Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #1: Hamlet
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…
If Othello is about reputation and Macbeth is about ambition, Hamlet is about the pain of living in an unjust world and the agony of trying to fix it using only the crude instrument of revenge. The world that Laertes cannot cleanse, that Ophelia cannot fit into an intact mind. The one that Hamlet stares at and cannot make sense of. And that’s amazing.
It’s Shakespeare. How do I say more than that? Hamlet is the character I most relate to in all of fiction. Is he crazy? Is he faking it? Can any of us say, moment to moment, which aspect is ascendant? Actually, probably most people can. But I really sympathize with Hamlet’s loneliness and frustration with the world’s sordidness.
I’ve read the soliloquies about a zillion times, me and my book and the monster in my head. (Check out this completely amazing vlogger rendition of To Be Or Not To Be.)
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
He gets it. He gets it. The young prince dispatched on an errand of vengeance by his murdered father’s ghost is one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters and I love him. Funny, biting, possessed of my own demons, he narrates a shockingly relatable experience for a 400-year-old story.