MB UNIUD

I could have a word with William Shakespeare, the up-and-coming playwright recently discovered by a young nobleman, the Earl of Southampton. Since the theatres have reopened, after the 1593’s plague, he has become not only a shareholder, but also the main playwright of the most successful company of actors in London, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

I asked him some questions about his latest work: Hamlet.

First of all, he helped me to shine a light on what all of us are wondering: his original source. It is not the fifth series of the Histoires tragiques by François de Belleforest as we thought, but a play on the same subject written by Thomas Kyd.

The famous playwright asserts that Hamlet is not only a tragedy of revenge, it is a play of life and death and of man’s ambiguous relation to them both. It is also about melancholy and doubt.

A major question for man, dealt in his already announced success, is the relation between “appearance and reality”: how does one separate what appears to be real or absolute from what actually is so?

Hamlet deals with the crisis of the human conscience, but also with loss of faith in the effectiveness of man’s action.

I’m pretty sure Shakespeare’s masterpiece will deliver the goods and I think this young talented playwright fully deserves his success.