Shakespeare's Couples: Everybody in Hamlet is Dysfunctional

The only thing that keeps Hamlet's relationships from being totally annoying is that Shakespeare appears to have been perfectly aware that all the relationships are horrible. 

Hamlet doesn't trust Cordelia. She is weak and lets others push her around. Even Branagh's addition of sex didn't give that relationship more substance. And that's mostly the point. Hamlet is playing a game. Cordelia is a pawn. There's nothing there because there never really was anything there. 

Gertrude's relationship with Claudius is interesting but it is also a relationship that rests on enormous self-deception. And Updike's version didn't improve it. 

On the male/male front, there is Hamlet and Horatio, but Horatio disappears for most of the play, only showing up to deliver a stellar final line. Nicholas Farrell's Horatio is fantastic, but also gives the impression of carrying on a somewhat one-sided fascination with his prince.

I think the play is a good one, but it is the story of entirely dysfunctional people who can't hold onto anything real and consistent for more than 2 seconds. There's a deep cynicism about it which all the profundity can't allay.

There have been several plays/books about minor characters--the actors who show up at the castle, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern--and those minor characters often end up...not completely miserable. (At the end of Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern aren't dead yet!) And from that perspective, a romance might be possible. To go traditional, one of the players and the gravedigger's sister (I'm inferring a sister). To go male/male, Fortinbras and, say, Horatio. 

Nobody else stands a chance. 

Perhaps, Hamlet was Shakespeare's answer to Greek tragedy.