Hamlet

A prince returns to a court where his father is newly dead and his mother newly married to the dead king's brother. The father's ghost names a murder and demands revenge. What follows is less a revenge plot than the study of a man who circles the deed, feigns madness, stages a play to catch a conscience, and turns his scrutiny on his own failure to move.

Freud read the figure in The Interpretation of Dreams; Ernest Jones extended that reading into a clinical monograph, Hamlet and Oedipus; Lacan took the prince as a case in desire and in mourning that will not complete. For a clinician the play holds a delay no outer obstacle explains, a grief bound up with disgust at the mother's remarriage, and an attachment to the dead that keeps refusing resolution. The soliloquies give language to a mind watching itself fail to act, and to the way loathing and longing settle on one object without cancelling.