Jeremy McCarter on Hamlet, excerpts, NYTimes 19 July 2025

Jeremy McCarter [1] has a good New York Times opinion piece, “Listen to ‘Hamlet.’ Feel Better” Access requires subscription [2]. Favorite bits: ~~~ “It is we who are Hamlet,” wrote the essayist and critic William Hazlitt. [....] His circumstances may not match yours [...] but, after the traumas of the past few years, Hamlet’s sorrow is likely to feel familiar, as is his sense of powerlessness. Amid political unrest, military deployments in the streets, an unfolding climate crisis and the unforeseeable, possibly apocalyptic disruptions of A.I., who among us hasn’t felt, as Hamlet does, that “the time is out of joint”? [....] According to the textbooks, a tragedy is a story in which a hero tumbles from a lofty height. But when we first meet Hamlet, he’s already in the dumps: grief-stricken by the sudden death of his father and appalled by everything that has followed. [....] In scene after scene that follows, new discoveries violate his sense of reality, bombarding him with what he cal...