The Problem of Too Much Information in Literature

When I am reading Hamlet I often develop an urge to tell people about it, as if the Melancholy Dane's history had heretofore been classified as a top secret. I am bursting with information about Hamlet, so filled am I by the massive "evidence" presented by Shakespeare. So I sit down at my writing table and begin to put together an essay or a lecture in which I seem to extract a thesis out of the evidence in the play. I say "seem" because I think I actually begin with some kind of preconceived idea which rather automatically causes me to arrange the play's evidence to accommodate my thesis. If I am guilty of such a priori thinking, I attribute it to the excessive evidence in the writings of Shakespeare and many other major authors. They give me so much that I can find nearly anything I want. If I wish Hamlet to be an Oedipal figure, I can prove "conclusively" that he is. I shall have equal success if I attempt to prove lat he is a stock Senecan revenge character, a typical example of lenaissance melancholy, an Aristotelian tragic hero, an existentialist, or scholastic, or all of these rolled together. I can't lose; the evidence for il of my theses is overwhelmingly present in the rich and abundant language of the play. Shakespeare has given me a deck of cards, which I can shuffle, cut, and arrange in a nearly infinite number of ways.