Revenge

Three hours and still utterly riveting. I have had a tendency in recent years to rate Bach above Shakespeare but that's largely on account of 'perfect' being more easily, apparently, achieved in music than in words but neither Bach or Handel wrote Hamlet.

David Tennant's antics are better than I remember them but I don't remember much at all. The use of a mirror to shoot Polonius through rather than an arras to stab him through provides the fractured reflection on the characters several times once it's there to be made use of.

But what I don't remember ever being taught, or finding out, was that there's not just the two revenge plots, Laertes being manipulated by Claudius to kill Hamlet after Hamlet's accidentally killed Polonius 'taking him for his better' in pursuit of the ghost's instructions. The whole play is framed  by Fortinbras taking revenge on Denmark for Old Hamlet taking territory off Old Fortinbras thirty years earlier. Quite brilliant, as is the whole design of the thing, the language, the psychology and the 'philosophy' contained within all that.

And Hamlet is 30 because it says so in the gravedigger scene. That's when the previous war was and Yorick must have died when Hamlet was 7. He's still a student but he's royal and not got much else to do and, of course, he's a dilettante.