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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

To attempt an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a single blog post: surely a foolhardy objective if ever there was one. So here we’ll try to focus on some of the key points of Hamlet and analyse their significance, homing in on some of the most interesting as well as some of the most notable aspects of Shakespeare’s play.

Hamlet is a long play, but it’s also a fascinating one, with a ghost, murder, mistaken identity, family drama, poison, pirates, duels, skulls, and even a fight in an open grave. What more could one ask for?

Hamlet is a long play – at just over 30,000 words, the longest Shakespeare wrote – so condensing the plot of this play into a shortish plot summary is going to prove tricky. Still, we’ll do our best. Here, then, is a very brief summary of the plot of Hamlet , perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.

The play begins on the battlements at Elsinore Castle in Denmark one night. The ghost of the former king, Hamlet, is seen, but refuses to speak to any of the soldiers on guard duty. At the royal court, Prince Hamlet (the dead king’s son) shows disgust at his uncle, Claudius, who is king, having taken the throne after Hamlet’s father, Claudius’ brother, died.

Hamlet also resents his mother, Gertrude – who, not long after Hamlet Senior’s death, remarried … to Claudius. Claudius gives the young man Laertes, the son of the influential courtier Polonius, leave to return to France to study there. At the same time, Claudius and Gertrude entreat Hamlet not to return to his studies in Germany, at the University of Wittenberg. Hamlet agrees to remain at court.

Laertes leaves Denmark for France, bidding his sister Ophelia farewell. He tells her not to take Hamlet’s expressions of affection too seriously, because – even if Hamlet is keen on her – he is not free to marry whom he wishes, being a prince. Polonius turns up and gives his son some advice before Laertes leaves; Polonius then reiterates Laertes’ advice to Ophelia about Hamlet, commanding his daughter to stay away from Hamlet.

Hamlet’s friend Horatio tells Hamlet about the Ghost, and Hamlet visits the battlements with his friend. The Ghost reappears – and this time, he speaks to Hamlet in private, telling him that he is the prince’s dead father and that he was murdered (with poison in the ear, while he lay asleep in his orchard) by none other than Claudius, his own brother.

He tells his son to avenge his murder by killing Claudius, the man who murdered the king and seized his throne for himself. However, he tells Hamlet not to kill Gertrude but to ‘leave her to heaven’ (i.e. God’s judgment). Hamlet swears Horatio and the guards to secrecy about the Ghost.

Hamlet has vowed to avenge his father’s murder, but he has doubts over the truth of what he’s seen. Was the ghost really his father? Might it not have been some demon, sent to trick him into committing murder? Claudius may disgust Hamlet already, but murdering his uncle just because he married Hamlet’s mum seems a little extreme.

But if Claudius did murder Hamlet’s father, then Hamlet will gladly avenge him. But how can Hamlet ascertain whether the Ghost really was his father, and that the murder story is true? To buy himself some time, Hamlet tells Horatio that he has decided to ‘put an antic disposition on’: i.e., to pretend to be mad, so Claudius won’t question his scheming behaviour because he’ll simply believe the prince is just being eccentric in general.

Polonius sends Reynaldo off to spy on his son, Laertes, in France. His daughter Ophelia approaches him, distressed, to report Hamlet’s strange behaviour in her presence. Polonius is certain that Hamlet’s odd behaviour springs from his love for Ophelia, so he rushes off to tell the King and Queen, Claudius and Gertrude, about it.

Claudius and Gertrude welcome Hamlet’s childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to court and charge them with talking to Hamlet to try to find out what’s the matter with him. Polonius arrives and tells the King and Queen that Hamlet is mad with love for Ophelia, and produces a love letter Hamlet wrote to her as proof.

As Hamlet approaches, Polonius hatches a plan: he will talk to Hamlet while the King and Queen listen in secret from behind an arras (tapestry). Sure enough, Hamlet talks in riddles to Polonius, who then leaves, convinced he is right about the cause of Hamlet’s madness. Hamlet talks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who tell him that the actors are on their way to court.

Hamlet is suspicious that his friends were sent for by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on him (as indeed they were); he confides to his old friends that he is not necessarily really mad; he implies he’s putting it on and still has his wits about him. The actors arrive, and Polonius returns, prompting Hamlet to start answering him with cryptic responses again, to keep up the act of being mad.

To determine Claudius’ guilt, Hamlet turns detective and devises a plan to try to get Claudius to reveal his crime, inadvertently. Hamlet persuades the actors to perform a play, The Murder of Gonzago , including some specially inserted lines he has written – in which a brother murders the king and marries the king’s widow.

Hamlet’s thinking is that, when Claudius witnesses his own crime enacted before him on the stage, he will be so shocked and overcome with guilt that his reaction will reveal that he’s the king’s murderer.

Claudius and Gertrude ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what they made of Hamlet’s behaviour, and then the King and Queen, along with Polonius, hide so they can observe Hamlet talking with Ophelia. At one point, in an aside, Claudius talks of his ‘conscience’, providing the audience with the clearest sign that he is indeed guilty of murdering Old Hamlet.

This is significant because one of the main reasons Hamlet is being cautious about exacting revenge is that he’s having doubts about whether the Ghost was really his father or not (and therefore whether it spoke truth to him). But we, the audience, know that Claudius almost certainly is guilty.

After he has meditated aloud about the afterlife, suicide, and the ways in which thinking deeply about things can make one less prompt to act (the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy ), Hamlet speaks with Ophelia. He tells her he never loved her, and orders her to go to a nunnery because women do nothing but breed men who are sinners.

Ophelia is convinced Hamlet is mad for love, but Claudius believes something else is driving Hamlet’s behaviour, and resolves to send Hamlet to England, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission to get the tribute (payment) England owes Denmark.

Sure enough, Claudius responds to the performance of The Murder of Gonzago (or, as Hamlet calls this play-within-a-play, The Mousetrap ) by exclaiming and then walking out, and in doing so he convinces Hamlet that he is indeed guilty and the Ghost is right.

Now Hamlet can proceed with his plan to murder him. However, after the play, he catches Claudius at prayer, and doesn’t want to murder him as he prays because, if Claudius killed while speaking to God, he will be sent straight to heaven, regardless of his sins.

So instead, Hamlet visits Gertrude, his mother, in her chamber, and denounces her for marrying Claudius so soon after Old Hamlet’s death. The Ghost appears (visible only to Hamlet: Gertrude believes her son to be mad and that the Ghost is ‘the very coinage of [his] brain’), and spurs Hamlet on.

Hearing a sound behind the arras or tapestry, Hamlet lashes out with his sword, stabbing the figure behind, believing it to be Claudius. Unbeknownst to Hamlet, it is Polonius, having concealed himself there to spy on the prince. Polonius dies.

Claudius asks Hamlet where Polonius is, and Hamlet jokes about where he’s hid the body. Claudius dispatches Hamlet to England – ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, but in reality the King has arranged to have Hamlet murdered when he arrives in England. However, Hamlet realises this, escapes, has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed, and returns to Denmark.

Laertes returns from France, thinking Claudius was responsible for Polonius’ death. Claudius puts him right, and arranges for Laertes to fight Hamlet using a poisoned sword, with a chalice full of poisoned wine prepared for Hamlet should the sword fail.

As they are plotting, Gertrude comes in with the news that Polonius’ death has precipitated Ophelia’s slide into madness and, now, her suicide: Ophelia has drowned herself.

Laertes and Hamlet fight in Ophelia’s open grave, and then Hamlet challenges Laertes to a duel at court. Unbeknown to Hamlet, and as agreed with Claudius earlier on, Laertes will fight with a poisoned sword.

However, during the confusion of the duel, Hamlet and Laertes end up switching swords so both men are mortally wounded by the poisoned blade. Gertrude, in making a toast to her son and being unaware that the chalice of wine is poisoned, drinks the deadly wine.

