Wherefore Hamlet?

One of the challenges of reading Hamlet is to figure out what the fuss is all about.

To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.

Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.

But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.

Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.

Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.