Shakespeare, William Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. (London: Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 2005) [ISBN 9781904271338]. Extremely well annotated (over annotated to some tastes), a lengthy introduction with an emphasis on the critical and theatrical history of the play.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet. Edited by G.R. Hibbard. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199535811]. A well annotated edition with a helpful, wide ranging introduction and useful illustrations.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet. Introduction by Alan Sinfield. (London: Penguin, 1980, 2005) [ISBN 9780141013077]. Accessible, thought-provoking introduction and straightforward notes.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production. Edited by Robert Hapgood. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
[ISBN 9780521646352]. Not recommended for a first reading of the text but compelling for its insights into how different actors and directors have staged the play.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007)
[ISBN 9781904271802]. Not recommended for a first reading of the play but valuable for a comparison between the two most influential texts of the play. The 1603 version is longer than the 1623 version, this edition explores the differences between the two texts and their possible significance.
Berry, Philippa Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death and the Tragedies. (London: Routledge, 1999) [ISBN 9780415068956].
Bloom, Harold Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003)
[ISBN 9781841954615].
Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. (1904: London: Penguin, 1991)
[ISBN 9780140530193].
Croall, Jonathan Hamlet Observed: The National Theatre at Work. (London: Royal National Theatre Publications, 2001) [ISBN 9780951994344].
de Grazia, Margreta Hamlet Without Hamlet. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780521690362].
Erne, Lukas Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780521045667].
Greenblatt, Stephen Hamlet in Purgatory. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) [ISBN 9780691102573].
Harris, Jonathan Gil Shakespeare and Literary Theory. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) [ISBN 9780199573387].
Howard, Tony Women as Hamlet. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) [ISBN 9780521117210].
Jardine, Lisa Reading Shakespeare Historically. (London: Routledge, 1996) [ISBN 9780415134903].
Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy. (London: New Mermaids, 2009)
[ISBN 9781408114216].
Lavender, Andy Hamlet in Pieces. (London: Nick Hern, 2001)
[ISBN 9781854596185].
Maher, Mary Z Modern Hamlets and their Soliloquies. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003) [ISBN 9780877458265].
McDonald, Russ Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780198711711].
Pennington, Michael Hamlet: A User’s Guide. (London: Nick Hern, 2008) [ISBN 9781854595461].
Rutter, Carol Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. (London: Routledge, 2000) [ISBN 9780415141642].
Shakespeare, William Titus Andronicus. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199536108].
Shapiro, James 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. (London: Faber, 2006) [ISBN 9780571214815].
Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (Horndon: Northcote House, 2005) second revised edition [ISBN 9780746311417].
Wilson, J. Dover What Happens in Hamlet. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [ISBN 9780521091091].
Wofford, Suzanne L. (ed.) Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. (London: Macmillan, 2011) second revised edition
[ISBN 9780333973516].
www.hamletworks.org offers exhaustive line-by-line interpretations as well as longer essays and critical insights.
www.hamletguide.com offers a good selection of critical texts.
www.shakespeare-online.com offers some good insights, especially on the influence of Seneca on Hamlet.
http://shea.mit.edu/ramparts/ Hamlet on the Ramparts concentrates on Hamlet’s encounters with the ghost.
www.bbc.co.uk/hamlet a useful BBC link to clips of film versions.
www.rsc.org.uk/explore/hamlet a link to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s prominent productions of the play.
When approaching the examination paper, you should remember that this is a text-based course and therefore you should not discuss film versions in detail. Films of Hamlet do, however, offer an insight into the importance of directorial interpretation and indicate how each era produces its own version of the text (in Tony Richardson’s 1969 version, for instance, Ophelia is played by Marianne Faithful and offers a wry commentary on Flower Power, while Michael Almereyda’s film of 2000 relocates the play to contemporary New York against a background of warring business corporations rather than kingdoms).
