My love affair with William Shakespeare began in middle school when my favorite teacher showed us how fun he can be. She affectionately called him “Bill” and I’ve been hooked ever since. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's tragedies. From this we get such quotes as “To be or not be”, “Frailty thy name is Woman,” and “To thine own self be true.” Such a great work defies simple summation but here you will find the themes of love, sex, death, gender, power, God all wrapped in a story where sadly nearly every character dies. While Hamlet’s uncle-father and aunt-mother see death as “common” and therefore largely a matter of indifference, he is nearly destroyed by the significance of death in its particularity, namely the particular death of the good king, his father. Eventually he navigates his way between these two extremes. He is able to accept the commonality and equalizing effect of death without forfeiting the significance of each individual life (and death). In the face of his own fate he seizes the interim between the death which stalks him behind and the dying which lies in front. He makes peace with his dying but insists on showing that a life is strong enough to say “One,” that is, to present oneself as an individual against a “sea of troubles.” Carpe interim! “The readiness is everything.”