Transcript summary 

Title: Dr Erin Sullivan discusses 'What’s wrong with Hamlet?'

Shakespeare's plays focus on human emotion and experience: among them, "Hamlet" is the one that attracted most the attention. Hamlet looking at the skull is its most iconic image, because it shows a man contemplating himself as man. Hamlet's experience include emotional and existential suffering and so the play is also about the mind in pain and in distress. Shakespeare's readers always wondered what's wrong about him. Hamlet's suffering starts from the beginning: he comes back to Denmark to attend his father's funeral. People think that his suffering is due to his father's death, but he is not just sad, he's also angry at those around him - King Claudius addresses him as "cousin" and "son", but Hamlet does not agree ("a little more than kin, and less than kind"). His strange behavior worries his mother (Queen Gertrude) too: she tries to comfort him by saying that "all that lives must die" and also tells him not to insist on being sad. The question "why seems it so particular with thee?" hints to Gertrude's worrying about him and also implies something deeper and darker, because at Shakespeare's time being "particular" wasn't a good thing.