Hamlet Essay

What more can be said about Hamlet? After you read this book you will ask, "How could so many critics have missed so much?". Past critics have failed to find the answers in Hamlet because they have failed to ask the right questions. They have been blinded to the mysteries in Hamlet by that ever-premature question, "What more can be said?" But there is a necessary question of the play yet to be considered: To be or not to be -- what? That is the question.

To live and to love living. That is the answer. In search of that answer, we constantly question the world. And the answer comes, more than from any other part of the world, from the minds of men (and womb-men). This book is an attempt to find part of the answer in one work conceived in the mind of one man -- in Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

I am about to reveal to you a secret that has been hidden in plain sight for over four hundred years. Most of the clues are in the most performed, most written-about play in the English language. Other clues, though less obtrusive, can be found in any large library.

Clues such as:

1. The English Pope and his fertility well, and Henry VIII and his first queen.

2. A divorce decreed at Blackfriars.

3. An imaginary kick from an imaginary fetus when the Pole Star danced.

4. The day the canon disseminated "seminary".

5. A brass door-knocker shaped like a nose.

6. The mole under William Allen's right eye.

7. A 16th-century cannon called a "falcon" (but not Maltese).

8. A bunghole.

9. Domini canis will have his day.

10. Two provincial roses.

11. A Strange baker and his "daughter."

12. The steward that stole his master's daughter, and the baby born from the womb of earth.

13. The name of a forest or Shakespeare's kin, an anonymous play and a hamlet that destroyed itself, and two games of backgammon interrupted by murders.

14. Black Will and George Shakebag.

15. "When a man's verses cannot be understood...it strikes a man more dead...