I would like to offer my take, having just watched last weekend the Lawrence Olivier version, reading along–and a bit further than their treatment permitted, as it left out a lot of dialogue, and all of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.
If people “know” nothing else about Hamlet, they have heard he is indecisive. He can’t make up his mind. He spends a lot of time hand-wringing.
I disagree strongly with this. He showed his courage when he was willing to fight his comrades to follow the King’s ghost. And he is obviously very, very intelligent. His dialogue makes this extremely obvious.
What I would like to suggest–and I suspect this must have been said by someone somewhere, as commented on as this play has been for hundreds of years–is that this is a sort of Prodigal Son story, one in which Hamlet leaves the world he had known, but eventually comes back.
I don’t think the issue is that he fears to kill his uncle, or that he fears his own death, particularly. Obviously, he contemplates suicide at the outset, and again in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
I think his issue is an Existential crisis, in which he doubts everything and everyone. Revenging his father only makes sense within a world which makes sense. It is only justice in a world where justice is the rule. It only makes a difference if the world as it should be is protected, or the world as it ought not to be is corrected.
But what if nobody deserves justice? What if the world is fallen, and everything and everyone a cruel lie? Why participate in this farce? His mother betrayed him, Ophelia lacks his wit and his trust, and even his old friends R&C are playing games with him, dimwittedly.
And there is some pretty clear misogyny here. In the film version, he attacks both his mother and Ophelia, and of course utters the famous line “frailty thy name is woman.”
And it has no doubt been often remarked on–I am utterly unfamiliar with Shakespearan scholarship–that there are parallel stories between Hamlet and Ophelia. Both lose their fathers to murder. But Hamlet feigns madness and only contemplates suicide. Ophelia genuinely does go mad and does in fact commit suicide. Such, we might suppose, was Shakespeare’s view on the differences between men and women.
I think it Horatio alone who–in his honesty, steadfastness, and loyalty–brings him back “into the world” as it were. He brings the one who was a stranger back home. He brings back some sense that moral sanity is possible and desirable. That is why when Hamlet finally resolves to kill the king, he does not do so when he is at prayer. His new world–which is his old world, with greater sad wisdom–has rules.
And remember that Horatio tries to kill himself when Hamlet is poisoned, and is prevented from doing so by Hamlet, who tells him his job is to tell his story. Telling his story only makes sense in a morally unpoisoned world.
And Horatio of course treats Hamlet as the brief king, and honorable heir to the throne of Denmark that he was. He died as part of lineage, as part of a social system, as part of a place and time and cultural ethos.
And at the risk of being politically fashionable, given the situation, it would not be hard to see Hamlet and Horatio as lovers, particularly given how betrayed by women (particularly by The Woman in most reasonable psychologies) Hamlet felt.
My two cents. Don’t spend it all in one place.