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Hamlet has long been scrutinized for a single, hidden key that would reveal it according to some discipline. Great art is not obtuse. Hamlet is a play. Great literature though it is, one still cannot read actor, stage setting, and audience in the eloquent words on a printed page. Hamlet belongs to the life of the theatre.
Theatre is a sacred ancient art, with its roots in the unrecorded spectacles of primitive magic and ritual; its sounds, not in words, but in music. There is theatre in each child who playacts at the terrors that assail him from within and without. Our dreams are theatre, although theatre is not a dream. The art of drama grapples structurally with three primary relationships: that of man to his deific projections of threatening wishes and drives; that of man's complexity of self-images and role models to each other; and that of men to one another in the midst of confusions of identities and roles. Hamlet is a play, not only about a prince of Denmark, but about these relationships and the art of theatre itself.
Francisco's retort to Bernardo's question, the opening of the play is “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.” We are confronted initially with the image of the watch, and a statement about the confusion of identities which lends a major thematic strand to the play. Something is askew, and rank does not define protocol. It is a time for the questioning of being rather than that of role, but in the medium of theatre, role and being are at constant odds. An actor is himself, his role, and his relationship to the audience all at once. He is the magnification of our inability to adequately identify each other both within the play as a reflection of life and in his split identity of illusory character and player.
As an audience, we first experience the watching of a watch, the observation of observation. We become a single mirror