David Thomson on Hamlet

...Hamlet is not just a nightmare of incest or the dread of taking action, but an entire metaphor for the presentation of self. Hamlet endures and increases the more we learn about the duplicity of selfhood. It is a play about theatre and our failure to exist as more than amateurs plying ourselves. The question that hangs over it is less who wrote it than what revelations of the brain and personality are yet to come to give it greater depth. How did anyone so long ago know us so well? (David Thomson, Why Acting Matters, pp. 48-49)