Midway through Great Expectations, Pip and a friend attend a spectacularly bad production of Hamlet. The costumes are outrageous, the casting implausible, the scenery absurd, and the acting thoroughly unnatural; the audience responds by hurling nuts and insults throughout the performance. Having come to see his old village acquaintance, the churchman-turned-actor Mr. Wopsle, in the leading role, Pip laughs at the inadvertent drollery despite himself (ch.31). Dickens's readers have long enjoyed this episode with unalloyed mirth, except for a persistent interpretive disagreement about what the incident is doing in the novel. For some critics who acknowledge its thematic function, the badness of Wopsle's acting provides an inauspicious parallel to Pip's own expectations: just as Wopsle hoped to soar out of his humble station through the London theater, only to have "had a drop," in Joe Gargery's phrase (170; ch. 27), so Pip's aspirations to metropolitan grandeur will earn him ridicule and failure. Other critics have discerned parallels between Pip and the character Wopsle portrays: both young men struggling to find their way in the world, haunted by an absent patron, tormented by an unattainable love, stuck in a bad dream of a revenge tragedy. (1) The significance of Wopsle's bad Hamlet, then, has been taken either to be that it's bad, or that it's Hamlet. Few critics have noted, however, that it's bad and it's Hamlet, or, more radically, that it's bad because it's Hamlet.
