Stalwart 2026 readers! In today’s video, I answer a reader question about Hamlet (submitted by copans):
Selin dismisses the play Hamlet because the protagonist is annoying. Selin is frequently annoying, so this is pretty hilarious. I assume you are poking fun of the callow certainty of undergrads, but do you also not have any time for Hamlet?
For those who haven’t read Either/Or, the allusion is to this passage:
People said it was universal to be obsessed with your parents, but I didn’t feel that way. When we read Hamlet in high school I almost died of impatience. All I thought about at that time was getting out—and Hamlet had done it, he was in college, and then he came back to get entangled in a gross drama related to his mother’s sex life? Because his father told him to, in a pages-long outpouring of moralizing self-pity, where he didn’t say anything to or about Hamlet, and just droned on about how lust was preying on garbage? And then Hamlet went around making cutting remarks to people about his mom? I had no patience for such a person.
I ended up having a lot to say—about Hamlet, annoyance, unreliable narration, psychoanalysis, “poking fun,” reverence, nihilism, irony, and “critical thinking.” Video after the paywall. Thank you!