Laertes, as he lies dying, confesses to Hamlet that Claudius hatched the plan involving the poisoned sword and wine, and Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword, forcing him to drink the wine for good measure too – thus finally avenging his father’s murder. Hamlet dies, giving Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway, his dying vote as the new ruler of Denmark. Fortinbras arrives to take control of Denmark now the Danish royal family has been wiped out, and Horatio prepares to tell him the whole sorry tale.

Analysis of the play’s sources – and their significance

Although it’s often assumed that there must be some link between Shakespeare’s son Hamnet (who died aged 11, in 1596) and the playwright’s decision to write a play called Hamlet , it may in fact be nothing more than coincidence: Hamnet was a relatively common name at the time (Shakespeare had in fact named his son after a neighbour), he didn’t write Hamlet until a few years later, and there had already been at least one play about a character called Hamlet performed on the London stage some years earlier.

None of this rules out the idea that Shakespeare was transmuting personal grief over the death of Hamnet into universal art through writing (or, more accurately, rewriting) Hamlet , but it does need to be borne in mind when advancing a biographical analysis of Shakespeare’s greatest play.

This earlier play called Hamlet , which is referred to in letters and records from the time, was probably not written by Shakespeare but by one of his great forerunners, Thomas Kyd, master of the English revenge tragedy, whose The Spanish Tragedy  had had audiences on the edge of their seats in the late 1580s. Unfortunately, no copy of this proto- Hamlet  has survived – and we cannot be sure that Kyd was definitely the author (although he is the most likely candidate).

Most of Shakespeare’s plays are based on earlier stories or historical chronicles, and many are even based on earlier play-texts, which Shakespeare used as the basis for his own work. Indeed, very few of Shakespeare’s plays have no traceable source. But for some, in the case of Hamlet the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and the source-text is a problematic one.

The modernist poet T. S. Eliot argued in an essay of 1919 that Shakespeare’s  Hamlet was ‘an artistic failure’ because the Bard was working with someone else’s material but attempting to do something too different with the relationship between Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude.

Whether we side with Empson or Eliot or with neither, the fact is that this earlier, sadly lost version of the ‘play about Hamlet’ wasn’t itself the origin of the Hamlet story, which is instead found in a thirteenth-century chronicle written by Saxo Grammaticus. In this chronicle, Hamlet is ‘Amleth’ and is only a little boy – and it’s common knowledge that his uncle has killed his father.

Because Danish tradition expects the son to avenge his father’s death, the uncle starts to keep a close eye on little Amleth, waiting for the boy to strike in revenge. To avert suspicion and make his uncle believe that he, little Amleth, has no plans to seek revenge, Amleth pretends to be mad – the ‘antic disposition’ which Shakespeare’s Hamlet will also put on.

Because the ‘antic disposition’ no longer makes as much sense to the plot in Shakespeare’s version – why would Hamlet’s uncle have to watch his back when he murdered Hamlet’s father in secret and Hamlet surely (at least according to Claudius) has no idea that he’s the murderer? – Hamlet becomes a more complex and interesting character than he had been in the source material.

There is not as clear a reason for Hamlet to ‘put an antic disposition on’ as there had been in the source material, where pretending to be slow-witted or mad could save young Amleth’s life.

The textual variants of Hamlet

There’s more than one Hamlet . The play we read depends very much on the edition we read, since the play has been edited in a number of different ways. The problem is that the play survives in three very different versions: the First Quarto printed in 1603 (the so-called ‘Bad’ Quarto), the Second Quarto from a year later, and the version which appeared in the First Folio in 1623.

Q1 – the First or ‘Bad’ Quarto – is well-named. It was most probably a pirated edition of Shakespeare’s text, perhaps hastily written down from the (rather faulty) memory of a theatregoer or perhaps even one of the actors.

To give you a sense of just how bad the Bad Quarto was, in Q1 the play’s most famous line, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’, which begins his famous soliloquy in which he muses on the point of life and contemplates suicide, is rendered quite differently – as ‘To be or not to be, I there’s the point’.

It also appears at a different point in the play, just after Polonius (who is called ‘Corambis’) in this version – has hatched the plot to arrange a meeting between Hamlet and Polonius’ (sorry, Corambis’) daughter, Ophelia.

What does Hamlet the play actually mean ?

What is Hamlet telling us – about revenge, about mortality and the afterlife, or about thinking versus taking action about something? The play is ambivalent about all these things: deliberately, thanks to Shakespeare’s deft use of Hamlet’s own soliloquies (which often see him thrashing out two sides of a debate by talking to himself) and the clever use of doubling in the play.

Revenge is supposed to be left to God (‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord), but both Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character imply that it’s expected in Danish society of the time that the son would take vengeance into his own hands and avenge his murdered father: he is ‘Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’, as he says in his soliloquy at the end of II.2.

Christopher Ricks, the noted literary critic, has talked about how many great works of literature are about exploring the tension between two competing moral or pragmatic principles. Perhaps the two contradictory principles which we most clearly see in tension in Hamlet are the two axioms ‘look before you leap’ and ‘he who hesitates is lost’.

If Hamlet had been less a thinker and more a man of action, he would have made a snap judgment regarding Claudius’ guilt and then either taken revenge or resolved to leave it up to God.

But if he’d been wrong, he would have condemned an innocent man to death. However, if he’d been right, he would have spared everyone else who gets dragged into his quest for vengeance and destroyed along the way: Polonius (killed in error by Hamlet), Ophelia (killed by her own hand, but in response to her father’s death at Hamlet’s hands), Laertes (killed trying to avenge Polonius’ murder), and even – against the express wishes and commands of the Ghost himself – Hamlet’s own mother, who only drinks the poisoned wine by accident because she wants to wish her son good luck in the duel he’s fighting with Laertes.

This habit of Hamlet’s, his tendency to think things over, is both one of his most appealingly humane qualities, and yet also, in many ways, his undoing – and, ultimately, the end of the whole royal house of Denmark, since Fortinbras can come in and reclaim the land that was taken from his father by Old Hamlet all those years ago.

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Hamlet , tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare , written about 1599–1601 and published in a quarto edition in 1603 from an unauthorized text, with reference to an earlier play. The First Folio version was taken from a second quarto of 1604 that was based on Shakespeare’s own papers with some annotations by the bookkeeper.

Shakespeare’s telling of the story of Prince Hamlet was derived from several sources, notably from Books III and IV of Saxo Grammaticus ’s 12th-century Gesta Danorum and from volume 5 (1570) of Histoires tragiques , a free translation of Saxo by François de Belleforest. The play was evidently preceded by another play of Hamlet (now lost), usually referred to as the Ur-Hamlet , of which Thomas Kyd is a conjectured author.

As Shakespeare’s play opens, Hamlet is mourning his father, who has been killed, and lamenting the behaviour of his mother, Gertrude , who married his uncle Claudius within a month of his father’s death. The ghost of his father appears to Hamlet, informs him that he was poisoned by Claudius, and commands Hamlet to avenge his death. Though instantly galvanized by the ghost’s command, Hamlet decides on further reflection to seek evidence in corroboration of the ghostly visitation, since, he knows, the Devil can assume a pleasing shape and can easily mislead a person whose mind is perturbed by intense grief. Hamlet adopts a guise of melancholic and mad behaviour as a way of deceiving Claudius and others at court—a guise made all the easier by the fact that Hamlet is genuinely melancholic.

Hamlet’s dearest friend, Horatio, agrees with him that Claudius has unambiguously confirmed his guilt. Driven by a guilty conscience , Claudius attempts to ascertain the cause of Hamlet’s odd behaviour by hiring Hamlet’s onetime friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. Hamlet quickly sees through the scheme and begins to act the part of a madman in front of them. To the pompous old courtier Polonius , it appears that Hamlet is lovesick over Polonius’s daughter Ophelia . Despite Ophelia’s loyalty to him, Hamlet thinks that she, like everyone else, is turning against him; he feigns madness with her also and treats her cruelly as if she were representative, like his own mother, of her “treacherous” sex.

