Hamlet: An Experiment without an Outcome?

Abstract

Hamlet is a very strange play: strange but familiar – like a stretch of time one has lived but never really understood. This space, when one lives it and when one looks back, is perfectly convincing: one does not question the reality of it for a moment. But what was at stake, and what its struggles amounted to when all had been said and done, always seems to elude one's grasp. In Hamlet, when the play is over, the stage is peculiarly empty. Something has taken place, and in another sense it is as though nothing has; something (a direction?) has been indicated but there is no-one left to follow up on it..

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 14 2002: pp. 27-32