Hamlet was first performed around 1600, three years before Queen Elizabeth I’s death. Although it was based on an episode in the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus and on a lost play (sometimes called the Ur-Hamlet), Shakespeare’s version perhaps reflects worries about who would succeed the ageing Queen. It has often been argued that Hamlet begins the period of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies (it was followed by Othello, King Lear and Macbeth); A.C. Bradley’s influential Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) for instance focuses on these four plays, even though several of Shakespeare’s previous tragedies, including Titus Andronicus, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, had enjoyed great popularity. Bradley claimed that the later tragedies embody philosophical ideas and a psychological realism of a greater depth than that found elsewhere in Elizabethan literature. These claims have since been questioned but for many critics Hamlet remains an important expression of the disparity between human potential and the limiting (and sometimes fatal) circumstances which constrain us.
The sixteenth century saw the population of London expand dramatically (it probably more than tripled). The first permanent theatre, simply called The Theatre, was built in Shoreditch in 1576 to exploit this potential large audience. It was financially successful and a number of other theatres soon appeared around the outskirts of London. Plays were written quickly (during his professional life Shakespeare averaged more than two plays per year) for an audience hungry for new stories. The plot inconsistencies in several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, may in part be due to this necessity to produce work rapidly.
Unlike Hamlet, Shakespeare was never a university student, and the first published reference to him, by the playwright Robert Greene in Greenes Groats – Worth of Wit (1592), derides him for his relative lack of education. Shakespeare was a professional author, writing for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; as a shareholder in their acting company he became relatively rich. By 1599, the company was wealthy enough to build its own theatre, The Globe, where Hamlet was probably first staged with the overweight actor Richard Burbage, who was in his mid-30s, in the title role. The Globe was an open air theatre and performances took place in the afternoon, offering a contrast to the darkness surrounding many of the play’s episodes, beginning with the first scene which occurs around midnight. Much of the immediate cultural, biographical and historical background to Hamlet is depicted in James Shapiro’s accessible and enjoyable 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005).
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play with a running time of over four and a half hours and often excites controversy over which passages might be cut in performance. Despite its length, this is an elusive play which leaves many important questions unanswered. We do not know why a ghost in a Catholic purgatory appears in a play written for a Protestant audience or why he urges his son to commit a murder which will put the son’s soul in peril. We are not told whether Gertrude conspired with Claudius in the murder of her husband, why Claudius decided to kill his brother or why Claudius has been elected King instead of the popular Prince Hamlet. The extent of Hamlet’s previous relationship with Ophelia is also uncertain. Horatio’s character changes according to the demands of a particular scene: he is able to explain the political situation to the guards during the first scene, for instance, but seems ignorant of the same situation almost immediately afterwards when he meets Hamlet.
Activity
1. Does our lack of knowledge about important elements in the plot of Hamlet frustrate our enjoyment of the play or increase it?
2. Why do you think a playwright might deliberately withhold such information?
The play contains other confusions: Hamlet seems to be around 20 years old at the beginning of the play but the gravedigger later tells us that he is over 30; the weather is freezing but King Hamlet has recently been sleeping in the garden; and although he was murdered while asleep at home he appears as a ghost in full armour rather than in the garments in which he died.
The unanswered questions about the play seem less noticeable during its performance. In many ways this is a play about the theatre. It explores the relationship between truth, play-acting and deceit, so inconsistent details may even seem appropriate. The purpose of The Murder of Gonzago, a play within a play, is a paradoxical one: Hamlet is using a fiction (a play) to reveal the true state of the King’s conscience. The arrival of the players allows for a long extract from a third play about the fall of Troy in a very different theatrical style from either the rhymed couplets of The Murder of Gonzago or the general tone of Hamlet; like Hamlet, this third play also concerns the murder of a king (Hamlet’s ‘true’ intent). Hamlet presumptuously lectures the actors on what constitutes good acting (they are to ‘hold a mirror up to nature’) and he is amazed that the Player King can cry ‘real’ tears for a mythological queen. Repeatedly these passages reflect on the interplay between theatrical illusion and reality. Hamlet also becomes an actor, pretending to be mad so that he can escape suspicion. But it is possible to question whether he altogether keeps his sanity (is his murder of Polonius a sane action?), while his pretend madness seems to lead to Ophelia’s genuine insanity. Given the multiple ways in which Hamlet reminds us of its theatricality, it might be classified as Metatheatre: a work which deliberately draws attention to its use of theatrical conventions.
