William Shakespeare
Amleto

Yes, it's understandable. I would probably furrow my brow or form my lips into a contemptuous smirk too.

Is there really a need for me to talk to you about "Hamlet"? No. Is there anything I can add to the rivers of ink spilled over critical analysis, comparative studies, psychological investigations, historical references, or socio-cultural connections? Certainly not. Do I perhaps think I know how to tell in a particularly captivating (or particularly original) way one of the most well-known works of humanity that is continuously cited, dissected, and plundered? Once again, no.

This page is, in every way, perfectly useless.

But what to do if my disgust towards everything that surrounds me is unbearably acute these days? What if I tried to take Prince Hamlet as a model, as an inspirational source for my thoughts and actions if I wanted to declare war (a war without quarter!) on this world? What if I wanted to talk to you about specific points of his story relating it to my latent (?) desire for revolt?

Simple, I would talk to you about it. And, even if I myself thought that it was entirely unnecessary or even crazy, I would say, like Othello, that "It's all the fault of the moon, when it draws too close to the Earth it makes everyone mad" (or at least it drives me mad).

Who the hell is Prince Hamlet?!

He is, in potential, each one of us. Or rather, each one of us vassals/sub-vassals/lords of the decadent and exhausted society/culture/economy of the West.

Oh my, compared to the majority of us, he is a bit better off: he lives in a castle, is heir to the throne of the kingdom of Denmark, and certainly doesn't struggle to make ends meet.

But Prince Hamlet is consumed by a worm.

Sure, his father the king has just died under suspicious circumstances and he can't comprehend it; sure, his mother the queen has immediately remarried Claudius (Hamlet's uncle, brother of his deceased father, and, thanks to this marriage, the new king) and this tears his guts: "O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer!". But the fact is that this worm is raging and expanding its reach on Hamlet's very consciousness of human life, devouring all the wood of the scaffolding, of the frameworks, of the cultural legacies that still anchor him to his present: "O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie!".

Anyone sane of mind (and in good faith), anyone (once reaching the age of "reason") has felt, at least once, this sense of triviality, of imposture, of terrible inertia of the things of this world. And, in moments when one perceives all this, the words of the Poloniuses ("Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act), of the Laerteses ("Best safety lies in fear), of the Claudiuses ("What is necessary must be taken as such; why should we, in our petulant opposition, take it to heart?"), taste of unheard mockery, they become, more than thermal waters that numb the nerves, drops that fill, one after another, the cup of the exasperated heart.

What rarely happens, however, is reaching the point of no return, that line that, once crossed, makes us something else. Prince Hamlet finds that final drop and he finds it in the specter of his father: a symbol of all vile betrayals (past, present, and future), of all sordid iniquities (past, present, and future) that infest this dungheap we call the world and that cry for revenge, the ghost reveals to the son the secret of the end of his earthly life by Claudius's treacherous hand and asks him to settle the accounts: "Farewell! Farewell! Remember me".

But the nature of Prince Hamlet is that of a man who splits hairs, a man in whom the workings of the intellect serve as a constant counterbalance to the storm of passions. Revenge, in his intentions, will occur only at the opportune moment.

In the meantime, to conceal his intentions, he will pretend to "put on an antic disposition" before the whole court. But how lucid his feigned madness is!

A mind kindled by a supernatural vision, by a clear objective, and by a state of (self-imposed) continuous delirium: Hamlet reaches a higher degree of enlightenment that ranges from the disillusioned ("Denmark's a prison") to the existential ("I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams"), from the sarcastic [see the lashing (and very entertaining) replies given to Polonius in Act II and III] to the immortal [here, I should quote that little thing which is the "To be, or not to be..." monologue, but it is too overused (as well as easily searchable) and, therefore, I will pass it over].

There would be, in truth, the love of Ophelia ("The fair Ophelia"): the last offering the world could still extend to somehow alter the course of Hamlet's fate.

It is not clear (and this ambiguity, this interpretability is one of the greatest virtues of all Shakespearean production) whether Hamlet sacrifices her on the altar of his bloody plans, deems her somehow colluding with Claudius's advisors, or wants to protect her by distancing her from his path which he feels inevitably directed towards a bloody end; the fact is that the maiden will be dismissed harshly ("Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I myself am indifferent honest, but I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me […] Go thy ways to a nunnery") and, unable to bear the pain of her broken heart (both for the love denied to her by Hamlet and for the involuntary assassination of her father Polonius perpetrated by the prince of Denmark), she will first go mad and later die by suicide.

But Hamlet still has scruples. The spirit he saw "Might be the devil […] and abuses me to damn me".

If our revolt against the world is to be total, let us remember (like Hamlet) to leverage psychology and use the arts or means of communication to obtain information, to unmask the conscience of the powerful, and to dispel what remains of our doubts. The acting troupe to which Hamlet will have the assassination of a king performed (identical to what the specter of his father told him he had endured in life) and to which Claudius will react by fleeing breathlessly, unable to bear the sight, will be the definitive proof.

Definitive on an intellectual level, but still not sufficient to generate action: it is possible that we will need examples to finally decide to take up arms. Prince Hamlet finds them in Fortinbras (king of Norway) and his soldiers who, contending for a small piece of land with the king of Poland, risk their lives, without too much sophistry, only for a mere matter of prestige; he, who would have much more valid reasons to turn his desire for revenge into an act, understands how "Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake".

But let us also remember that nothing will go as we expect, nothing more defies the purposes of human beings than the blind strokes of Fate and therefore, as Hamlet says, one must be ready, challenge the "auguries […] 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".

If our revolt ends like the carnage of the last Act where all the main characters (including Hamlet) will render their souls to some god, if we ourselves are a mere stepping stone for the next kingdom to come (as Fortinbras's will be), if the price to be paid is high and seems to us, at the point of death, all in vain, let us not take it too seriously.

Uselessness is the essence of the things worth living for and all the others, those that are estimable or quantifiable, are nothing, they are just the chaff of the things that truly nourish us: they are just the rest, where everything, as in eternal sleep, "is silence".