Okay, so I was definitely not paying attention the first time I read Hamlet because I don’t

remember any of this.

For the first half of the play we’re watching Hamlet, who is being a brat but for admittedly fair
reasons, ambling around in excruciating apathy. He’s upset his mother’s married his uncle, but
he isn’t really doing anything about it. Now, he’s returned home and the ghost of his father tells
him what really happened, and we’re struck with another chance to incite him into action.
Hamlet vows revenge, but his plan leaves room for improvement. He decides to feign insanity
for unclear reasons, and he’ll watch his uncle’s reactions to various ploys. Yes, he’s made a plan,
but all he’s really doing is buying himself more time in which to amble aimlessly. Nothing is
permanent or lasting here. He cannot decide whether or not to kill himself. He woos Ophelia one
second and is a monster to her the next even though to his knowledge there is no one else around.
he leads you to wonder if he really did go insane, but I think this man really does not care about
anything. He goes through the motions of grief and spiraling, but ultimately never follows
through on his actions. After the play within a play nonsense affirms Claudius’ guilt, Hamlet
watches him pray but decides not to act. He has his reasoning – Claudius will go to heaven while
his father is in purgatory, but I think it’s all excuses.

Now, the play changes when Polonius is killed. At this point the plot goes from apathy to action,
but Hamlet merely excuses himself from the action. Because when Hamlet kills Polonius, he
does not know he is killing Polonius. He stabs at something he cannot see. He’s still ambling,
blindly, but this time, there’s an unintended consequence. And as he drags the physical
manifestation of that unintended consequence with him as he leaves the room, the rest of the
bodies fall like dominoes for the remainder of the play. Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, Gertrude. This transition from passivity to action catapults the rest of the play.
Even though the premises on which Hamlet is placed—with a man killing his brother and
marrying his wife—are rife with action, everything we’ve seen on the stage up until this point
has been purely verbal.

Even when we see Ophelia die, and I feel angry about the way Ophelia is treated in this play,
Hamlet has a moment of agony, and then finds himself exactly on the path he was before. The
loss of his girlfriend, which happens in such a horrible should-be-guilt-inducing way, seems to
have no lasting effect on Hamlet. He is apathetic or at best jaded to Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern’s deaths. He continues along with his revenge plot.

I only see Hamlet as transformed in the moments before he finally gets to die. I wondered if it
was the death of Ophelia that causes this change, but really nothing is different in Hamlet before
Laertes is slashed with the poisoned blade and he explains to him the plot he and Claudius had
set up. Now that Hamlet knows that he too is going to die, he finally kills his uncle. And with
everyone around him slain, Horatio professes that he’s going to kill himself too, but Hamlet tells
him not to. “To be or not to be.” This is the moment where Hamlet finally picks a side. Maybe
it’s for selfish reasons, but he asks Horatio to live to tell his story.

This moment when everything is lost and for what… The little we see of the women and this
moment at the end are the moments that I feel most curious about this play. This play that is
asking what it means to live and if there’s even a point. Once everyone is dead he finally sees
that there is.