Activity
1. What is the effect on an audience of a play which so frequently discusses the theatre and questions of ‘good’ acting?
2. What different kinds of madness are depicted in this play?
As a revenge tragedy, Hamlet is a genre piece and this both emphasises its theatricality and leads to certain audience expectations. In a revenge tragedy, someone close to the hero (usually a family member) is murdered; the hero would normally demand justice of the king or ruler but that person has either committed the murder or is closely related to the murderer. Since the hero cannot expect justice from the State, he determines on a personal revenge. By becoming a revenger, he refuses to let God (or Providence – an important word in Hamlet) ensure that justice is done; consequently the hero’s own moral status becomes dubious. In the pursuit of his revenge, the hero may cause the death of relatively innocent characters and this casts further doubt on his morality. In some revenge plays the hero’s character deteriorates as he comes closer to success and perhaps Hamlet’s rant on top of Ophelia’s coffin suggests such a deterioration. The revenger is ultimately successful but since this means that he too has become a murderer, he is killed by the Providence that he denied.
Activity
1. Can you think of other stories you know, including plays, films and novels, which approximate this description of revenge tragedy?
2. Why do you think revenge tragedies might have such a strong popular appeal?
Over the last 200 years, there has been a tradition of criticism, expressed by such critics as S.T. Coleridge, A.C. Bradley and Harold Bloom, that Hamlet is greater than the role of revenger which is imposed on him. According to this view, part of Hamlet’s tragedy is that he is too profound a thinker to fulfil a task which would better suit a simpler man. Bloom’s Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) in particular credits Hamlet with an almost superhuman profundity: ‘Hamlet himself is a frontier of consciousness yet to be passed’. Certainly, Hamlet is the most complex of three characters in the play who seek to avenge the death of their fathers. Of the other two, Laertes becomes utterly ruthless and declares that if he met Polonius’s murderer he would be prepared to ‘cut his throat I’th’church’, while Fortinbras (whose name means ‘strong in arms’) is the embodiment of military strength and unwavering resolution.
As background reading, you might want to look at Titus Andronicus (circa 1592), a revenge tragedy partially written by Shakespeare. There is also a remarkable film version (1999) by Julie Taymor of this very gory play. How do the two plays resemble each other and how do they differ?
Activity
By murdering King Hamlet, Claudius has committed both fratricide (killing his brother) and regicide (killing the king). Also, according to Renaissance thinking, his marriage to his brother’s wife is incestuous. Imagine you are Claudius; using the information revealed about King Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius in the text, write a page-long statement in which you justify your actions.
It is worth considering to what extent Hamlet can be classified as a tragedy. The medieval view, which Shakespeare inherited, saw a tragedy as an account of an individual’s fall from great status and prosperity to unhappiness and a violent death. By this standard, Hamlet is a tragedy but it is also a play which embraces a considerable amount of comedy. Hamlet makes jokes and ridicules a series of characters (Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Claudius and Osrick). His mockery of Ophelia and Gertrude is equally trenchant but more painful; as an audience we are less sure that they are deserving victims. By contrast, classical tragic figures, such as Oedipus and Antigone as well as many of Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes, such as King Lear and Othello, seem relatively humourless; if there is any joking in their respective plays, it is either harshly ironic or it is done by people other than the protagonist. According to Aristotelian criteria, this introduction of comic elements into Hamlet might prevent it from being a tragedy. John Milton in his preface to his play Samson Agonistes (1671), ‘Of that sort of dramatic poem called tragedy’, remained faithful to Aristotle’s view and protested against ‘the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons’; the appearance of the comic and ‘vulgar’ gravediggers in Act 5, Scene 1, would disqualify Hamlet according to both of Milton’s Aristotelian principles.
By contrast, it has often been argued that Hamlet is a tragic character because he displays hamartia, Aristotle’s ‘tragic flaw’, which negates his exceptional and heroic qualities. According to Coleridge and other Romantic critics, Hamlet’s fatal flaw is hesitation, an inability to act brought on by his profundity and his soliloquy about action in Act 2, Scene 2 (‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’) is often cited as both evidence of his philosophical outlook and his indecision.
