I wrote this a few years ago with the intention of helping an A level student with the play. I'm not sure how much good it did then but it's been used by others since. Although a bit unwieldy for this blogspot format here, this is the safest place to keep it because I keep losing it and having to ask friends who have it on their computers to send it back to me.
So, if it can be of use to A level students, please have a look.
So, if it can be of use to A level students, please have a look.
Pictured- Fran Lewis, one of my favourite Hamlets, taken from Southsea Shakespeare Actors http://www.southseashakespeareactors.com/page14.htm
Introduction to Hamlet
Shakespeare is one of the very few eternal, world-famous names of any artist – perhaps the most famous writer in world history. More famous than the most highly-regarded musicians like Bach or Mozart, the painters Rembrandt or Picasso or possibly even pop singers like Elvis Presley or The Beatles, and we are lucky, now, thinking about the play Hamlet that we don’t need to worry about whether this very famous theatre man from Stratford actually wrote the plays that bear his name or not (because there are a number of people, some of them quite respectable, who don’t think he did) because our job is to think about the play, the words we have on the page and how it might be interpreted and acted. Thank heavens for that. It makes me nostalgic for the long ago days when I was at University and the fashion was to concentrate on the text. The text, you see- ‘the play’s the thing’ as Hamlet himself says. This is ‘English Literature’, and not so much of the rumour or guessing games that have come in recent years to surround the works of literature themselves.
We don’t need to resort to very much opinion or imagination to believe that Hamlet was Shakespeare’s masterpiece, above all of his other major plays, and that he intended it as such. Written around about 1600, after he had practised thoroughly with plot, character and staging in the theatre and started to make a good living out of it- if we need to refer to the traditionally accepted life of Shakespeare- we can see that he might have felt free enough to do what he wanted to do, to write the play he wanted to write and make some kind of ‘personal statement’.
It has been worked out that Shakespeare used about 600 new words in Hamlet that he had never used before, compared to King Lear next best with 350, two-thirds of which he never used again, so he does seem to have made a special effort.
We don’t think it must be a ‘personal statement’ simply because the title of the play is very similar to the name of his son, Hamnet, (or traditionally believed to be his son) who died, aged 11, a few years before he wrote the play- that might just be a big coincidence. And neither do we think that the appearance of Hamlet’s father as a ghost in the play means that Shakespeare was thinking of the death of his own father, John, around about that time. The story of Amleth, a Danish prince, had existed for centuries and an earlier version of a play about Hamlet was produced in London in a different version in the very early days of Shakespeare’s time there so, although it’s unlikely that he wrote that version, it’s very likely that he knew about it. What is quite possible is that Shakespeare eventually saw enough potential in that early play to use the story as the basis for his own greatest work.
Among the reasons why we might think that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet because he wanted to, rather than because the theatre he had shares in needed a new play- which is probably why he wrote most of his plays, especially the comedies and plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor- are the fact that it is too long, performed in its entirety, to have fitted into the usual afternoon slot in his theatre, The Globe, because it would take four hours or more to perform it uncut and most of Shakespeare’s plays are usually made to fit into three hours.
It also looks as if Shakespeare spent much more time on this play than he did in writing most of his others. It is his most complex, interesting and inventive play and, as such, perhaps the most complex, interesting and inventive play in the English language.
But, like almost every work of art, it doesn’t come new and fully-formed into its author’s head. Hamlet is a play written very much to satisfy the fashion of its time and ‘revenge tragedies’ like Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy are examples of contemporary works based on similar themes. Whatever is great about Hamlet, it isn’t necessarily any originality in the story or the theme. All of Shakespeare’s tragedies conform to at least one of the conventions that had been inherited from Ancient Greek tragedy- like those of Sophocles- which in the cases of Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, as well as Hamlet, the downfall of the hero depends on one fatal flaw in their character while they are otherwise noble, worthy, admirable and the tragedy is that we see a good person destroyed. But Shakespeare doesn’t use the ‘classical unities’ required of classical drama in which all the action on stage has to occur in the same place, on the same day and, perhaps, all of it written in the same style of poetry. But, at least, because of this, you see more people murdered on stage in Shakespeare than in an episode of Midsomer Murders whereas in Sophocles or Aeschylus you only hear about them, reported in long speeches by static actors who might then choose to tear their hair out in grief.
