Evergreen Elsinore.(Andrew Sullivan's 'The Conservative Soul')

READING Andrew Sullivan's new book The Conservative Soul (reviewed in the last issue of NR by Jonah Goldberg), I was interested to see that Andrew, when in high school, acted in a performance of Hamlet. He played one of the minor roles, the foppish courtier Osric, who shows up in the play's last act to tell Hamlet of Laertes's challenge, and to serve as the target of some unkind quips by Hamlet and Horatio. Andrew goes on to use the play as a starting point for reflections on the incompleteness and transience of our understanding: "Over four decades, I changed, and the play changed .... each experience is a kind of mystery.... If this is true of a play, how much truer is it of life itself?"

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

These passages stirred up some guilt about my own lack of acquaintance with Shakespeare's tremendous masterpiece, all the more inexcusable because I have a DVD of it on my shelf: the 1980 BBC production, with Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, Patrick Stewart as the king, and Claire Bloom--still stunning at age 49--as Gertrude.

Not that I am unacquainted with Hamlet. Nobody who has had anything like a decent education can arrive at middle age without having seen at least a handful of Hamlets. I saw, but did not act in, a performance at my own school, sensationally glamorous to us freshmen because a real fencing master had been brought in to coach the senior boys playing Hamlet and Laertes. At college I caught the fine Soviet 1963 movie, of which the thing I most clearly recall is the peal of round, fat, gloomy Slavonic phonemes rolled out by Innokenti Smoktunovsky's prince in reply to Polonius's inquiry about his reading matter: slo-VAA, slo-VAA, slo-VAA. I suppose I have seen three or four performances since, as one does in the course of life.

Partly from idle curiosity, but mainly from a desire to avoid a tiresome work chore I really should have been busy with--which is to say, in a spirit of true Hamletian procrastination!--I pulled out the DVD and sat with some cookies and a pot of coffee to watch it. There went my day.

It is of course impossible to say anything about Hamlet that has not already been said. I amused and flattered myself by noticing things I had missed before, or forgotten, but this little pleasure is dulled by the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has written a Ph.D. thesis on every point, and that a hundred other things I shall never notice have been similarly worked over by the scholars, revealing wonders of art and understanding I shall never know. This is fine old wine, its subtleties mostly wasted on a mere dinner-table tippler. (The Straggler household's vin de table actually comes in a large cardboard box.)

Nor was my viewing strategy ideal. Hamlet is a famously long Play--the BBC production runs three and a half hours. To watch a recorded Hamlet on a device with a pause button, while sitting in one's study, surrounded by reference books, with the Internet a few keystrokes away, takes much longer than ...