Hamlet contrives a plan to test the ghost’s accusation. With a group of visiting actors, Hamlet arranges the performance of a story representing circumstances similar to those described by the ghost, under which Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father. When the play is presented as planned, the performance clearly unnerves Claudius.

Moving swiftly in the wake of the actors’ performance, Hamlet confronts his mother in her chambers with her culpable loyalty to Claudius. When he hears a man’s voice behind the curtains, Hamlet stabs the person he understandably assumes to be Claudius. The victim, however, is Polonius, who has been eavesdropping in an attempt to find out more about Hamlet’s erratic behaviour. This act of violence persuades Claudius that his own life is in danger. He sends Hamlet to England escorted by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , with secret orders that Hamlet be executed by the king of England. When Hamlet discovers the orders, he alters them to make his two friends the victims instead.

Upon his return to Denmark, Hamlet hears that Ophelia is dead of a suspected suicide (though more probably as a consequence of her having gone mad over her father’s sudden death) and that her brother Laertes seeks to avenge Polonius’s murder. Claudius is only too eager to arrange the duel. Carnage ensues. Hamlet dies of a wound inflicted by a sword that Claudius and Laertes have conspired to tip with poison; in the scuffle, Hamlet realizes what has happened and forces Laertes to exchange swords with him, so that Laertes too dies—as he admits, justly killed by his own treachery. Gertrude, also present at the duel, drinks from the cup of poison that Claudius has had placed near Hamlet to ensure his death. Before Hamlet himself dies, he manages to stab Claudius and to entrust the clearing of his honour to his friend Horatio.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare’s entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s plays and poems .

Shakespeare: Hamlet Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Works cited.

The play Hamlet depicts a tragedy written by the author in the period between 1599 and 1601 (Shmoop 1). The story of the play is about the prince Hamlet whose father was the king of Denmark. The king was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle Claudius who also married Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. The play is centered on Hamlet’s anxiety and indecision on how to avenge his father’s death.

Following his father’s death news emerges of a ghost that roams the castles battlements that looks a lot like the dead king. Hamlet hurries to meet the ghost and receives news that his father was murdered by Claudius who poisoned him while he was sleeping (Shmoop 3). The ghost orders young Hamlet to remember him through seeking revenge for his untimely death. In response to this, Hamlet devises a plan to act like a madman while scheming to avenge his father’s death.

With the intention of ascertaining whether the ghost is telling the truth, Hamlet decides to make a play in which a king is murdered in the exact fashion his father was killed. As he continues with the preparations he often plays the madman throwing wild accusations to all women. He even suggests committing suicide in a speech to further convince his audience of his insanity (Shmoop 3). Upon watching the play his uncle admits guilt for the crime and Hamlet decides to kill him to avenge his father’s death (Shmoop 5).

The scene that is the subject of this report refers to a scene in the play that takes place at the graveyard following the death of Ophelia (Shmoop 23). In this scene the author depicts Hamlet’s observations on life from the perspective of the grave. In light of the events that unfold at the graveyard Hamlet encounters the skull of a childhood accomplice and is forced to stare death in the face as he reminisces on his childhood.

It may even be argued that events that surround the scene play a significant role in the actions that preceded it and those that will follow. In this report an analysis will be presented of this scene and how it was affected by previous actions and how it affects scenes that follow in the play.

As it has been mentioned the scene in the graveyard is the result of the death of Ophelia. In earlier scenes of the play we are introduced to Ophelia who is a sister to a young lord known as Laertes (Shmoop 7). The images in this scene indicate a strong relationship to what preceded due to the fact that the young lady’s death was the result of an accident that resulting from hamlet’s plot in the play. It has been established that the murder of her father that prompted her suicide was an accident as hamlet intended to murder King Claudius.

It appears that Ophelia’s adamant position following her brother’s censure and father’s advice may have prompted her hasty decision to take her own life (Shmoop 7). This point is based on evidence of her father’s address following his intervention on a discussion between Ophelia and her brother.

It is therefore possible to assume that her disappointment overwhelmed her given that both her loved ones had warned her about hamlet. Her eventual suicide that leads to the scene at the grave suggests she possibly held herself responsible for the death of her father and was tormented by guilt.

This supposed guilt appears to emanate from the scene when Hamlet begins his plan to act mad and bursts into Ophelia’s room startling her in his disheveled state (Shmoop 9). In the confusion Hamlet grabs Ophelia by the wrist and appears to express frustration over love for her. In this scene it is suggested that the young lady was taken by feelings of love suggested by hamlet.

It is evident given that both the father and daughter are both convinced by this display and appear to reconsider their judgment (Shmoop 9). The graveyard scene further draws reminders to the bond between Ophelia and her father given her repeated assurances of her fidelity. The eventual suicide draws us to conclude on the bond between the two that the death of her father so seriously affected.

At this point it is wise to note the accident that leads to the scene in the grave is the result of a failed murder attempt as hamlet finds the King deep in prayer. (Miller & Shakespeare 8). Hamlet is then forced to reconsider his plan and makes a hasty decision to hold on a while before completing his mission.

Following the reconsideration the King instructs his wife to meet hamlet. It was during the meeting that accidentally hamlet stabs Polonius and prompts Ophelia’s death (Miller & Shakespeare 8). Based on the events in this scene it is clear to see the significant role they play in the drama as a series of events unfold soon after. Without the events depicted in this accident scene it is unlikely the graveyard scene would have been included in the play.

The graveyard scene also has a major impact on the events that follow in the play as is seen in the delivery of the news of Polonius death by Gertrude. In the events immediately after receiving news of her father’s death and Hamlets departure Ophelia goes insane and commits suicide. The news of Ophelia’s death is presented to Laertes by Gertrude as an accident but it later emerges that it appears to have been a suicide (Shmoop 23).

It may be suggested that these attempts to shroud the news further aggravate the situation. Already angry her brother promises to revenge the murder and a match to facilitate the murder of hamlet is arranged (Miller & Shakespeare 8). This anger and plans for revenge are all made to appear useless in the graveyard scene which depicts how valueless life becomes after death. Hamlet is shown a head of an old acquaintance and realizes how little value life has after death.

The question of life after death becomes evident as Hamlets sees the gravediggers throw up two skulls as they dig and ponders on the lives of these men. He is astounded by the fact that a man’s life and work come to the exact same thing upon conclusion, nothing (Shmoop 23). It would appear that Hamlet in fact questions the purpose behind his quest given the nature of treatment the dead receive. However, the anger that precedes this scene has already set in motion events that hamlet can no longer avoid.

It would appear the author is throwing a question to the viewer and the scene acts as evidence of the futility of life pursuits. This appears to be depicted when hamlet collects a skull handed to him by the grave digger and is informed the skull belonged to a childhood friend of his father. He remembers the good times he had with him as a child and is astounded by the events that surround death (Shmoop 23).

As already mentioned the anger that precedes the scene plays a major role in the events that follow as Hamlet and Horatio happen upon the grief stricken Laertes and a fight almost ensues (Miller & Shakespeare 8). With Laertes seeking revenge hamlet is left in a position where he must fight to save his own life and avenge his father’s death (Miller & Shakespeare 8).

This is a position that occurs only as a result of the events just before the graveyard scene. In this duel that now must follow both Hamlet and Laertes are mortally wounded. In the process, Hamlet’s mother also dies after mistakenly drinking from a poisoned cup meant for Hamlet (Miller & Shakespeare 8). These deaths all appear the result of events that precede the graveyard scene. In addition to that Hamlet manages to murder King Claudius and avenge his father’s death.

The grave yard scene for this reason appears to play a pivotal role in the play. This is based on the fact that the entire beginning of the play has scenes that direct us toward the scene at the grave and the death of Ophelia.