At the beginning of the play, the atmosphere is a tense and nervous. Even in the first line, Bernardo, who is coming to relieve Francisco from his watch on guard duty, says ‘Who’s there’ when it is really Francisco’s job to challenge anyone who advances on him. From the very first line, things are ‘out of joint’. The officers on night watch have literally ‘seen a ghost’, the ghost of Old Hamlet, the recently deceased King and Hamlet’s father. As Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. Hamlet is a student, just home from University at Wittenberg, and his friend Horatio tells him of the sightings of the ghost, which Hamlet must go, and witness for himself. When the ghost appears to Hamlet, he tells him he must take revenge on Claudius, Hamlet’s Uncle, who murdered Old Hamlet and then married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and became the new King. Each scene ends with a rhyme and when Hamlet realizes the horror of the situation and the enormity of the challenge, he despairs that,
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
Hamlet’s possible weakness is prevarication- thinking too much and not simply getting on with the job in hand. Such responsibilities weigh heavily upon him. We are shown how Laertes, a more passionate, sword-fighting young man less burdened by deep thought, would have acted later, in the sub-plot, when he wants to take revenge on Hamlet for the murder of his own father, Polonius.
Whereas Laertes springs into action and challenges Hamlet immediately to a duel when he discovers his father dead and sister driven mad by Hamlet, Hamlet is paralysed by doubt and the implications of his actions. It is not until the end of Act 4 that he resolves,
O ! from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.
First he frets about the challenge he has been set and makes sarcastic comments about his mother’s speedy re-marriage, then he gets a chance to kill Claudius at prayer but doesn’t because he finds an excuse not to, then he accidentally kills Polonius, guessing that the movement he sees behind the arras is Claudius spying on him and he also pretends to be mad perhaps in order to uncover Claudius’s guilt, which seems to send his girlfriend Ophelia mad in the process, all of which starts off the second revenge theme. The whole headlong dash into disaster in the court of Denmark seems to be generated by Hamlet’s delay and unwillingness to get on with the job.
However, we are told not to see Hamlet as a weak or ignoble character. The tributes to him after he has died, his friendship with Horatio and his obvious cleverness show him to be thought less ‘weak’ but more ‘melancholy’- aware of too many implications, a young man who thinks too much and dresses in black, brooding on circumstances when action would have saved so much more collateral death.
It can be debated either way whether Hamlet only pretends to be mad after he declares that he will put on an ‘antic disposition’ for strategic purposes, whether he had already been pushed over the limit or whether, once he starts pretending to be mad, he goes mad in the process.
Some critics suggest that from the earliest stages of the play, Hamlet wants to commit suicide to avoid the need to take revenge and that the most famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’, is not so much a debate with himself about whether he should kill Claudius but a contemplation of his own death.
While this can be left usefully ambiguous, it is useful for students to consider the later soliloquy, ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh / Would thaw, melt and resolve itself into a dew’. There is some uncertainty whether Shakespeare wrote ‘solid’, ‘sullied’ or ‘soiled’ and, if we knew for sure, it might help us interpret ‘To be or not to be’ better. While ‘sullied’ and ‘soiled’ both refer to roughly the same thing- the corruption of human nature that he wishes to be clear of- and would indicate that he is more motivated by the murder and the indecency of his mother’s quick re-marriage, reading ‘solid’ into that line, which makes it more metaphysical and less related to recent goings on, would make us think he was contemplating suicide and did just want, above all, to disappear.
But, as we have already seen in passing, the play is made up of any number of ‘doublings’. Not only are there actually two revenge plots; two Hamlets; an older and younger Fortinbras (the Norwegian invaders who threaten Denmark throughout the play) but there are also a play within the play, a undifferentiated double act called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, another called Cornelius and Voltimand (both of which could have been represented by one character) and an elongating linguistic effect called hendiadys, before we even care to namedrop the echo effect of stichomythia..
