ATCHING OR READINGHamlet for the first time or the twentieth, an observer cannot help being struck, I think, by how much of the play has passed into our common language. Indeed, as many commentators have observed, the experience of Hamlet is almost always that of recognition, of recalling, remembering, or identifying some already-known phrase or image. It could be said that in the context of modern culture—global culture as well as Anglophone culture—one never does encounter Hamlet “for the first time.”
