Overview of Hamlet
Hamlet is without question the most famous play in the English language: the most often performed, read, and discussed. Written between 1598 and 1602, this tragedy is a milestone in Shakespeare's dramatic development; according to most critics, he achieved full artistic maturity with this work. Hamlet brilliantly depicts its protagonist's struggle with contradictory impulses of familial and romantic love, personal honor and moral integrity, and political ambition. Shakespeare's focus on this conflict was a departure from conventional revenge tragedies of his age, which often presented violent acts on stage. Shakespeare achieved high drama by portraying a character agonizing over a decision rather than acting decisively.
Shakespeare drew from a variety of sources to create his play. One such source was the Ur-Hamlet, or "original Hamlet," a play that scholars believe was written and performed during Shakespeare's lifetime. Numerous sixteenth-century records attest to the existence of this play, which may have been written by Thomas Kyd, the author another renowned revenge tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy, published in 1592. Other principal sources available to Shakespeare were Saxo Grammaticus's Historiae Danicae (circa 1200), which features a popular legend with a plot similar to that of Hamlet, and François de Belleforest's seven-volume Histoires Tragiques, Extraicts des Oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel (1559-80), which provides an expanded account of the story recorded in the Historiae Danicae. These sources sparked Shakespeare's creation of Hamlet, a supremely rich and complex literary work that continues to enthrall both audiences, readers, and commentators and to inspire myriad interpretations.
Hamlet is often regarded as a "problem play," one that contains unresolved issues. Hamlet's speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "You would play upon me ... you would pluck out the heart of my mystery" (Act III, scene ii) is often cited by scholars as an ironic gloss on their own task: to understand and explicate the play. The most fundamental issue in Hamlet, one which opens the door to countless interpretations, can be stated in one simple question: Why does Hamletdelay taking revenge on Claudius? While critics offer various answers to this question, their theories generally fall into two distinct camps: one group focuses on the inner workings of Hamlet's mind as the primary cause of his procrastination; the other stresses that external obstacles prohibit the prince from carrying out his task.
Critics who find the cause of Hamlet's delay in his internal meditations typically view the prince as a man of great moral integrity who is impelled to commit an act that goes against his deepest principles. On numerous occasions, the prince tries to make sense of his moral dilemma through personal meditations, presented on the stage as soliloquies. (A soliloquy is a speech delivered while the speaker is alone; it is devised to inform the audience what the character is thinking, or to provide information about other participants in the action.) Another perspective of Hamlet's internal struggle suggests that the prince is so disenchanted with life that he lacks the will to exact revenge. In addition, Hamlet is appalled that his mother Gertrude has married Claudius, her husband's brother, soon after her first husband's death. To the prince—even before he learns that Claudius is a murderer—his mother's "o'er-hasty marriage" and Claudius's encouragement of drinking and revelry degrade the Danish court to the status of "an unweeded garden / That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely."Hamlet considers killing himself, yet fears the damning consequences of suicide. With such heavy matters weighing on his mind, the Ghost's call for revenge only complicates Hamlet's ability to make decisions, leading to many other interludes of self-questioning and prolonged inaction.
Critics who view Hamlet's hesitation as a result of external rather than internal obstacles often emphasize one point: the prince's difficulty in determining the difference between appearance and reality as a primary barrier that restricts him from taking action. For example, Hamlet questions whether the Ghost is really a benevolent spirit or a devil who tries to trick him into killing Claudius. In addition, the Ghost's accusations pose a very practical problem for Hamlet. Claudius does not at first seem to be a villainous murderer, but rather a competent and responsible monarch. He has assumed the throne and married the queen with full approval of the court, and in fact in Act I, scene ii is shown to have acted quickly and decisively to quell the threat posed by young Fortinbras, the son of the king of Norway who was defeated in single combat by King Hamlet. At this stage of the play, as far as Hamlet is concerned, the king's transgressions are his hasty marriage to his brother's widow and his assumption of a throne that Hamlet thought should have passed to him.
