It's wonderful that you have access to so much live Shakespeare, Jonathan. I used to when I was in college, but unfortunately, that was before Shakespeare's time.
I'm inclined to agree with you about Hamlet, by the way. It's certainly one of the greatest plays in literature, but in my opinion, its automatic assignment to the top of the Shakespearean heap has become a little too--automatic? King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello are more visceral plays (Hamlet is so damned heady). The Henry the Fourths appear more recognizably human to me. In some ways, Hamlet seems like an exposition about what it means to be a man (by which I mean an adult male, not just a human being). Several versions of manhood are critiqued in the ideal, and eventually, after a bit of bloodletting, Hamlet embraces his own noble but tragic destiny. In Henry IV, Prince Hal is just as troubled a figure as Hamlet, but he's not nearly as good. His "noble destiny" as Henry V is a sham and he knows it. On the eve of Agincourt (in Henry V), when he famously prays for his troops, he is
still begging God to forgive his father for usurping the throne. In Henry IV Part 2, Hal is not choosing between ideals. He is betraying his lowlife friends because it turns out to be more important for him to embrace the lie than to wallow in the truth. In Henry V, he even hangs some of them. The price he (and they) pay, it seems to me, is more applicable to human experience than Hamlet's slow expiration in Horatio's arms. We all live like Prince Hal to some extent. How many of us die like Hamlet?