Hamlet

In one sentence: Shakespeare's tragedy, written around 1600, follows a Danish prince who learns exactly who murdered his father and still waits four more acts to act on it, a delay scholars have argued over for centuries. Thug Notes offers three explanations and refuses to pick one.

Overview

Soon after the old king's death, his brother Claudius marries the widowed queen, Gertrude, and takes the crown. Hamlet meets his father's ghost, learns Claudius is the killer, and is told to avenge him. He feigns madness, then stages a play that reenacts the murder to confirm the ghost's story, and still can't bring himself to strike. In the confusion he kills Polonius, the father of his love interest Ophelia, by mistake; Ophelia drowns after losing her mind, and her brother Laertes swears revenge. Claudius arranges a duel with a poisoned blade and a backup cup of poisoned wine. On the day of the duel, the queen drinks from the poisoned cup, Laertes and Hamlet both take wounds from the poisoned blade, and Laertes, dying, confesses the plot. Hamlet kills Claudius and dies himself; the Danish throne passes to a foreign soldier, Fortinbras. This is a stage play built on soliloquy and confrontation, not a novel.

Why It's Recommended

What keeps this play worth returning to is that it never hands you a clean answer for why Hamlet waits. One reading says he's too sensitive to survive a court full of operators. Another reads an Oedipal fixation into his hesitation, unable to kill a man for doing the exact thing Hamlet secretly wants. A third treats the delay itself as resistance to a rotten system. The three readings contradict each other, and Shakespeare never breaks the tie. Disease and rot run through the play as imagery, and questions like whether the ghost can be trusted, or whether Gertrude knew, are left open to the end. Even "to be or not to be" needs the reader to decide whether Hamlet is weighing life against death or self-denial against bloodshed. That refusal to resolve anything is what pulls the audience into Hamlet's own indecision.

Source

Wisecrack's Thug Notes covers Hamlet in its 2013-08-13 episode, running the whole revenge plot through street slang before landing on the delay as the real puzzle. The video lays out three competing theories without picking a winner, closing on the line "looks like Ol' Willy's gone and made Hamlets of us all," handing the uncertainty straight back to the audience.