Life was better back in Wittenberg. Though you'd never suspect it from the way he's behaved since his father's death, Hamlet was actually a really good roommate. He was very witty, very funny. He would make the greatest jokes and puns about teachers, especially our terrible math teacher who was a singularly pompous old dolt.
Hamlet may have taken his Philosophy courses a little too seriously and it was more than once that he was up late scribbling out a paper that he just didn't think was ready yet, even though it was fine, and anyone else would have blown out the candle and gone to bed already, but there's nothing wrong with taking your studies seriously. Hamlet also really enjoyed Biology. I remember him telling me all about the food chain. A lot. Apparently he found it very exciting. He really liked History too. He was fascinated with Alexander the Great, which made me a little edgy. You don't want someone who will inherit a relatively small country to get any ideas about taking over Europe.
Hamlet was never one of those chaps who brought a different maiden home every night like some of the other blokes on our floor. He would sigh over the soppy letters he wrote to Ophelia and read and reread all the letters she sent him. He'd also spread the dried flowers she sent him over his writing desk, which was always awkward for me to explain when people came over for study groups. Occasionally he would read the really sickeningly mushy parts out loud but I guess I always thought it was sort of sweet, though I would never admit it to him. Plus it came in handy cause I nicked some of it when I wrote love letters to a girl that worked in the bakery down the street. She thought I was brilliant.
It always took him forever to decide to do something but when he'd finally convinced himself to go through with it he'd get really fired up. Like the Fencing Club. He agonized and agonized about it before he joined, and then he would fight like a demon during practice, which really surprised me because I guess I'd always thought of him as something of a mama's boy. I think what really convinced him to go for Fencing was when he didn't get into the play. Somebody else got the madman role. He fumed about it for weeks. He loved plays, but didn't go to many because he thought the older boy that always got the lead roles was overly melodramatic and totally unbelievable.
Hamlet was never really social. When his fencing buddies went out for a drink after practice he usually just went back to the dorm and studied. He liked to be alone.
Come to think of it, Hamlet had a strange habit of talking to himself when he thought he was alone. I overheard him quite a few times. Pretty poetic most of it. I hope he wrote it down.
We didn't talk very much about what we were going to do once we were out of college. I figured that I'd end up working for some aristocrat friend of my fathers, get set up with one of their aristocratic daughters and live pretty much happily ever after. Hamlet obviously was going to inherit the throne of Denmark, but he didn't talk about it much. He really admired his father, and wanted his own rule to be pretty much the same as his King Hamlet's.