re: #62 Glenn Beck’s Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut

There is very little surviving material showing contemporary reception of Shakespeare’s plays, I think. They know from how often it was performed that it was in the top five of his plays in terms of how much audiences liked it.

The edition I’m re-reading (Arden) is the one I used to study it in high school - it has fantastic notes and a long introduction that covers a lot of the historical context. It doesn’t mention contemporary reaction as such, and obviously the historical record even of the plays themselves is somewhat shaky, what with the different surviving published versions etc. So presumably there’s just no data there.

It’s just amazingly dense with meaning. There are so many allusions to Hamlet’s state of mind, microcosms of the plot in single scenes or even fragments of speech and so on.