HamletWilliam Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Hamlet, written around 1600, is a revenge tragedy that refuses to behave like one. The ghost of the murdered king commands his son to kill Claudius, and the play's action consists almost entirely of Hamlet's failure to obey. What fills the space where the revenge should be is soliloquy. Seven of them, the longest sustained first-person meditation on the English stage.

Each soliloquy turns on a question the action cannot answer. The first asks whether the flesh itself is worth keeping. The third, "To be, or not to be," weighs existence against nothingness and finds the choice blocked by fear of what lies after death. The fourth, standing over the praying Claudius, suspends vengeance for a theological reason: killing a man at prayer would send him to heaven. The seventh, watching Fortinbras march toward Poland, asks why action costs everything for others and nothing for him.

The play draws together a set of questions the tradition had treated separately. What is willed and what is merely done? How does knowledge of an injustice obligate the knower? Can conscience be trusted when its effect is paralysis? Hamlet's meditation on Yorick's skull brings the question of mortality down to bone, and his remark on the special providence in the fall of a sparrow leaves him reconciled to a death he no longer chooses. Hamlet is the play the Syntopicon cites most often on will and on life and death, because it stages the inward life more completely than any earlier work in the tradition.