Activity
1. Consider the difference between the popular view of tragedy as a downfall from a position of great social status, represented by Hamlet, and Aristotle’s more rigorous criteria, represented by Sophocles’s King Oedipus. What do you believe to be the strengths and weaknesses of the two views?
2. How does the introduction of comic material into a tragedy affect the tragic action? Do you agree with Milton’s view that the use of comic episodes in a tragedy is an ‘error’?
In the twentieth century, Freudian critics, such as Ernest Jones, reinforced the view that Hamlet’s fatal weakness is hesitation. They argued that Hamlet had an Oedipus complex (he subconsciously wished to kill his father and marry his mother) which caused him to identify with Claudius (who has killed Hamlet’s father and married Hamlet’s mother); consequently killing Claudius would be much like killing himself. Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet (1948) was strongly influenced by Jones’s argument; in a voiceover at the beginning of the film Olivier tells us that ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind,’ and Hamlet’s confrontation with Gertrude (played by Eileen Herlie, who was 12 years younger than Olivier) in Act 3, Scene 4 was heavily sexualised and took place on the Queen’s bed.
The extent and meaning of Hamlet’s indecision, however, remains controversial. Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (circa 1589), the play which gave revenge tragedies their phenomenal popularity, is so slow to avenge his son’s death that his despairing wife commits suicide, but he does not possess a philosophical depth which precludes action. Perhaps a revenger has to hesitate (it is required by the genre) before finding a suitable opportunity to act. The Freudian perspective does, however, add weight to the idea that Hamlet is a domestic tragedy in which the majority of the deaths occur within two families. According to this view Hamlet’s status as a prince and the political upheavals caused by Fortinbras are less important than the fatal interaction between the ruling family and Polonius and his two children, an interaction which destroys both families. The director John Caird’s National Theatre production of Hamlet in 2000, took this view to an extreme by editing out almost all references to Fortinbras and Denmark’s threatened state in order to concentrate on events within Elsinore and to create a claustrophobic family drama.
Domestic issues lead to a consideration of the two women in this male-dominated play. Although in theory the Queen possesses political power, neither she nor Ophelia possess much authority. Both women are lectured about their sexuality by their male relatives and are told to abstain from sexual activity. Both women are also spied on by men during their private talks with Hamlet. Neither of them seems aware of the issues that lead to their deaths or of the possibility that King Hamlet may have been murdered. Olivier’s film version allows Gertrude a belated moment of realisation in which she saves her son’s life by knowingly drinking the poisoned wine, but this is a matter of directorial interpretation. The text suggests that these women are victims of a situation which they never understand. This is in contrast to many revenge plays from the period (such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy or Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women) in which women take an active and often murderous part. Some of the most important unanswered questions about the play concern these two characters. Why does Gertrude marry Claudius and why does she accept him so soon after her first husband’s death? Equally, although Hamlet has written Ophelia love letters, the extent of their relationship is unknown. In Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation (1996), a flashback shows us the couple making love but the flippant tone of the extract from a love letter quoted in the play could suggest only a teasing friendship. If Ophelia and Hamlet have previously been lovers, his treatment of her is particularly cruel; if the letters were light-hearted jokes then Polonius seems more foolish for taking them seriously. It might, however, be worth considering why Shakespeare puts his women in such powerless and ambiguous positions in this play. Linda Bamber’s Comic Women, Tragic Men (1982) offers a provocative feminist reading of the misogynistic aspects of Hamlet.
Activity
Imagine that Ophelia had been a resourceful and determined woman who did not become insane after her father’s death. Write a plot outline for an alternative version of Hamlet from the death of Polonius onwards in which she takes a significant part. In your view, how important is Ophelia’s passivity to this tragedy?