At the same time the entire play after the graveyard scene is the result of the events that must come to be based on the anger and betrayal that are caused prior to Ophelia’s death. However, it is worth noting that despite these events Hamlet manages to name a successor and is buried with dignity. This can also be related to the grave yard scene given that a decent burial was among the things Hamlet sought when he began to plot revenge.

Miller, Joanne K. and William Shakespeare. Hamlet . Printed in the USA, Research & Education Association, 2002. Print.

Shmoop. Hamlet . Printed in the USA, Shmoop University Inc., 2010. Print.

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> > Hamlet Essay Study Guides The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constution of our own minds. Man is distingtuished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect;—for if there be an overbalance, in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakspeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, .and our meditation on the workings of our minds,—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action, consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakspeare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment:—Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrasti-nates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without,— giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite;—definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it;—not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment: it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon ex-ternal things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy— O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, &c. springs from that craving after the indefinite—for that which is not—which most easily besets men of genius; and the self-delusion common to this temper of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of himself:— —It cannot be But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall To make oppression bitter. He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, jdelays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident. There is a great significancy in the names of Shakspeare's plays. In the Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Winter's Tale, the total effect is produced by a coordination of the characters as in a wreath of flowers. But in Coriolanus, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, &c. the effect arises from the subordination of all to one, either as the prominent person, or the principal object. Cymbeline is the only exception; and even that has its advantages in preparing the audience for the chaos of time, place, and costume, by throwing the date back into a fabulous king's reign. But as of more importance, so more striking, is the judgment displayed by our truly dramatic poet, as well as poet of the drama, in the management of his first scenes. With the single exception of Cymbeline, they either place before us at one glance both the past and the future in some effect, which implies the continuance and full agency of its cause, as in the feuds and party-spirit of the servants of the two houses in the first scene of Romeo and Juliet; or in the degrading passion for shews and public spectacles, and the overwhelming attachment for the newest successful war-chief in the Roman people, already become a populace, contrasted with the jealousy of the nobles in Julius Caesar;—or they at once commence the action so as to excite a curiosity for the explanation in the following scenes, as in the storm of wind and waves, and the boatswain in the Tempest, instead of anticipating our curiosity, as in most other first scenes, and in too many other first acts;—or they act, by contrast of diction suited to the characters, at once to heighten the effect, and yet to give a naturalness to the language and rhythm of the principal personages, either as that of Prospero and Miranda by the appropriate lowness of the style,—or as in King John, by the equally appropriate stateliness of official harangues or narratives, so that the after blank verse seems to belong to the rank and quality of the speakers, and not to the poet;—or they strike at once the keynote, and give the predominant spirit of the play, as in the Twelfth Night and in Macbeth;—or finally, the first scene comprises all these advantages at once, as in Hamlet. Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences, with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of Macbeth. The tone is quite familiar;—there is no poetic description of night, no elaborate information conveyed by one speaker to another of what both had immediately before their senses—(such as the first distich in Addison's Cato, which is a translation into poetry of 'Past four o'clock and a dark morning!');—and yet nothing bordering on the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effeminacy for feeling what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet the armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it, the welcome relief of the guard, the cold, the broken expressions of compelled attention to bodily feelings still under control—all excellently accord with, and prepare for, the after gradual rise into tragedy;— but, above all, into a tragedy, the interest of which is as eminently ad et apud intra, as that of Macbeth is directly ad extra. In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of Brutus, of Archbishop Cranmer, that of Benvenuto Cellini recorded by himself, and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite pupil Torricelli, the ghost-seers were in a state of cold or chilling damp from without, and of anxiety inwardly. It has been with all of them as with Francisco on his guard,— alone, in the depth and silence of the night;—''twas bitter cold, and they were sick at heart, and not a mouse stirring.' The attention to minute sounds,—naturally associated with the recollection of minute objects, and the more familiar and trifling, the more impressive from the unusualness of their producing any impression at all —gives a philosophic pertinency to this last image; but it has likewise its dramatic use and purpose. For its commonness in ordinary conversation tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the reader or spectator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and in its component parts, though not in the whole composition, really is, the language of nature. If I should not speak it, I feel that I should be thinking it;—the voice only is the poet's,— the words are my own. That Shakspeare meant to put an effect in the actor's power in the very first words— "Who's there?" — is evident fromt he impatience ex-pressed by the startled Francisco in the words that follow —"Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself." A brave man is never so peremptory, as when he fears that he is afraid. Observe the gradual transition from the silence and the still recent habit of listening in Francisco's—"I think I hear them"—to the more cheerful call out, which a good actor would observe, in the—"Stand ho! Who is there?" Bernardo's inquiry after Horatio, and the repetition of his name and in his own presence indicate a respect or an eagerness that implies him as one of the persons who are in the foreground; and the scepticism attributed to him,— Horatio says, 'tis but our fantasy; And will not let belief take hold of him— prepares us for Hamlet's after eulogy on him as one whose blood and judgment were happily commingled. The actor should also be careful to distinguish the expectation and gladness of Bernardo's 'Welcome, Horatio!' from the mere courtesy of his 'Welcome, good Marcellus!' Now observe the admirable indefiniteness of the first opening out of the occasion of all this anxiety. The preparation informative of the audience is just as much as was precisely necessary, and no more;—it begins with the uncertainty appertaining to a question:— Mar. What, has this thing appear'd again to-night?— Even the word 'again' has its credibilizing effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bemardo, anticipates the common solution—"tis but our fantasy!' upon which Marcellus rises into This dreaded sight, twice seen of us— which immediately afterwards becomes 'this apparition,' and that, too, an intelligent spirit, that is, to be spoken to! Then comes the confirmation of Horatio's disbelief;— Tush! tush! 'twill not appear!— and the silence, with which the scene opened, is again restored in the shivering feeling of Horatio sitting down, at such a time, and with the two eye-witnesses, to hear a story of a ghost, and that, too, of a ghost which had appeared twice before at the very same hour. In the deep feeling which Bernardo has of the solemn nature of what he is about to relate, he makes an effort to master his own imaginative terrors by an elevation of style,—itself a continuation of the effort,—and by turning off from the apparition, as from something which would force him too deeply into himself, to the outward objects, the realities of. nature, which had accompanied it:— Ber. Last night of all, When yon same star, that's westward from the pole Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it bums, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one— This passage seems to contradict the critical law that what is told, makes a faint impression compared with what is beholden; for it does indeed convey to the mind more than the eye can see; whilst the interruption of the narrative at the very moment when we are most intensely listening for the sequel, and have our thoughts diverted from the dreaded sight in expectation of the .desired, yet almost dreaded, tale—this gives all the suddenness and surprise of the original appearance;— Mar. Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!— Note the judgment displayed in having the two persons present, who, as having seen the Ghost before, are naturally eager in confirming their former opinions,—whilst the sceptic is silent, and after having been twice addressed by his friends, answers with two hasty syllables—'Most like,' —and a confession of horror: —It harrows me with fear and wonder. O heaven! words are wasted on those who feel, and to those who do not feel the exquisite judgment of Shak-speare in this scene, what can be said ?—Hume himself could not but have had faith in this Ghost dramatically, let his anti-ghostism have been as strong as Sampson against other ghosts less powerfully raised. Mar. Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch, &c. How delightfully natural is the transition to the retrospective narrative! And observe, upon the Ghost's reappearance, how much Horatio's courage is increased by having translated the late individual spectator into general thought and past experience,—and the sympathy of Marcellus and Bernardo with his patriotic surmises in daring to strike at the Ghost; whilst in a moment, upon its vanishing the former solemn awe-stricken feeling returns upon them:— We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence.