ABSTRACT
What makes one work timely and another timeless? Here we are at the heart of mystery of great works: why this strange need for us to return to certain key plays over and over, and not others? Perhaps part of the reason lies in the questions that these works ask of us. Questions that are impossible to fully answer. Questions like the one that begins Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Who’s there?” This simple interrogative haunts every scene of Shakespeare’s play. Who is the ghost? Who is Claudius? Who is my mother? My friend? My lover? And perhaps the biggest mystery of all: Who is Hamlet? How can we ultimately know him? He and his play remain a secret, like the cause behind the smile of the Mona Lisa. There is something fundamentally unknowable about both. Hamlet guards his mystery tenaciously; look at the moment deep in Act III where he taunts his friend Guildenstern, encouraging him to make music from a simple pipe. Guildenstern demurs, he does not “know the stops.” This elicits the following famous attack from Hamlet:
Why look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would play upon me! You would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ. Yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood! Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me. 1
