Jeremy McCarter on Hamlet, excerpts, NYTimes 19 July 2025
Access requires subscription [2].
Favorite bits:
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“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 calls “thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.”
[....] except for sporadic appearances by his schoolmate Horatio, Hamlet is painfully isolated, in a way that feels very much like modern life. (People come, people go, he talks mostly to himself, like the rest of us.)
[....]
Yet even when Hamlet has no means of escape, no prospects and almost no friends, he still has his curiosity — his relentless, compulsive need to know. He might not be able to escape his existential cage but he can at least understand its design. Again and again, he subjects another character to a litigator’s stream of questions: Horatio, the Norwegian captain he meets on the road, the Gravedigger. What happened when the Ghost appeared? Why do princes send armies to senseless wars, and why do soldiers obey them? What happens to our corpses when we die? All of these answers feed the deepest and most searching questions, the kind that he asks himself — about life and death, about what it means to be human.
The characteristic of Hamlet that matters most isn’t his gloom, but his capacity for outgrowing it….
Near the end of the play, in a quiet scene with Horatio, Hamlet sounds nothing like the tortured, fretful, ruminating student of Act I. His endless questions and the lessons of his ordeals have given him a new view of death, which is really a new philosophy of life: “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”
He has demonstrated that it’s possible, even in the direst circumstances, to find peace. He has made the timely discovery that to be alive and present in each moment is enough.
NOTES:
[1] McCarter has produced an audio adaptation of Hamlet:
“...an audio-drama adaptation of the play that tells Hamlet’s story entirely from his own point of view, letting you hear only what he hears. If you listen wearing headphones, you feel that you’re trapped in the “nutshell” of his mind. Committed to Hamlet’s perspective like this, you might find a new way to identify with his plight, and to extract something consoling from his ordeal: a clue for how to navigate these dangerous times. You might even begin to wonder if this infernally bloody tragedy in fact has a happy ending.”
Author bio:
Jeremy McCarter is the co-author of VIEWFINDER with Jon M. Chu and the New York Times bestseller HAMILTON: THE REVOLUTION with Lin-Manuel Miranda. He is the author of YOUNG RADICALS, the story of idealistic Americans fighting for their ideals. He founded and leads the acclaimed audio storytelling company Make-Believe Association. and is the literary executor of the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. He has written about culture and politics for New York Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He spent five years on the artistic staff of the Public Theater in New York.
[2] McCarter, Jeremy, “Listen to ‘Hamlet.’ Feel Better” (July 19, 2025), New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/opinion/hamlet-shakespeare-self-help.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X08.eh5c.uJDCsRnau59j&smid=url-share
IMAGE: Via author bio page at Amazon (fair use):
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B01FIAWFM2/about
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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