For whatever reason, William Shakespeare is a widely famed author when it comes to English Literature. I know this sounds cliche, but I just don’t see why. 
When I took AP English Literature and Composition during my twelfth grade year, we had to read Hamlet, which is technically a play but formatted as a novel.
This was not the first of his work I have had to read over the years, but it had been so long that I had forgotten by this point how much I disliked other plays he has written. Reading Hamlet made me remember why.
In this play, Shakespeare tells the story of Prince Hamlet, who finds reason to believe that his Uncle Claudius is responsible for the death of his father, the late King of Denmark.
Even more alarming for him, Claudius marries his mother, which some would consider to be quasi-incestuous, to become the new King.
Hamlet experiences an inner conflict as he struggles to cope with the death of his father and seeks revenge against Claudius. He appears to be crazy by those around him as he seems to be talking to himself during a scene where he is convinced that he is communicating with the ghost of his father.
Personally, I generally tend to have a strong dislike for anything written in Old English, mainly because I do not care enough about the work to try to understand it, which is why I did not enjoy having to read this book. When it comes down to it, however, I do respect Shakespeare’s work because of how he wrote plays that were so different characteristically from others of his time period. His use of soliloquies and invention of new phrases further set him apart from other screenwriters.
Overall, I have to admit that Hamlet is a well-written, intricate work through its use of symbolism allusions to Greek mythology throughout the work. I simply could not tolerate the task of trying to analyze the novel haha. I found the book in general to be rather boring, and I did not really appreciate how this book was learned about in class.
I guess my teacher probably thought this would be a fun idea, but for every night that we had a reading assignment, she wanted us to read as much as possible from the assigned portion of novel as a class by assigning each student a specific character’s lines to read. As each of us read, our wording sounded awkward since we are all so used to speaking in the 21st century American English (although there was that one try-hard who tried to mimic the Old English accents).
When it came to how this book was presented as a class, I just wished we had more class discussion about interpreting what the novel was actually trying to say. For me, deciphering the complex Shakespearean English was really difficult. We only left time for this sort of discussion during class time on Fridays because of how my teacher wanted us to read the play as a class from Monday through Thursday, which was really unnecessary since we always ended up having reading for homework anyway.
If I had to teach the class, I would focus the class time towards understanding what Shakespeare is trying to communicate because my teacher for the most part assumed that we all found reading the dialect to be easy, which was not the case at all.
The novel is certainly beneficial for students to practice analyzing work for literary devices, but most students in my class struggled with understanding what was being said by the characters in general; and if students are unable to comprehend what is going on in the plot, then students will have an even more difficult time trying to analyze the work.
As a whole, I rate Hamlet as a 6/10. It has a great deal of academic merit, but I strongly dislike Shakespeare’s writing. Like other works written by him, it is not a play I would willingly read again.
Yasmin, I would completely relate to your lack of enthusiasm about Shakespeare if I didn’t have an amazing AP Literature teacher! He constantly questioned us, explained everything, and drew out important themes. He made sure we reaped the core message of every work, and that we were the wiser for it. Hamlet, as such, would have just seemed to be a play about a guy who can’t get a grip on his sanity because of misery and revenge. But after having delved deeper, I understand how great it is.
At the beginning, Hamlet said, “the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image…” Shakespeare figured that as we read, if we truly understand the play, we would see ourselves in Hamlet and confront the same questions he does. One of my favorite speeches in Hamlet is where he said, “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth…” In this part, he couldn’t reconcile the beauty and wickedness of the world. He longed for a better world to live in. For this reason, he questioned the value of life, and contemplated suicide.
But by the end, Hamlet said, “Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day…” Hamlet won himself a victory in choosing not to let future fears and distresses, especially about death, ruin his present. He empowered himself to live in the moment because he knew that his skull would eventually look like Yorick’s (which he found in the graveyard), and that nothing can change that fact. He believed that no matter how much we mess with the course of our lives, God (“a divinity”) will always put us back on track to fulfill his/her plans. Hamlet believed that he had to carve away the bad aspects of life to discover who he was.
I can understand where you are coming from with this. I am not a big reader, but I still took AP Lit and didn’t have the best teacher as well. She was nice and fun to talk to, but as a teacher, there was some lack of explanation about what Shakespeare. I also had a lot of trouble understanding what was happening in the novel. I relied heavily on “No Fear Shakespeare” to know what as going on. We also read the play out loud, so, instead of trying to understand it, I just let myself be entertained by people trying to mimic the proper flow and inflection of the words. Overall, your post is really relatable and I enjoyed reading it! Great job!
I would have to say that I completely agree with your post, like completely! I also took AP English Lit and Comp my senior year and enjoyed the class until we read Hamlet. I can’t say that I liked it really or the play, because we also watched it in class. My teacher didn’t focus much on the actual reading and understanding of Shakespeare, for we concentrated more on watching the play (?); maybe he felt bad that he tortured us with Grendel, Beowulf, and other various novels like those. Either way, I really liked your post because I 100% relate. Thanks for sharing!