Hamlet

The inverse of Hamlet — Macbeth acts immediately on ambition where Hamlet thinks too long. Both are destroyed: one by having thought too little, one by having thought too much.

Both are studies in the gap between the dream and the reality — Gatsby reaches for Daisy as Hamlet reaches for a just world, and both are destroyed by that reaching.

Raskolnikov is Hamlet who goes through with the murder. Dostoevsky admired and imitated Shakespeare's psychological interiority; the guilt-spiral that follows direct action mirrors Hamlet's paralysis before it.

Both plays anatomize the gap between who a man believes himself to be and who he actually is. Willy Loman's delusions and Hamlet's philosophical clarity are different responses to the same modern problem of identity.

Stoppard's play retells Hamlet from the perspective of its least consequential characters — asking what the play looks like to those on the margins of the protagonist's tragedy. Essential pairing.

Shakespeare's other great meditation on fathers, children, power, and the failure of family. Where Hamlet is about a son who cannot act, Lear is about a father who acts catastrophically and destroys everything.