— Ib. Horatio's speech:— I have heard, The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day, &c. No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than Shakspeare in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn in this treatment of the cock-crow. And, by my advice, Let us impart what we have seen to-night Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him. Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of introducing the main character, 'young Hamlet,' upon whom is transferred all the interest excited for the acts and concerns of the king his father. Ib. sc. 2. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of exhaustion. In the king's speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of conscience,—the strain of undignified rhetoric,—and yet in what follows concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he not a royal brother?— Ib. King's speech:— And now, Laertes, what's the news with you? &c. Thus with great art Shakspeare introduces a most impor-tant, but still subordinate character first, Laertes, who is yet thus graciously treated in consequence of the assistance given to the election of the late king's brother instead of his son by Polonius. Ham. A little more than kin, and less than kind. King. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Ham. Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun. Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, the complete absence of which throughout characterizes Macbeth. This playing on words may be attributed to many causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity of mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakspeare generally; —or to an imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it were said—'Is not this better than groaning?'—or to a con-temptuous exultation in minds vulgarized and overset by their success, as in the poetic instance of Milton's Devils in the battle;—or it is the language of resentment, as is familiar to every one who has witnessed the quarrels of the lower orders, where there is invariably a profusion of punning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames have in a considerable degree sprung up;—or it is the language of suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal, dislike. The first and last of these combine in Hamlet's case; and I have little doubt that Farmer is right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the expression 'too much i' the sun,' or son. Ham. Ay, madam, it is common. Here observe Hamlet's delicacy to his mother, and how the suppression prepares him for the overflow in the next speech, in which his" character is more developed by bring-ing forward his aversion to externals, and which betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with a prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings of thought, and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality sui generis, and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and movements within. Note also Hamlet's silence to the long speech of the king which follows, and his respectful. but general, answer to his mother. Ib. Hamlet's first soliloquy:— O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! &c. This tædium vitæ is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases, passion combines itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the appearance of his father's spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet:—it is—Horatio's speech, in particular—a perfect model of the 'true style of dramatic narrative;— the purest poetry, and yet in the most natural language, equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough. Ib. sc. 3. This scene must be regarded as one of Shak-speare's lyric movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. You will observe in Ophelia's short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the natural carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of cautions and prudences necessary to its own preservation. Ib. Speech of Polonius:—(in Stockdale's edition.) Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,) Wronging it thus, you'll tender me a fool. I suspect this 'wronging' is here used much in the same sense as 'wringing' or 'wrenching'; and that the paren-thesis should be extended to 'thus.' 1 Ib. Speech of Polonius:— ——How prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows:—these blazes, daughter, &c. A spondee has, I doubt not, dropped out of the text. Either insert 'Go to' after 'vows';— Lends the tongue vows: Go to, these blazes, daughter— or read Lends the tongue vows:—These blazes, daughter, mark you— Shakspeare never introduces a catalectic line without intending an equivalent to the foot omitted in the pauses, or the dwelling emphasis, or the diffused retardation. I do not, however, deny that a good actor might by employ-ing the last mentioned means, namely, the retardation, or solemn knowing drawl, supply the missing spondee with good effect. But I do not believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius, Shakspeare meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that personage's mind. In the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life, where to distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius is uniformly made respectable. But if an actor were even capable of catching these shades in the character, the pit and the gallery would be malcontent at their exhibition. It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be, contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet's mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius, and besides, as I have observed before. Hamlet dislikes the man as false to his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown. Ib. sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a proof of Shakspeare's minute know-ledge of human nature. It is a well established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their own thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances: thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the striking of the dock and so forth. The same desire to escape from the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet's account of, and moralizing on, the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to th& universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns, escapes, as it were, from himself in generalizations, and smothers the impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning. Besides this, another purpose is answered;—for by thus entangling the attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical sentences of this speech of Hamlet's, Shakspeare takes them completely by surprise on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have dared, like Shakspeare, to have preceded this last visitation by two distinct appearances,—or could have contrived that the third should rise upon the former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest. But in addition to all the other excellences of Hamlet's speech concerning the wassel-music—so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the ratiocinative meditativeness, of his character—it has the advantage of giving nature and probability to the impassioned continuity of the speech instantly directed to the Ghost. The momentum had been given to his mental activity; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in, and the very forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the purpose for which he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from benumbing the mind. Consequently, it acted as a new impulse,—a sudden stroke which increased the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst it altered the direc-tion. The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and Bemardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of Hamlet and his impetuous eloquence perfectly intelligible. The knowledge,—the unthought of consciousness, —the sensation,—of human auditors,—of flesh and blood sympathists—acts as a support and a stimulation a. tergo, while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed, by the. apparition. Add too, that the apparition itself has by its previous appearances been brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence of objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful subjectivity, is truly wonderful. Ib. sc. 5. Hamlet's speech:— O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell?— I remember-nothing equal to this burst unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakspeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalized truths, that 'observation had copied there,'—followed immediately by the speaker noting down the generalized fact, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain! Mar. Hillo, ho, ho, my lord! Ham. Hillo, ho, ho, boy I come bird, come, &c. This part of the scene after Hamlet's interview with the Ghost has been charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus well known, that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms and a certain technical phraseology to disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common order of things—something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and the sense of the ridiculous be excited. The dose alliance of these opposites—they are not contraries— appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelm-ing and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous, —a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet's wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts.'' The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensible:—but I would call your attention to the char-acteristic difference between this Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of revealed religion,—and Shakspeare's consequent reverence in his treatment of it,—and the foul earthly witcheries and wild language in Macbeth. Act ii. sc. i. Polonius and Reynaldo. In all things dependent on, or rather made up of, fine address, the manner is no more or otherwise rememberable than the light motions, steps, and gestures of youth and health. But this is almost everything:—no wonder, therefore if that which can be put down by rule in the memory should appear to us as mere poring, maudlin, cunning,— slyness blinking through the watery eye of superannuation. So in this admirable scene, Polonius, who is throughout the skeleton of his own former skill and statecraft, hunts the trail of policy at a dead scent, supplied by the weak fever-smell in his own nostrils. Ib. sc. 2. Speech of Pofonius:— My liege, and madam, to expostulate, &c. Warburton's note. Then as to the jingles, and play on words, let us but look into the sermons Of Dr. Donne (the wittiest man of that age) and we shall and them full of this vein. I have, and that most carefully, read Dr. Donne's sermons, and find none of these jingles. The great art of an orator—to make whatever he talks of appear of importance—this, indeed, Donne has effected with consummate skill. Ham. Excellent well; You are a fishmonger. That is, you are sent to fish out this secret. This is Hamlet's own meaning. Ham. For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, Being a god, kissing carrion— These purposely obscure lines, I rather think, refer to some thought in Hamlet's mind, contrasting the lovely daughter with such a tedious old fool, her father, as he. Hamlet, represents Polonius to himself:—'Why, fool as he is, he is some degrees in rank above a dead dog's carcase; and if the sun, being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog,—why may not good fortune, that favours fools, have raised a lovely girl out of this dead-alive old fool?' Warburton is often led astray, in his interpreta-tions, by his attention to general positions without the due Shakspearian reference to what is probably passing in the mind of his speaker, characteristic, and expository of his particular character and present mood. The subsequent passage,— O Jephtha, judge of Israel I what a treasure hadst thou! is confirmatory of my view of these lines. Ham. You cannot. Sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except my life. This repetition strikes me as most admirable. Ham. Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and ont-stretched heroes, the beggars' shadows. I do not understand this; and Shakspeare seems to have intended the meaning not to be more than snatched at:—'By my fay, I cannot reason!' The rugged Pyrrhus—be whose sable arms, &c. This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspeare's own dialogue, and authorized too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time (Porrex and Ferrex, Titus Andronicus, &c.)—is well worthy of notice. The fancy, that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism: the lines, as epic narrative, are superb. In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical: in truth, taken by itself, that is its fault that it is too poetical!—the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspeare had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play ia Hamlet? —— had seen the mobled queen, &c. A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning cap, which conceals the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same as the nightcap, that is, it is an imitation of it, so as to answer the purpose ('I am not drest for company'), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect purity. Ib. Hamlet's soliloquy: O, what a rogue and peasant slave am! I &c. This is Shakspeare's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet which I have before put forth. The spirit that I have seen, May be a devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps Out of my weakness, and my melancholy, (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me. See Sir Thomas Brown: I believe————that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons arc not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villany, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world. Relig. Meet. Pt. I. Sect. 37. Act iii. sc. i. Hamlet's soliloquy: To be, or not to be, that is the question, &c. This speech is of absolutely universal interest,—and yet to which of all Shakspeare's characters could it have been appropriately given but Hamlet? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for Iago too habitual a communion with the heart; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong, to all mankind. The undiscover'd country, from whose bourne No traveller returns.— Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the apparition of the Ghost. O miserable defender! If it be necessary to remove the apparent contradiction,—if it be not rather a great beauty,—surely, it were easy to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or abiding-place. Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest? Oph. My lord? Ham. Are you fair? Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and 'irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him;—and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. 'I did love you once:' —'I lov'd you not:'—and particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shakspeare's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and out-juttings. Ib. Hamlet's speech:— I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already, all but one, shall live: the rest shall keep as they are. Observe this dallying with the inward purpose, char-acteristic of one who had not brought his mind to the steady acting point. He would fain sting the uncle's mind; —but to stab his body!—The soliloquy of Ophelia, which follows, is the perfection of love—so exquisitely unselfish! Ib. sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one of the happiest instances of Shakspeare's power of diversifying the scene while he is carrying on the plot. Ham. My lord, you play'd once i' the university, you say? (To Polonius.) To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest;—but yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he cannot let rest. Ib. The style of the interlude here is distinguished from the real dialogue by rhyme, as in the first interview with the players by epic verse. I never heard an actor give this word 'so' its proper emphasis. Shakspeare's meaning is—'lov'd you? Hum! —so I do still, &c.' There has been no change in my opinion:—I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildenstern—'Why, look you now,' &c.— proves. Ib. Hamlet's soliloquy:— Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do something:—but what to do, is still left undecided, while every word he utters tends to betray his disguise. Yet observe how perfectly equal to any call of the moment is Hamlet, let it only not be for the future. Ib. sc. 4. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into this business, while it is appro-priate to his character, still itching after former importance, removes all likelihood that Hamlet should suspect his presence, and prevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in our opinion. Ib. The king's speech:— O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven, &c. This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit. The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as have watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the. final—'all may be well!' is remarkable;—the degree of merit attributed by the self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the indefinite half-promise, half-command, to persevere in religious duties. The solution is in the divine medium of the Christian doctrine of expiation:—not what you have done. but what you are, must determine. Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying: And now I'll do it:—And so he goes to heaven: And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd, &c. Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking, fiendishness! — Of such importance is it, to understand the germ of a character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's [speech is truly awful! And then— My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go,— O what a lesson concerning the essential difference [between wishing and willing, and the, folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains! Ham. A bloody deed;—almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother. Queen. As kill a king? I confess that Shakspeare has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide? Act iv. sc. 2. Ros. Take you me for a spunge, my lord? Ham. Ay, Sir; that .soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities, &c. Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before;—in fact, in telling home-truths. Act iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with. the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagina-tion of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concern-ing the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself—she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is instanced in the close:— My brother shall know of it, and so I thank you for your good counsel. And as the world were now bnt to begin Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every word— They cry, &c. Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of Judgment in Shakspeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, 'rational and consequential,' reflection in these lines with the anony-mousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions. Ib. King's speech:— There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will. Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspeare never in-tended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so. Ib. Speech of Laertes:— To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil! Laertes is a good character, but, &c. WARBURTON. Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh scene of this act;— I will do it; And for that purpose I'll anoint my sword, &c. uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet;— He being remiss, Most generous, and free from all contriving, Will not peruse the foils. Yet I acknowledge that Shakspeare evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes,—to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;—and to this end he reintroduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimulus of passion in her brother. Ib. sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot; —but here how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion! Ib. sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by— Sir, this report of his Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!— Ib. King's speech: For goodness, growing to a pleurisy, Dies in his own too much. Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures 'plethory.' I rather think that Shakspeare meant 'pleurisy,' but involved in it the thought of plethora, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood; otherwise I cannot explain the following line— And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh, That hurts by easing. In a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that 'hurt by easing.' Since writing the above I feel confirmed that 'pleurisy' is the right word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is often called the 'plethory.' Queen. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes. Laer. Drown'd! O, where? That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling, the Act concludes with the affecting death of Ophelia,—who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers, quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is under-mined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy! Act v. sc. i. O, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two extremes! You see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use. Ib. sc. i and 2. Shakspeare seems to mean all Hamlet's character to be brought together before his final disappearance from the scene;—his meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yielding to passion with Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalize on all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners with Osrick, and his and Shak-speare's own fondness for presentiment: But thou would'st not think, how ill all's here about my heart; but it is no matter. 1 It is so pointed in the modem editions.