Just Finished Reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The other day I checked out, from my local public library's online source Libby, an audiobook version of William Shakespeare's longest play, the tragedy Hamlet.  The version I listened to was by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was pretty powerful, even though they stuck to the original archaic language...which was a great mental exercise in concentration and listening as I struggled to follow it.  Still, I somehow managed to keep up with the story's general flow as the fictional Danish Prince Hamlet, distraught over his father's recent death, discovers from his ghost its true cause...which leads him down a path of vengeance and disaster.  Hamlet, the Ghost, Horatio, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern...quite an unforgettable list of characters as well as memorable lines, plot twists, and that ending: ouch!  I liked hearing the play instead of visually reading it, but unfortunately since I wasn't actually watching a stage play in the way it is supposed to be experienced I was often confused as to which character was doing the speaking...and the climactic duel scene was pretty much indecipherable just listening to it, necessitating some reference to the written script, available free online: here's a link to the Gutenberg site: [Gutenberg Hamlet].  I'm not yet finished with Hamlet: I'd like to see some film versions, the 1948 Lawrence Olivier movie being the most celebrated one...although I understand it considerably altered Shakespeare's written play.  Libby offers some other plays of Shakespeare on audio, and I'd like to try them out as well.  I had a lot of fun with Hamlet, something that greatly surprised me.  Back at Nova High I had a classmate named Frances who was crazy about Shakespeare...I'm beginning to see why.  I suggest that if you're having trouble reading a play of his, try like I did and see how much you can follow on audio, or find a quality stage presentation to watch...sometimes you can pick up some good stuff from YouTube, and then there are the modern language versions on the market as well...