We are invited to compare the invading Norwegians under the prince Fortinbras, seeking to reclaim land lost by his father, with the disarray of the Danish court where he, too, is seeking revenge for his father. At the beginning of the play they are out of sight, mentioned by Claudius but representing a further threat to the stability of Denmark but by the very end of the play, Fortinbras enters to represent a new age of power and control, not necessarily thoughtful or intellectual like Hamlet but orderly and likely to provide strong leadership.
The play within the play, The Mousetrap or The Murder of Gonzago, is part of Hamlet’s complicated web of scheming to undercover Claudius’ guilt but Shakespeare uses it to pass comment on the art of drama itself as well as providing an opportunity for a comic turn from the pedantic, old fool, Polonius. If we are not already aware of watching an artificial drama on stage, then this play is at a further remove in artificiality in its poetic language and exaggerated unreality.
Like Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can equally be played as comic turns although they are sinister, too. Used by Claudius to spy on Hamlet and then sent with Hamlet to England to make sure Claudius’ plan to have him put to death by the English king, Hamlet doesn’t trust them, sees through them and is clever enough to turn the tables on them and send them to their deaths instead.
Hendiadys means ‘one by means of two’ in such phrases as ‘law and order’ or ‘house and home’, in which each word has a slightly different meaning but refer to the same thing. In Hamlet there are numerous examples like ‘the trappings and the suits of woe’ or ‘a king of shreds and patches’. The effect, once noticed, is to deepen and extend the texture as well as the text of the play, making it richer, more various and giving it a shimmering effect where reality is not so precisely defined by one word but hovers between two that are close in meaning.
A further linguistic effect worth noting, if only for interest’s sake, is ‘stichomythia’ which has an echoing effect as one line follows the same pattern as the line before it such as in Hamlet’s exchange with his mother in her bedroom.
Gert. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Ham. Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gert. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Ham. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
As well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius, there is further comic relief in the gravedigger as well as Hamlet’s sometimes bitter and morose wit. The gravedigger is a literally ‘down to earth’ character whose dark humour and matter of fact view of the world comes at one of the sombrest, most reflective moments of the play as Hamlet contemplates Ophelia’s grave before her funeral.
So, the play is structured around two, if not three, revenge themes that are interwoven in the story and a set of ‘doublings’. If we must usually say that revenge is thus the main theme of the play, we might also reflect that the ‘human condition’ -the question of what it is like to be a human being- becomes a theme, too, as Hamlet is made to consider his own character, his delay and inaction, and reflects in a melancholy way on ‘what a piece of work is a man’, that the earth is a ‘sterile promontory’, ‘an unweeded garden, /That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.’
Staging a production of Hamlet presents any number of potential problems or challenges- not only the problem of the play’s length which means it must often be edited down to more manageable proportions but the fact that Hamlet is a very long and emotionally challenging role but, being 23 years old, a mature actor with the experience and range needed to carry it off will usually look too old for the part. It does, however, offer itself to any number of interpretations which can be taken up by directors. For example, one production in Portsmouth had Hamlet playing with paper boats on water and setting fire to them as he recited ‘To be or not to be’, suggesting that he was ‘burning his boats’ and was deciding in this soliloquy to take action and never mind the consequences; in another, following the accidental murder of Polonius, Ophelia came on dressed in her father’s clothes, suggesting that the killing of her father by her boyfriend was the reason for her madness.
Hamlet, of course, always wears black; the representation of the ghost in live theatre is a challenge to imaginative staging and one needs to consider the contrasts in the scenes between the loud, passionate parts and the reflective, contemplative passages- there is a range of loud/quiet, fast/slow and even funny/serious polarities in tone that need to be handled sensitively.
