Nine Hamlets

The one about seeing Hamlet for the ninth time. Dispatch 34 begins with three missing dogs, a cold house, and a man returning from his ninth staged production of Hamlet. He knows the plot by heart. What he does not know—and what keeps bringing him back—is who he will be when he encounters it this time. Beside the fireplace, the narrator revisits a character he has understood differently at different ages. Hamlet has seemed indecisive, grieving, cowardly, brilliant. Now another possibility emerges: perhaps Hamlet cannot fully enter the world because everything must first be resolved within himself. Every relationship becomes evidence, every person part of the investigation, until the self has grown so large there is barely room for anyone else. But it is Ophelia who changes the play this time. In Rhonda Zamora’s performance, the narrator sees not a fragile woman disappearing beneath Hamlet’s turmoil, but someone fiercely attempting to preserve herself while everyone around her assigns her a role. The contrast produces the episode’s central tension: too much self and we cannot reach the world; too little and the world consumes us. The dogs eventually return, bringing the cold night inside with them and restoring the household to its less metaphysical concerns. Yet the question remains. Nine Hamlets is about the strange way great works change as we do, revealing something different each time we return. Perhaps that is why we revisit old plays, books, places, and people even though we already know what happens. We are not always returning to see them again. Sometimes we are returning to discover who has arrived to meet them.