matters touching the lord Hamlet

As some of you know already, I have been absorbing much of my time reading Hamlet, along with this past week's whirlwind of the music festival etc. This past May you probably already know that I went through a Robert Penn Warren obsession about my "bad book" that's supposed to be about corruption and politicians but really isn't. Anyway, now it's June and it's about Hamlet, starting with screening for the family fast-forwarded, and then to read the play itself.
The only other plays I read by Shakespeare was Othello and Macbeth and Julius Caesar, so I was impressed with why Shakespeare was so popular and how many popular interpretations weren't Shakespeare's.

Here are some good reasons why Shakespeare is fun to read:
1 It's really fun to fit many cliched lines into their original context. Reading Hamlet is almost like reading the Bible in respect to familiarity, and like reading the Bible, transforms empty cliches into real stories and real people, making them all the more worthwhile.

2 What's really neat about finding real people, is getting to understand all of them, if not all sympathetically, at least pathetically.
Including finding the background characters' reality and character. Of course it requires reading in between lines by looking at the negative images: asking what are they not saying/doing? why are they mentioned at all? (this is how I often read the Old Testament--esp. the woman figures: "what! why did you mention a woman?" vs. "why did they say so little?")

3 Gleaning as close to truth or history from his culture and what he observed of others (e.g. what's Elizabethan and what's medieval Dane/Scot etc.) by what's different from his and theirs (and yours and his). What remains true, and what is artificial constructs... Basically, the eternal task of a historian. (e.g. the remaining truth/similarity of love between father and daughter, son and father etc. and natural relationships with the responsibilities that their society constructs)

Of course this is true for any classic/epic : Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, Canterbury Tales, etc.
Is that truth shall remain true, people will be people, history will constantly be excavated and analyzed (and hidden and mythologized), and that our eternal searching and discovering and interpreting and translating through time and tongue will not have been in vain; For, like science--biology, physics, theology, and mathematics, truth shall reveal, and it will forever be unlocking its own mysteries as time unravels and puts all our masterful attempts and concealment to shame. Let the bright morning dawn! And light shall put away our pitiful creations of night.
(I shall post later on misconceptions...)