The objective correlative

So once again, I ally myself with the hordes by talking about things I know bobbins about.

Am I a charlatan for not quite getting Hamlet? It seems more celebrated for its contribution to the English language than for whatever it is actually about. T.S. Eliot baldly declared the play an artistic failure, taking apart the play in an essay Hamlet and his Problems. In this essay he argued that the the play failed to show the emotions and ideas expressed by the the character Hamlet:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear "

"...probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature."

A survival question then: How would I describe the plot of Hamlet, if challenged at knifepoint (could happen...)?

Here's one answer, from the excellent Author! Author! blog (I'm specifically referring to the 2-page plot synopsis half way down, rather than the one in the style of YA novel - though that spin is perhaps more compelling.) Now I would argue that this synopsis rather proves Eliot's point; it's hard to see anyone falling for this story without prior introduction. I think it's equally uncertain whether they'd see demonstrated in it the central theme that Eliot detects in it of "the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother."

I suppose it's possible that this is an unfairly modern criticism. We're not so used to soliloquys in modern fiction, and I doubt Shakespeare or any other writer of his time ever exchanged admonitions with another to 'show not tell'. Perhaps, since the invention of film, ours has been the age of show, in any medium. Perhaps we should be writing screenplays.