Page 125 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

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I KNOW NOT SEEMS

Hamlet

To be or not to be; that is the question.
—Hamlet

y 1599, Shakespeare had reached the height of his powers. It was
Bthe perfect moment from which to stretch the boundaries of
tragedy beyond anything existing in the Western world. Would it be
possible to write a tragedy in which fate played little, if any, part?
Could the hero's ultimate demise be determined entirely by forces
within the man himself, without regard to what Romeo and Julie's
Friar Laurence described as "a power greater than we can contra-
dict"? It could, and the result would be Hamlet, the first true tragedy
of character and, many insist, the most complex, confounding play
ever written.
"Along with the King James Bible," Life once noted, "Hamlet has
passed into the language so completely that millions of people who
have neither seen nor read the play unknowingly repeat fragments of
its stirring lines in everyday conversations to describe their own sit-
uations and emotions." Hamlet isn't an important artifact from our
collective past, rather, it is central to our ongoing culture.
First and foremost, Hamlet is as universal as Oedipus of old.
Hamlet's specific story touches something in every theatergoer,
whether living in 1600 or the year 2000. Hamlet is one man; simul-
taneously, he is Everyman. As such, he is the ultimate literary cre-
ation, the apotheosis of any dramatist's goal: Convey the general
truth of the human condition through the story of an individual
character. No wonder Hamlet is often performed in modern dress, a

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