Dalrymple writing about Shakespeare is always a double pleasure. He’s covered Macbeth, Measure for Measure and cited the sonnets, and now in his quarterly column for City Journal, he tackles Hamlet. After a summer filled with debate about the “relatability” of his work (thanks to American radio personality Ira Glass, who stirred controversy by tweeting “Shakespeare sucks”), Dalrymple reminds us that Shakespeare’s work touches on humanity’s deepest questions:
Hamlet the character and Hamlet the play elucidate the inevitable and insoluble paradoxes of human existence, the very heart of our mystery, which no technical sophistication will ever pluck out: a mystery that explains why puzzlement at our own situation is the permanent condition of mankind.