ABSTRACT
With this simple plot Shakespeare bequeaths to us his longest play, a monumental aria on ambivalence, on what one actively does by actively not doing something else. Hamlet is often regarded as Shakespeare’s paragon of psychological complexity. We are privy to Hamlet’s extended meditations, his obsessions, his ‘innermost thoughts’. But for all their sound and fury, for all the windy suspiration of forced breath it takes to get through his hundreds of lines of soliloquy, Hamlet’s interior monologues ultimately tell us very little about who he is or why he behaves as he does.
