Good Night, Sweet Prince
Montaigne advised us not to bother to prepare for dying, because we would know well enough how to do it when the time came. Pragmatically, that is Hamlet's stance. Silence is the salient aspect of what is coming for all of us, and Hamlet has been anything but a silent protagonist. What can the world do with a silent Hamlet? For Hamlet, silence is annihilation. Hamlet's wake, his name, has not been wounded but wondrous: Ibsen and Chekhov, Pirandello and Beckett have rewritten him, and so have the novelists Goethe, Scott, Dickens, Melville, and Joyce. Playwrights and novelists will be compelled to continue revising Hamlet, for reasons that I suspect have more to do with our horror of our own consciousness confronting annihilation than with our individual addictions to guilt and to grief. What matters most about Hamlet is his genius, which is for consciousness itself. He is aware that his inner self perpetually augments, and that he must go on overhearing an ever-burgeoning self...