e is on screen, onstage, on tour, and trending online. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet — the story of a moody Danish prince stuck between grief and action — is clearly having a moment. And not a quiet one.
In an age defined by TikTok scrolls and short attention spans, a 400-year-old play is somehow everywhere at once. Its reach spans Broadway stages, Hollywood films, Oscar ceremonies, and the Billboard singles chart.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music is currently hosting a National Theatre production starring Hiran Abeysekera. A bold film retelling set inside London’s South Asian community stars Riz Ahmed. Anthony Hopkins, at 88, is charming fans on TikTok with a piece of Prince Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy.
The Oscar-winning film Hamnet — a fictionalized account of the real loss that inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet — earned Jessie Buckley an Academy Award nomination. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift‘s “The Fate of Ophelia,” a song about Hamlet’s tragic ex-lover, climbed all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart.
Eddie Izzard is now carrying her one-person production of the play on a worldwide tour. Every version of Hamlet that lands seems to pull a fresh audience into Shakespeare’s orbit.
Four hundred years after it was first performed, Hamlet still feels urgent. Its antihero — paralyzed by grief after his uncle murders his father and marries his mother — reads less like a Renaissance-era prince and more like someone having an existential crisis in a group chat.
Harvard Shakespeare scholar Jeffrey R. Wilson says the play is perfectly suited to this cultural moment. Audiences living under relentless bad news cycles are quietly asking themselves the same questions Hamlet asks out loud.
People are exhausted from the onslaught of awfulness in the world, and Hamlet gives audiences both permission to ‘go there’ to explore those emotions and a tool kit of ideas to help us process angst.
— Jeffrey R. Wilson, Harvard Shakespeare Scholar
It is a remarkable thing for a 16th-century text to function as emotional permission. But that is exactly what Wilson argues Hamlet offers — a shared vocabulary for collective dread.
The productions landing right now are not reverent museum pieces. They are vibrant, strange, and strikingly alive. From the Brooklyn Hamlet who wears a beanie to the London version that bursts into Bollywood-style dance, these are not the stuffy school-trip productions of memory.
The Peruvian theater company Teatro La Plaza recently presented a version off-Broadway starring eight Spanish-speaking actors with Down syndrome. Director and playwright Chela De Ferrari says great plays survive not because they go untouched, but because they keep getting transformed.
Working with actors with Down syndrome and cognitive disabilities brought me back to something essential in Hamlet: that beneath its philosophical brilliance there is an exposed human being asking, in one way or another, how to exist in a world that keeps misreading him.
— Chela De Ferrari, Teatro La Plaza
In one of the show’s most powerful moments, an actor imitates Laurence Olivier’s famous delivery of the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy while Olivier’s image is projected on a screen behind them. The moment carries a new weight when spoken by someone whose right to occupy public and artistic space is so often questioned.
“I like to imagine a kind of continuity between our actors and all the great actors who have carried the play before,” De Ferrari says. “I believe Shakespeare lives in all of them.”
Filmmaker Aneil Karia grew up feeling Shakespeare was just out of reach. On school trips to see the plays, he always felt like an observer watching an intellectual exercise unfold — never quite inside the story.
So he teamed up with Riz Ahmed and screenwriter Michael Lesslie to build something different. Their film is a stripped-down, modern-day Hamlet set in present-day London, and it leans hard into the title character’s discomfort at being complicit in a corrupt system.
In this version, Hamlet parties at a neon-drenched nightclub and delivers his soliloquy while speeding through rain-slicked London streets in a BMW — hands off the wheel as a truck approaches. To be, or not to be, indeed.
The best-case scenario here is that it’s opening up Shakespeare to audiences who didn’t think it was for them, or who struggled with it previously. This is a big call, but I feel like Shakespeare would approve.
— Aneil Karia, Filmmaker
The film started streaming this week and has already drawn strong early engagement from younger viewers, many of whom discovered it through social media clips.
Back in Brooklyn, the National Theatre’s production takes a different approach: it leans into the comedy. Hiran Abeysekera plays Hamlet as manic and mischievous, delivering soliloquies at the edge of the stage, making direct eye contact with the audience, pulling out the physical humor buried in the text.
Director Robert Hastie says Hamlet is, at its core, a deeply self-aware play. It knows it is a play in the same way Deadpool knows he is in a Deadpool film.
Abeysekera approaches the “To be, or not to be” speech not as a grand theatrical moment but as an errant thought — the kind that floats through a person’s mind on a hard morning in front of the bathroom mirror. That shift in framing makes it feel startlingly personal.
One of the reasons we’re still talking about Shakespeare, and this play in particular, is that whenever those words fuse with a new actor or a new group of actors, it becomes a different play. Maybe that’s a good working definition of a classic.
— Robert Hastie, Director, National Theatre
Then there is the TikTok front. Caitlin Cardile and her three-person company Mad Spirits Theatre are doing something genuinely clever: they take trending audio clips — dialogue from The Office, a Lady Gaga song, a line from That ’70s Show — and assign them to Shakespeare characters.
So Kitty Forman’s fan-favorite line “I may have been a little irrational today” gets lipsynced by an actress playing Ophelia. A tense exchange between Scar and Simba from The Lion King becomes a scene between Claudius and Hamlet. The result is funny, surprising, and genuinely shareable.
“We’re like, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we took these silly trending sounds that everybody’s doing and put them to Shakespeare characters?'” Cardile says. “This has ended up being so much fun.”
It is also, quietly, a serious piece of cultural outreach. By meeting audiences where they already spend their time, Mad Spirits is doing what every great production on this list is doing — proving that Hamlet belongs to whoever picks it up.
Four hundred years is a long time for a story to survive. But Hamlet is not merely surviving. It is adapting, multiplying, and finding new voices. That may be the most Shakespearean thing about it.