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My shrink pointed out in a conversation once as a tangent that Hamlet was not-so-subtly a psychoanalytic masterpiece: Hamlet watches his uncle carry out the Oedipal fantasy of killing his father and marrying his mother, and is haunted by a "ghost" to take action. It is not Shakespeare's only play to feature historical fiction or political machination by a long shot, so one should probe for other reasons to explain why it's proved so enduringly popular.

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Hamlet has all the best lines, but by god do you have to slog through so much of the play to get to them, including Ophelia's endless wailing. I've seen it half-a-dozen times and it is never ever not a slog in some way, not with Andrew Scott, nor with Benedict Cumberbatch or Paapa Essiedu.

It's just a bloody long play, or feels like it, and I imagine in Shakespeare's day, audiences wandered in and out of the auditorium casually to stretch and top up on booze + vittles whereas now you're fused into the seat on arrival and too stiff to get out at the interval without a winch.

I’ve had a director argue pretty convincingly that Hamlet is a “built your own adventure” play where you’re supposed to select some scenes and remove others, and that it may have arisen from multiple revisions.

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