Here and Everywhere? The Platypus Reads Part XLVII

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Once you accept Hamlet as the archetypal modern hero (or anti-hero), you begin seeing him everywhere. Case in point, my wife and I were watching "Phantom of the Opera" the other night. There's a line toward the end of the movie where the Phantom sings: "Down once more to the dungeon of my dark despair; down once more to the prison of my mind." All I could think of was Hamlet's line to Guildenstern and Rosencranz: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I had bad dreams." Here, once more, was the star-crossed prince, slighted and overlooked, falling back within his own mind to recreate the world as a play, with himself as the main character, and wreck his revenge. Of course Christine is no Ophelia, and that alters the whole course of the story.

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