The Ten Essential Penguin Classics: I (Heart) Hamlet, by Kendra Levin:

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True story:  Hamlet was my first boyfriend. 

It was the summer of 1995. The O.J. Simpson trial was in full swing, as was a war in the Balkans. Much smaller dramas were taking place in my hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts. I was thirteen and rehearsing for my fifth production with a children's theatrical troupe called the Rebel Shakespeare Company.

This was what we did, my friends and I. While our peers played sports or hung out at the mall developing social skills, we rehearsed and performed Shakespeare plays in an old Revolutionary War fort-turned-park. Our audiences consisted mostly of extremely patient parents steeled for a long afternoon of watching children in velvet capes shout unintelligibly over the roar of overhead airplanes. But we loved it. Those summers were imbued with the kind of magic that can only be created by combining the thrill of performing some of the greatest scenes in the English language with approximately one zillion hormones.

Naturally, it was a recipe for romance.

In our production, Hamlet was played by a young actor who was a big star in the Marblehead children's acting scene. Everybody thought he was going to grow up to be famous, including him. He had floppy red hair, a scattering of freckles, way too much energy, and a not-at-all secret crush on me.

Hamlet pursued me all summer. He made rings for me out of flowers. He asked me to do the scene from Romeo and Juliet with him, the one where she's dead and he kisses her (an invitation that, in retrospect, seems more creepy than romantic).  He wrote me long letters quoting Hamlet: "Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love."

I didn't doubt he loved, but I did doubt my own feelings. Truth be told, I was harboring my own, much more secret, crush on Fortinbras. But that wasn't meant "to be" and, as the summer wore on, Hamlet wore me down. By the time the play went up, we were officially going out. Our make-out spot was behind the little brick building that housed the bathrooms. Hamlet ran his bitten-nailed hands all over my vaguely pirate-esque Guildenstern costume. He carved our names into one of the park's benches, followed by "4-EVA." In the words of Polonius, this was "hot love on the wing."

Sadly, the summer ended and, a few months later, so did my relationship with Hamlet. When the temperature dropped, making out in historic parks lost much of its appeal. He was in high school now, while I was still in middle school; clearly, our love was star-crossed. But my love affair with Hamlet the play was just beginning.

The summer had whetted my appetite for more Hamlet, and in the year that followed I became an avid fan. I watched the film adaptation with Mel Gibson and, when it came out in theaters, the Kenneth Branagh version (all four hours of it). I sought out plays like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet, both of which I loved. When my parents gave me Harold Bloom's book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human as a gift upon graduating from middle school, I read the chapter on Hamlet first.

All this made sense considering I'd grown up in a home that celebrated Shakespeare. My dad, a former English professor, started reading me stories from Shakespeare as a toddler, and my parents took me to see my very first play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, when I was five.

In high school, things between Hamlet and I got really serious.  We were assigned lots of other reading in English class, but I cheated on everyone with Hamlet-Pip, Holden Caulfield, even Romeo. It amazed me how much Hamlet and I had in common. Like me, he loved the theatre. I had started writing plays, and felt that Hamlet was a bit of a playwright too, re-tooling The Murder of Gonzago to suit his own purposes. 

Hamlet was the only guy who got me as a teenager, who understood what I was going through. Hamlet saw Marblehead High School as I did: "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." Hamlet shared my view of living in a town that felt increasingly claustrophobic to me: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!" And he felt the way I did about life; he kind of wanted "to die: to sleep; no more," but he couldn't quite commit to it because, like me, he couldn't be sure he'd wind up somewhere much better than Elsinore.

I did wind up somewhere better, though-not by dying, but by being accepted to an arts boarding school, thanks to the plays I had been writing, which had won some awards.  My new school boasted an impressive array of dorkiness in various forms, but not even the acting students were as geeky about Shakespeare as I was. Undaunted, I kept on writing-both plays and the occasional long paper about Hamlet (which we studied in my senior English class, to my obvious delight).

When it came time to write my college application essay, I decided to discuss the historical figure who'd had the biggest impact on my life: William Shakespeare. He'd inspired me to act, to read, to write-he'd kindled my love of language and given me the confidence to believe I had something to say that might interest others.

Plus, he'd helped me snag my first boyfriend.

In college, I kept writing papers about Hamlet, even in classes like The Epic of Gilgamesh and Introduction to Buddhism where the play was totally irrelevant.  I didn't care. Hamlet was the one piece of literature I was sure I understood.  And when I found I hated the college I'd chosen, I followed the advice of Polonius:  "This above all: to thine own self be true." I transferred to NYU to study playwriting. Within three years, my first play was produced Off-Broadway.

My love affair with Hamlet the character ended sometime in my mid-twenties, though my passion for Hamlet the play hasn't waned. Sometime in the last few years, I realized what an utter teenager the object of my literary lust really is:  vain, spoiled, arrogant; as obsessed with himself as he is with death.  He's really not so unlike the Hamlet I dated at thirteen.

But the funny thing is, the less Hamlet appeals to me as boyfriend material, the more Hamlet continues to astound me with its many layers of meaning. I re-read the play again this spring and spent hours discussing it with my real-life boyfriend-a fellow Shakespeare nerd-discovering themes I'd never noticed before, like Shakespeare's view of the writer's role in society, and the way memory makes ghosts of us all. I saw a production of the play at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts this summer, and another on Broadway starring Jude Law this fall. Each time I see or read the play, new doors are opened into rooms I never knew were there; it is an ever-expanding universe contained within five acts. Hamlet really is "king of infinite space."

To me, what makes a work of literature a classic is its ability to endlessly unspool with new meaning with each reading. It is the author's ability to transcend his or her own era so much that a thirteen year-old girl at the end of the twentieth century can feel that a play written by a grieving father in Elizabethan England speaks directly to her. It is the work's ability to touch the lives of its readers so deeply that it becomes inextricably linked with them; that the reader can hardly separate where the characters end and the real people begin.

Hamlet belongs on the Top Ten list of Penguin classics because it is all these things, and more; because it holds the mirror up to the nature of our own lives; and because I heart Hamlet.  4-EVA.

View the Ten Essential Penguin Classics

Kendra Levin is an Associate Editor at Viking Children's Books