Despite its domestic themes, Hamlet’s claim that there is ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’ can be taken as an introduction to a story of political corruption. Edward Gordon Craig, for his stage production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1911 to 1912, chose to enmesh the entire court in a single golden robe descending from Claudius at the beginning of Act 1, Scene 2, with only Hamlet excluded, to emphasise the guilty complicity of his subjects in Claudius’s rule. As Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1965), noted, political interpretations of the play with an emphasis on Fortinbras’s threat of invasion were extremely popular in the Soviet Union. Their influence is perhaps present in Branagh’s film version in which Fortinbras’s army stealthily invades Elsinore while Hamlet duels with Laertes. Marcellus’s depiction in the first scene of the play of Denmark as a country on the brink of war, in which the shipwrights work even on Sunday and weapons are being bought from foreign markets, sets the mood for a play of paranoia. Hamlet’s pursuit of vengeance destabilises an already dangerous political situation.
The court is a place of unceasing surveillance in which Polonius gathers intelligence for the King. At the beginning of Act 2, Scene 1, Polonius even decides to spy on his own son and sends Reynaldo to make enquiries. When Hamlet presumably becomes aware that Polonius is secretly listening to the Prince’s conversation with Ophelia in Act 3, Scene 1, he urges her to go to a nunnery. This advice may have a satirical element but considering the danger of court life at Elsinore, perhaps it should be taken at face value. King Hamlet’s death by having poison poured into his ear has a symbolic aspect in a play in which overheard conversations can have a dangerous consequence.
Activity
1. How does the threat of invasion contribute to the plot of Hamlet? In your view, are Fortinbras’s actions relevant to the tragedy?
2. Consider the culture of surveillance in this play; since the audience also watch the events unfold, do we enter into a kind of complicity with Polonius?
Words are important in Hamlet and the play involves numerous acts of understanding and misunderstanding of their significance. On approaching Hamlet, who has a book in Act 2, Scene 2, Polonius asks him what he is reading and Hamlet replies ‘Words, words, words’. Hamlet divorces the words from their potential meaning. Later in the same scene the two men question whether the phrase ‘Mobled Queen’ is ‘good’ in the First Player’s speech. Hamlet willingly plays on the meaning of individual words with the gravedigger and only minutes before his fatal duel with Laertes, he parodies Osrick’s pretentious choice of phrase until all of the courtier’s ‘golden words are spent’. Hamlet’s own status as a writer is puzzling. He complains in his letter to Ophelia that he is ‘ill at these numbers’ (cannot write poetry) but he quickly adds rhyming passages to The Murder of Gonzago to create The Mousetrap which will reveal Claudius’s guilt.
In Hamlet, the lengthy monologues often seem to be self-contained set pieces. Polonius exhorts his son how to behave abroad in a series of stately aphorisms, Gertrude turns her description of Ophelia’s death into a poignant elegy and Hamlet famously considers whether to commit suicide in a meditation which transcends his personal circumstances to question the value of human existence. These monologues often do not contribute much to the plot; instead the speaker becomes lost in trying scrupulously to say what they need to express. In an environment in which words are frequently used to deceive, there is a pervasive anxiety to render a full and truthful account.
Hamlet with its digressions and lengthy speeches may seem a puzzling work after the brevity of Greek tragedy. In his version of Antigone (1942), Jean Anouilh reflected on the ‘restful’ quality of tragedy: once the machinery of the plot has been put into motion by a single fateful action by the protagonist, their death is inevitable. Hamlet, by contrast, is a play in which many of the events that create the tragedy are mysterious and in which the outcome might seem accidental rather than necessary. Hamlet has no master plan for killing Claudius and only achieves this end because Claudius’s own plot to kill Hamlet backfires. Many of the characters seem aware of alternative futures of great happiness. Ophelia laments that Hamlet’s madness has destroyed ‘Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state’; at Ophelia’s graveside, Gertrude recalls her hope that Hamlet would marry Ophelia and even Fortinbras, in the last lines of the play, reflects on how Hamlet would have ‘proved most royal’ if he had lived.
Activity
Hamlet is often viewed with extreme sympathy by critics. Write a list of what might be considered his negative qualities, with at least five points. Study your list. Does it change your perspective on his behaviour?
By the end of this chapter, and having read the essential text and any associated recommended reading, you should be able to: