![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The many-sided Hamlet-son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger-is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. These, in their broadest terms, have been-for Hamlet, as we interpret him-the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet, for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. ![]() With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. ![]()
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