—Ed. 10 Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Works By lorna wallace | jun 19, 2024. Fans often like to read between the lines to develop theories about their favorite books , movies , and TV shows , from Jar Jar Binks being a Sith Lord to all of the Pixar movies taking place in the same universe . Most of these theories don’t stand up to scrutiny, but they sure can be fun. Here are 10 such theories about Shakespeare ’s works, ranging from the almost believable to the utterly outlandish. In King Lear , Cordelia and the Fool were played by the same actor. Iago is in love with othello., the tempest ’s prospero was based on john dee …, … or shakespeare himself., the characters named antonio in several of shakespeare’s plays are one person., macbeth’s “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech is actually lady macbeth’s suicide note., shakespeare once played the part of lady macbeth., hamlet is linked to the death of shakespeare’s son, hamnet., ophelia is pregnant in hamlet ., the “fair youth” sonnets suggest that shakespeare was gay.. Role doubling usually happens for one of two reasons: There aren’t enough actors for each role or to strengthen the subtext between two characters. It isn’t known if doubling was used in the original performances of Shakespeare’s plays, but it has been suggested that in King Lear , Cordelia and the Fool were played by the same actor . The two characters are never on stage together, so this theory is possible, and they are linked by being the only two characters to tell Lear the truth. Plus, at the end of the play, Lear mourns his daughter with the words, “my poor fool is hanged.” The typical view of Othello is that the plot is driven by Iago’s hatred for the titular character. The play opens with Iago complaining that Othello has promoted bookish Cassio to lieutenant over himself—a seasoned veteran. A few scenes later, Iago also says that he suspects that Othello has slept with his wife: “It is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / ’Has done my office.” But perhaps these reasons are a cover for Iago’s true motivation: His unrequited love for Othello. Evidence for this theory lies in Iago’s misandry throughout the play—he tells his own wife that all women are volatile and untrustworthy —as well as his declarations of love for Othello. Is his statement “I am your own forever” false flattery or his true thoughts? You decide. When penning The Tempest , some believe that Shakespeare looked to John Dee —a polymath who served as Queen Elizabeth I ’s astrologer—when creating Prospero. The biggest similarity between the two is that Prospero is a wizard, while Dee experimented with the occult. Other parallels include both of them having large libraries (Dee had one of the largest private libraries in England) and both experiencing misfortune (Dee’s brother-in-law sold many of his books without permission, while Prospero was exiled). Another suggestion is that Prospero is actually a stand-in for the playwright himself. Both magic and writing are acts of creation, and Prospero controls the events of the play in the same way as a writer. To cap this theory off, Prospero’s epilogue is sometimes perceived as a farewell speech from a retiring Shakespeare. But Emma Smith , Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford, points out that for that puzzle piece to fit, The Tempest would need to have been Shakespeare’s last play—a position which probably belongs to The Two Noble Kinsmen , Henry VIII , or the now-lost Cardenio . The name Antonio crops up several times across Shakespeare’s plays, and it’s been theorized that rather than being separate characters, all of these Antonios are one man at different stages in his life. Dan Beaulieu and Kevin Condardo from the Seven Stages Shakespeare Company have dubbed this the Unified Antonio Theory . The theory starts with Antonio as a captain in Twelfth Night , rescuing and falling in love with Sebastian. Antonio makes passionate declarations of love to Sebastian—“If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant”—and willingly endangers himself to accompany him to Orsino’s court. Sebastian, however, ends up marrying Olivia. Then, according to the theory, Antonio becomes the Duke of Milan and later finds himself shipwrecked in a storm caused by his brother Prospero in the events of The Tempest . Once back on the Italian mainland, Antonio becomes a wealthy merchant and falls in love with Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice . The connection between these two men is so passionate that some productions even add in a kiss between them. But Bassanio also marries a woman, leaving Antonio to end up as a side character in Much Ado About Nothing . In Act 5 of Macbeth , the titular Scottish king receives word that Lady Macbeth has died by suicide. He then gives one of the most famous soliloquies in the play, known as the “ tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ” speech, traditionally taken as a rumination on the futility of life by a husband in the depths of grief. But an alternate way to look at the speech is that Macbeth is reading his wife’s suicide note. Just a few scenes earlier, a guilt-stricken and sleepwalking Lady Macbeth is described by one of her attendants as writing something on a piece of paper, which could be a suicide note. This idea is also supported by Macbeth’s speech changing in style halfway through: The first section, full of long and soft-sounding words, could be Lady Macbeth’s words; the second section, which uses short and plosive words, comes from Macbeth himself. Another Macbeth -based theory is that Shakespeare himself once played the part of Lady Macbeth. This theory is actually tied to the famous curse that led to the play being referred to as “ the Scottish play ” in theaters. According to the legend, during the first performance of Macbeth , the actor playing Lady Macbeth (who would have been a man; women didn’t professionally act at that time) unexpectedly died, and Shakespeare jumped in to save the day. The First Folio does list Shakespeare as an actor in his own plays, but there isn’t any surviving evidence about which specific roles he played. In 1596, Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet, died—an event the playwright never directly commented on in his work. Although many academics steer clear of searching Shakespeare’s plays for biographical breadcrumbs, some believe that there’s a connection between Hamnet’s death and Hamlet , which was written around 1599–1601 . The Prince of Denmark’s name almost matching the name of Shakespeare’s deceased son is likely a coincidence (although the names were basically interchangeable at the time!). Hamlet is believed to have been based on a now-lost play from the 1580s, and the story itself is much older than that, so it didn’t spring solely from Shakespeare’s mind. But Harvard Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt argues that working on the tragedy “may have reopened a deep wound.” He also points to the potentially imminent demise of Shakespeare’s father, John, which—coupled with Hamnet’s death a few years earlier—“could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet .” But this is mere conjecture. Another theory about Hamlet is that Ophelia—who meets her end by drowning (whether by suicide, accident, or murder is unknown)— is pregnant . To start, there are hints that Hamlet and Ophelia may have had sex: Hamlet teases Ophelia with sexual innuendoes, such as “shall I lie in your lap?,” while Ophelia (who has gone mad) later sings , “Before you tumbled me, / You promised me to wed.” The strongest evidence of Ophelia’s potential pregnancy comes in the scene where she gives out flowers and herbs in Act 4. The plants she names—rosemary, pansies, daises, etc.—were used to treat physical and mental pain [ PDF ], and she decides to keep some rue for herself. This herb may just symbolize regret, but according to John M. Riddle, a specialist in the history of medicine, rue’s “most recognized use in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages was as an abortifacient.” Of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, 126 of them are addressed to a mysterious male figure known as the “Fair Youth.” Although the identity of the young man remains unknown, the fact that the sonnets are Shakespeare’s most personal writings has led some people to believe that they are proof that he was gay. Many of the poems are certainly passionate, but they may not be straightforwardly confessional as there is often a distance between a poet’s private identity and the persona they craft for their writing. Shakespearean expert Dr. Elizabeth Dollimore neatly sums up what we really know about whether the playwright had sexual feelings for men: “It’s certainly not impossible that he did,” but “it’s certainly not definite that he did.” Read More About Shakespeare: Website navigation “speak what terrible language you will”: shakespeare and tiktok. Austin Tichenor People frequently and self-deprecatingly claim, “I’m no Shakespeare,” right before they boast about something amazing they’ve written. (Or is that just me?) But in terms of new words and phrases entering the language, it increasingly seems as if more and more people are like Shakespeare, or at least trying to be, and with varying degrees of success. William Shakespeare is the primary source for many hundreds of words and phrases in the English language .  While it seems cold-blooded to be a critic and gossip about whether he actually coined these varied words or merely popularized them , if you’ll pardon my rant , it’s obscene how uncomfortable and worthless I feel (despite being not in the least jaded about the puppy dog excitement and amazement I experience) when I realize that Shakespeare was a champion at playing with language. And yes, those highlighted — and italicized — words are all his. Similarly, if you complain about not having slept one wink , if you’ve had too much of a good thing , or been eaten[…]out of house and home , or observed that something wicked this way comes , or [worn your] heart upon [your] sleeve , been given short shrift , gone on a wild-goose chase , or even if you’ve caught yourself singing along to the Nick Lowe song “ C ruel to Be Kind ,” then congratulations! You’ve been quoting, respectively, Cymbeline, As You Like It, Henry IV Part 2, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet , and Hamlet . Granted, these words and phrases have had 400 years to catch on, but culture writer and chronicler of “mostly made-up microtrends” Rebecca Jennings has identified a TikTok fad she’s dubbed “trendbait,” where “random people have made videos inventing [new] terms in the hope that the wording will go viral.” Whether it’s a man earnestly trying to explain something called the “weekend effect” or a young woman trying to force a label onto a thing that isn’t really a thing — or, best of all, this funny woman (below) hilariously satirizing both and thousands more like them — people are planting their linguistic flags in this brave new world (The Tempest!) of democratic, gatekeeper-free, digital communication. @deadeyebrakeman 2024 trend predictions #eclecticgrandpa #fyp ♬ Kylie has trend predictions - kylie brakeman This playfulness with language is always to be applauded, of course, coming as it does from anyone of any age with a phone and a social media account (even the Folger has gotten into the TikTok game , below). One of the most successful Shakespeare trends I’ve seen on the platform formerly known as Twitter is the weekly game of #ShakespeareSunday , started by the account @HollowCrownFans , wherein people pair favorite Shakespeare quotes with related gifs from different elements of pop culture like Disney animation, Star Wars , or Doctor Who . I have also tried to make things “trend” with various hashtags that failed to catch on, like referring to the 400th commemoration of Shakespeare’s passing as his #deathiversary, or dubbing the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s record-setting performance of Romeo and Juliet aboard a flight to Verona as #ShakesOnAPlane. I even refer to these “Shakespeare & Beyond” articles as “blessays,” a portmanteau coined in 2007 by author and actor Stephen Fry that combines “blog” and “essay” and delights no one but my Folger editors and me. (As I said, #ImNoShakespeare. ) @folgerlibrary The Bear finally speaks… #winterstale #shakespeare #fyp #theatretiktok @Therealdarklady ♬ original sound - Folger Shakespeare Library Jennings lists Shakespeare as an example of a “top-down” source for how “catchy phrases or new terms have historically been disseminated,” but I don’t agree. Shakespeare’s plays were the popular culture of his day and theater was the original social medium . The playhouse was the place where people from all levels of society could see and be seen, exchange news and gossip, and — most importantly — become emotionally invested in the stories being told onstage. Shakespeare’s language resonated with audiences then and now because it came out of the mouths of fascinating characters in narratively compelling situations. Understanding that Shakespeare’s theater wasn’t high culture then helps explain why pop culture now — in the form of television, comedy, and music — does a better job than social media at creating lasting words and phrases that make it not only into everyday usage but into dictionaries. Monty Python’s Spam sketch gave us the word for unsolicited online messaging. “Cowabunga,” an expression of excitement or exhilaration, got its start on the 1950s TV show Howdy Doody before being adopted by surfers in the 1960s and being heard in subsequent decades by watchers of Gidget, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Simpsons. Everyone knows a “ Debbie Downer,” thanks to Rachel Dratch and Saturday Night Live . The sitcoms Seinfeld and Friends gave us the words for “regifting” and “friend zone,” the latter of which being something Antonio from Twelfth Night would absolutely have recognized. Musicians also enjoy a Shakespearean-level of playfulness with language, giving us such dictionary-verified words as “stan” (from Eminem’s song about an extremely devoted fan); “props” or “propers” (immortalized by Aretha Franklin in her song “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and adopted from Detroit street slang); “diss” (an insult or expression of contempt; Robert Greene’s pamphlet labeling Shakespeare an “upstart crow” might be considered the original diss tract); “jiggy” (from the Will Smith song and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to be “excitedly energetic or uninhibited” or “to engage in sexual activity”); and Destiny’s Child, whose “bootylicious” would seem self-explanatory but the OED helpfully defines as to be “sexy; shapely; often with reference to the buttocks.” @rjmclok Bro was straight up speaking a different language 😭 #shakespeare ♬ original sound - RJ It might be safer to argue, then, not that TikTok is the new Shakespeare, but that Shakespeare was the original TikTok. Don’t take my word for it: Watch this TikTok bro (above) straight-up celebrate Shakespeare’s gift to language. I love this guy’s Shakespeare bromance — a word, along with “bootylicious,” that Shakespeare wishes he invented. is the co-artistic director of the Reduced Shakespeare Company ; a writing and acting coach at The Shakespeareance ; the co-author of ten stage comedies, including William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) and The Comedy of Hamlet! (a prequel) ; the co-creator of the illustrated children’s books Pop-Up Shakespeare and Daisy, the Littlest Zombie ; a contributor to The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare and Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen (from Arden Shakespeare); and the host of the world’s oldest and longest-running theater podcast, the Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast. — View all posts by Austin Tichenor Stay connected Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Find out what’s on, read our latest stories, and learn how you can get involved. 373 IMAGES Hamlet Reflection and Interpretation Free Essay Example Hamlet Essay on the Struggle to Find Meaning All Known Hamlet by William Shakespeare Essay on hamlet (second sample) Shakespeare: Hamlet Hamlet Essay COMMENTS Shakespeare's Hamlet: Research Paper & Essay Samples [Free ... Focused on: Reasons for Hamlet's procrastination and its consequences. Characters mentioned: Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius. Role of Women in Twelfth Night and Hamlet by Shakespeare. Genre: Research Paper. Words: 2527. Focused on: Women in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Essays on Hamlet Essays on Hamlet. Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from ... Hamlet Introduction to the play. Hamlet is Shakespeare's most popular, and most puzzling, play. It follows the form of a "revenge tragedy," in which the hero, Hamlet, seeks vengeance against his father's murderer, his uncle Claudius, now the king of Denmark. Much of its fascination, however, lies in its uncertainties. Hamlet Essays Essays and criticism on William Shakespeare's Hamlet - Essays. Perhaps one of the most perplexing problems a modern audience may have with Shakespeare's Hamlet is the obvious question: what takes ... A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare's Hamlet Here, then, is a very brief summary of the plot of Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. Act 1. The play begins on the battlements at Elsinore Castle in Denmark one night. The ghost of the former king, Hamlet, is seen, but refuses to speak to any of the soldiers on guard duty. At the royal court, Prince Hamlet (the dead king's son ... A Modern Perspective: Hamlet The surprising thing about Shakespeare's Hamlet is that it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero's taking justice into his own hands—an argument central to The Spanish Tragedy. ... See Mack's classic essay, "The World of Hamlet," Yale Review 41 (1952): 502-23; ... Hamlet Critical Essays Essays and criticism on William Shakespeare's Hamlet - Critical Essays. ... William Shakespeare. Hamlet. David Bevington, ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. All act, scene, and line numbers refer ... Shakespeare's Hamlet essay, summary, quotes and character analysis Master Shakespeare's Hamlet using Absolute Shakespeare's Hamlet essay, plot summary, quotes and characters study guides. Plot Summary: A quick review of the plot of Hamlet including every important action in the play. An ideal introduction before reading the original text. Commentary: Detailed description of each act with translations and ... Hamlet Sample Essay Outlines Sample Essay Outlines. PDF Cite. The following paper topics are based on the entire play. Following each topic is a thesis and sample outline. Use these as a starting point for your paper. Topic ... Hamlet Hamlet, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1599-1601 and published in a quarto edition in 1603 from an unauthorized text, with reference to an earlier play. The First Folio version was taken from a second quarto of 1604 that was based on Shakespeare's own papers with some annotations by the bookkeeper. Shakespeare: Hamlet The story of the play is about the prince Hamlet whose father was the king of Denmark. The king was murdered by Hamlet's uncle Claudius who also married Hamlet's mother Gertrude. The play is centered on Hamlet's anxiety and indecision on how to avenge his father's death. Get a custom Essay on Shakespeare: Hamlet. 809 writers online. Hamlet Essay at Absolute Shakespeare Hamlet Essay. Hamlet Essay features Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous critique based on his legendary and influential Shakespeare notes and lectures. HAMLET was the play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the ... Hamlet Toggle Contents Act and scene list. Characters in the Play ; Entire Play Events before the start of Hamlet set the stage for tragedy. When the king of Denmark, Prince Hamlet's father, suddenly dies, Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, marries his uncle Claudius, who becomes the new king.A spirit who claims to be the ghost of Hamlet's father describes his murder at the hands of Claudius and ... Hamlet Character Analysis: [Essay Example], 612 words Hamlet: An Analysis of Shakespeare's Masterpiece Essay Hamlet is one of the most famous plays of William Shakespeare, written in the early seventeenth century. The play is a tragedy, and it revolves around the story of Prince Hamlet, who seeks revenge for his father's murder. Hamlet Essay Hamlet Essay Topics and Outline Examples Essay Title 1: The Tragic Hero in "Hamlet": Analyzing the Complex Character of Prince Hamlet. Thesis Statement: This essay delves into the character of Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," examining his tragic flaws, internal conflicts, and the intricate web of relationships that contribute to his downfall, ultimately highlighting his status as a ... Analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet: [Essay Example], 763 words Shakespeare's use of language in "Hamlet" is masterful, utilizing poetic devices such as metaphors, similes, and allusions to convey the themes and emotions of the play. Dramatic techniques such as soliloquies and dramatic irony also play a significant role in engaging the audience and creating tension and suspense. Shakespeare Hamlet Essay Hamlet, By William Shakespeare. Hamlet was composed by William Shakespeare, first performed in July 1602 and first published in printed form in 1603. An inherent tension between confrontation and resolution is revealed through Hamlet's characterisation within Shakespeare's play. It is evident that there is a significant level of internal ... 10 Interpretations of Shakespeare's Works Hamlet is linked to the death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet. Hamlet holds the skull of the jester Yorick. / Culture Club/GettyImages. In 1596, Shakespeare's 11-year-old son, Hamnet, died—an ... "Speak what terrible language you will": Shakespeare and TikTok Discover Shakespeare's stories and the world that shaped them. Deepen your understanding of his works and their cultural influence. Shakespeare's works Read and learn more about Shakespeare's plays and poems; Shakespeare in print The First Folio (the book that gave us Shakespeare) and what came after; Shakespeare in performance From playhouse to film sets, explore four centuries of staging ... At the Royal Ballet, Taking the Measure of Ashton's Genius In a second program, a number of shorter, rarely performed works — "Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan" (1976), "Hamlet and Ophelia" (1977), "The Walk to the Paradise ... assignment essay homework paper phd resume review speech thesis