Solidly competent.

I missed the whole idea of the well-being of the nation being tied to the moral health of the ruler. “Something rotten”, of course, but a brief reading misses a lot. “Something's bad? Why is it bad?.... Well, something's always bad in a play.”

I also seriously mis-understood the Hamlet/Laertes foil-set-up; Laertes isn’t “the good kid”, he’s just the *extrovert*.... And although I grasped that the ghost alone doesn’t prove anything, I didn’t understand that this was clear to many other people—even Hamlet, who never understood anything until he was damn well ready.