage enough to end it all. He concludes with the brilliant observation,

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;

And just like that, we have another of those absolute gems with which Shakespeare's Hamlet is replete.

Reading Shakespeare is a tricky deal - and not just because his language, by virtue of its chronological distance from the present and its own eloquence, is quite removed from our current comprehension. Reading Shakespeare is tricky because one always feels enormously burdened by the weight of his reputation. It almost feels like an insult to one's own intelligence if the 'expected' awe and respect for his work is not automatically generated. Because let's face it, 500 years of literature after his time and enormous giants of the field since him cite inspiration from his pen. Therefore, I was quite dismayed when I read 'Midsummer Night's dream.' The language was brilliant, needless to say, but I found the plot, the story, the characters - almost everything except the language to be quite pedestrian. The primary emotion that I felt after reading the play was 'Why even bother writing something this mediocre?' And then I decided to read his most famous work and I am not disappointed at all.

Hamlet reminds me of a line from the movie Fight Club. Brad Pitt says to Edward Norton, 'We are God's middle children... with no special place in history and no special attention.' He indicates how our generation has not really had any great wars, any great challenges, and how our concerns and our tragedies dwarf when compared to what history had to face. Since art reflects life, (If, for a moment, I take the liberty of going against the great Oscar Wilde) the greatest challenges our heroes have to face today are merely contemporary. I'm not denigrating the efforts of one who tries to survive the tough life of a call center, or one who is trying to make sense of the quagmire of love, but I think we can agree that what our current stories have gained in realism and subtlety, they have lost in magnificence and grandeur. Which is why Hamlet was such a joy to read.

It is an eternal mirror to life inasmuch that life's core issues of revenge, conceit, disloyalty, anger, treachery, moral corruption, and individual conflict remain ever present. But that mirror reflects a particularly radiant gleam and is set in a beautifully adorned, intricate and larger than life frame. In much the same way that our current literature might slyly reference pop culture, Hamlet harks back to the Greek gods. The canvas on which Shakespeare has painted Hamlet's tragedy is a palimpsest from which nothing less than divinity itself has been erased. And just like the Greek gods which, quite refreshingly, were great and mighty and mean and capricious, characters in Hamlet are all in shades of gray. Only writers who have their own axe to grind paint characters which are either good or bad. Such writers are not only mediocre themselves, but they only appeal to a simple minded reader (Ms. Ayn Rand for example). I quite loved the fact that Shakespeare, in this epic tragedy, gave us characters which left me quite unsure as to where my loyalties lay.

I would have recommended reading the play but I can very easily understand how a lot of people might find it dreary. I have a special fascination with language and I like when things are unnecessarily beautiful and complex. Every line of Hamlet (indeed any other play by Shakespeare, I'm guessing) requires effort to disentangle and I understand how most people would consider it not worth the effort. But regardless of this fact, it would not be out of place for me to recommend watching the play. I myself am looking forward to it the first opportunity I get.