Shakespeare is so elitist. It is so canonized that it has become a subject of political critique. English departments do still teach the Bard, but it is received as an example of high culture, rather than an actual art. Most of us today would rather read Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill than subject ourselves to the language found in ol’ Bill’s plays. Most of us even think that Shakespeare is pretty much irrelevant to the 21st century. What could Shakespeare teach us today other than how poetic his writing was? What use is there for Shakespeare? I intend to briefly explore this idea by using what is arguably Shakespeare’s best known work: Hamlet.

Hamlet is brilliant, pure and simple. Writing aesthetic and pacing aside, the themes and ideas explored throughout the play are perhaps even more relevant to us now than they were in 1601. The play can be characterized as the first existential play, which takes the human condition into account. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex can be read as existential, however it does not employ the deep analysis of the protagonist as Shakespeare does in Hamlet. The character of Hamlet is multi-faceted, complex, contradictory, and dare I paraphrase Nietzsche: human, all too human.

Hamlet, aside from being in an existential crisis throughout the play, is a becoming. What do I mean by this? The character of Hamlet is always in flux, always in the process of realization, always in the process of becoming-Hamlet and the brilliance of Shakespeare’s play is that Hamlet never actualizes his full potential - he never fully becomes the Hamlet, he is always in the state of becoming. It is no coincidence that Hamlet dies at the end of the play, that is the only suitable fate for such a complex character in such an existential crisis. Hamlet must either realize his potential at the end (which would result in a somewhat boring and happy ending) or he dies while still in the process of becoming. This is why the play is so tragic. Hamlet dies without every realizing his full potential, without finishing the process of becoming.

For this reason in order to fully understand the character of Hamlet, it is necessary to embody him (i.e. act out the part). A literary analysis will only go as far as the words, but it misses the subtext, the underlying meaning that can only be obtained through a staging. There is a whole other world of meaning, a whole other plateau present in the play that can only be accessed through its realization on the stage. To fully try to grasp the complexity of Hamlet as a process of becoming, the character must be embodied and actualized on stage (or film). That is, Hamlet must first breathe and live before he can die. Let me us a very concrete example to illustrate what I mean by all this: Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ monologue. From a literary standpoint and as it is written in the play, Hamlet is merely contemplating death. From a staging perspective, however, the actor must make a choice: either Hamlet is truly melancholy and is contemplating suicide, or he is aware that Claudius and Polonius are lurking in the shadows listening to him. In the case of the former, this does nothing to change the trajectory of Hamlet’s becoming, it is the same interpretation as that of a literary analysis. The latter, however, alters the trajectory. If Hamlet is aware that both Polonius and Claudius are listening to his monologue, then Hamlet is merely playing a part, embracing his role as melancholy; in short, he is wearing the mask of Hamlet as someone with angst. The essential thing to note is that both potential outcomes are equally true and they both occur simultaneously but on different planes, realizing slightly different becomings. They are, as Deleuze put it, co-existing incompossible presents; both possibilities are distinct, yet indiscernible. The actor’s choice will ultimately change the process of the character’s becoming. Every actor who has ever played Hamlet has played him differently. Each actor playing Hamlet tackles the process of Hamlet becoming who he could have been. Each time the actor performs the scene, it is a repetition of the same play with the same characters, yet in its very repetition, it is somehow different. The difference is in the repetition.

This is the whole point of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and it is one that will never come to an end. Each time an actor takes on the role of Hamlet, he takes on the process of Hamlet’s becoming-Hamlet (i.e. realizing the ‘Hamlet’ that would have been actualized). To put it more philosophically, in Deleuzian terms, every possible way that the character of Hamlet can be actualized on stage already exists in another plane (or plateau). All the various ways in which Hamlet can deliver the infamous “To be or not to be” is already ‘mapped out’ within the virtual. All these potentials are what Deleuze calls BwOs, or body without organs. For Deleuze then, each actor that plays Hamlet needs to “make oneself a body without organs” (BwO), that is, to experiment with the various possibilities that the character of Hamlet may embrace his becoming-Hamlet. The way in which the actor makes his choices, delivers the lines of Shakespeare, etc are what Deleuze calls activating the virtual potentials by bringing them into the actual and ‘actualizing them’. Through taking on the process of embodying the character of Hamlet, the actor is forced to become Hamlet through conjunctions with other BwOs (i.e. line delivery, emotion, acting choices, etc). This is a becoming. Hamlet is always in this process, every time an actor takes on the role, the becoming of Hamlet will be different, but it will be a becoming nonetheless.