Various hindrances keep Hamlet from killing Claudius once he is convinced that the king is indeed guilty of murder. The most obvious is that the monarch is almost never alone. When Hamlet finds him alone during the prayer scene (Act III, scene iii), he hesitates to kill him because he does not want Claudius's penitent soul to go to heaven. Hamlet's inaction here is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his delay: critics who see Hamlet's procrastination as the result of an internal struggle maintain that this episode clearly demonstrates his inability to exact revenge; on the other hand, commentators who support the theory of external influences assert that the prince delays killing Claudius not only because he does not want Claudius to die repentant, and hence to go unpunished in the afterlife. Perhaps more importantly, at this point Hamlet has not proven to anyone (except possibly Horatio) that his uncle is a murderer. To kill him with no proof would be to seal his own fate as a regicide.
If Hamlet is seen as a victim of external influences, his internal meditations on his hesitation do not necessarily demonstrate an inability to act; rather, they reflect his need to vent his frustration through self-reproaches at the fact that he cannot find an adequate opportunity to avenge his father's murder. One of the most straightforward assessments of Hamlet's inaction came in the first full-length essay ever published on Hamlet. In this essay, which appeared in 1736, the critic writes that "The Case indeed is this: Had Hamlet gone naturally to work, as we could suppose such a Prince to in parallel Circumstances, there would have been an End of our Play. The Poet therefore was obliged to delay his Hero's Revenge; but then he should have contrived some good Reason for it."
Closely related to Hamlet's delay is the theme of revenge. The prince is not the only character preoccupied with revenge in Hamlet: Prince Fortinbras of Norway is massing troops against Denmark because King Hamlet killed his father and won Norwegian lands in battle, and Laertes—infuriated by his father's death atHamlet's hands—threatens to overthrow the Danish government before joining Claudius in a plot to kill Hamlet. Further, Hamlet belongs to the genre of the Revenge Tragedy. Revenge Tragedy is a dramatic form made popular on the English stage by Thomas Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy is an early example of the type. Such plays call for the revenge of a father's death by a son, or vice versa; this act is usually directed by the ghost of the murdered man. Other devices found in Revenge Tragedies include hesitation by the hero, real or feigned madness, suicide, intrigue, and murder enacted on stage. Some critics theorize that Shakespeare despised the Revenge Tragedy as a form whose conventions had become trite. Yet because the genre was immensely popular with Elizabethan audiences, the playwright had to follow certain guidelines to produce a financially successful play. As a result, Shakespeare modified the theatrical type by creating a double entendre (double meaning) in which he subtly denounced the banality of the Revenge Tragedy without denying his audience many of its popular components. Hamlet's distaste for revenge throughout the play therefore may reflect Shakespeare's disgust with revenge theater, and yet the dramatist fulfilled the audience's expectations for a tragic conclusion.
Many different patterns of imagery give a visual dimension to the dramatic action of Hamlet. Perhaps the most striking imagery is that of bodily corruption, disease, and death. Throughout the play, Hamlet is preoccupied with the degeneration of the Danish court and the foul implications of Claudius and Gertrude's relationship. Images of corruption and disease run throughout the play. While they are not generally associated with Hamlet himself, some commentators citeHamlet's speech to Horatio in Act I, scene iv, in which Hamlet speaks about the potentially corrupting influence of "the stamp of one defect" in an individual's nature. While Hamlet begins the passage speaking about Claudius, some critics believe that he is also speculating about a "particular fault" in his own personality. Indeed, many critics identify his fatal indecisiveness as that fault. Further, a sense of infection underscores Claudius's crime and Gertrude's sin. The description of disease and corruption exceeds the visual dimension and operates on an olfactory level (relating to the sense of smell). Shakespeare offers a vivid depiction of decay and stench by employing imagery of cancerous infection, "the rank sweat of an enseamed [greasy] bed / Stewed in corruption," rotting flesh, and the sun as an agent of corruption. Patterns of war imagery also occur in Hamlet, underscoring the notion that Hamlet and Claudius are in a duel to the death.
In the words of Ernest Johnson, "the dilemma of Hamlet the Prince and Man" is "to disentangle himself from the temptation to wreak justice for the wrong reasons and in evil passion, and to do what he must do at last for the pure sake of justice. . . . From that dilemma of wrong feelings and right actions he ultimately emerges, solving the problem by attaining a proper state of mind." Hamlet's moral dilemma transcends the Elizabethan period, making him a man for all ages. His difficult struggle somehow to act within a corrupt world and yet maintain his moral integrity is seen to have universal and timeless meaning.
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