In the end, we don’t want to make firm decisions on questions like whether Hamlet is good or bad, weak or strong, mad or sane. We need to balance the arguments on either side and usually come to a considered but not always decisive point of view. For example, it might be a mad idea for Hamlet to put on his ‘antic disposition’ in the first place which means he has no need of it if he’s mad already but it might be a brilliant strategy that could just have worked and he wasn’t mad at all, just unlucky in a sword fight in which his opponent cheated but, on the other hand, perhaps the stress and strain send Hamlet mad and, while pretending to be mad, he does actually go over the edge.
Neither do we have to believe any of it. George Bernard Shaw was one who felt the play was a bit too melodramatic and if such a film were made nowadays with so much murder, madness and incest in it then it would surely be an X certificate. It isn’t necessarily the realism or likelihood of the story that we are looking at but the thoughts, ideas and even the language that are built into it. A successful work of art will allow us to ‘suspend our disbelief’, to not even worry about its overall unlikeliness and, for the duration of the play, take it all on trust
And we don’t even have to prove whether it is a great play or not, but interpret it as best we can, although having spent any amount of time interpreting it, we are likely to decide it is a great play.
Quotes to know-
It is very useful, if not essential for students to be able to quote significant parts of the text to illustrate their points. It would be useful to be able to reproduce the lines below, as well as many others, and talk about their significance in the play-
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I
To be or not to be: that is the question
O that this too, too solid flesh...
Useful books-
Two chapters on Hamlet in James Shapiro’s 1599, a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
One chapter in Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language.
The Casebook on Hamlet.
Introduction to Hamlet
Shakespeare is one of the very few eternal, world-famous names of any artist – perhaps the most famous writer in world history. More famous than the most highly-regarded musicians like Bach or Mozart, the painters Rembrandt or Picasso or possibly even pop singers like Elvis Presley or The Beatles, and we are lucky, now, thinking about the play Hamlet that we don’t need to worry about whether this very famous theatre man from Stratford actually wrote the plays that bear his name or not (because there are a number of people, some of them quite respectable, who don’t think he did) because our job is to think about the play, the words we have on the page and how it might be interpreted and acted. Thank heavens for that. It makes me nostalgic for the long ago days when I was at University and the fashion was to concentrate on the text. The text, you see- ‘the play’s the thing’ as Hamlet himself says. This is ‘English Literature’, and not so much of the rumour or guessing games that have come in recent years to surround the works of literature themselves.
We don’t need to resort to very much opinion or imagination to believe that Hamlet was Shakespeare’s masterpiece, above all of his other major plays, and that he intended it as such. Written around about 1600, after he had practised thoroughly with plot, character and staging in the theatre and started to make a good living out of it- if we need to refer to the traditionally accepted life of Shakespeare- we can see that he might have felt free enough to do what he wanted to do, to write the play he wanted to write and make some kind of ‘personal statement’.
It has been worked out that Shakespeare used about 600 new words in Hamlet that he had never used before, compared to King Lear next best with 350, two-thirds of which he never used again, so he does seem to have made a special effort.
We don’t think it must be a ‘personal statement’ simply because the title of the play is very similar to the name of his son, Hamnet, (or traditionally believed to be his son) who died, aged 11, a few years before he wrote the play- that might just be a big coincidence. And neither do we think that the appearance of Hamlet’s father as a ghost in the play means that Shakespeare was thinking of the death of his own father, John, around about that time. The story of Amleth, a Danish prince, had existed for centuries and an earlier version of a play about Hamlet was produced in London in a different version in the very early days of Shakespeare’s time there so, although it’s unlikely that he wrote that version, it’s very likely that he knew about it. What is quite possible is that Shakespeare eventually saw enough potential in that early play to use the story as the basis for his own greatest work.
Among the reasons why we might think that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet because he wanted to, rather than because the theatre he had shares in needed a new play- which is probably why he wrote most of his plays, especially the comedies and plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor- are the fact that it is too long, performed in its entirety, to have fitted into the usual afternoon slot in his theatre, The Globe, because it would take four hours or more to perform it uncut and most of Shakespeare’s plays are usually made to fit into three hours.
It also looks as if Shakespeare spent much more time on this play than he did in writing most of his others. It is his most complex, interesting and inventive play and, as such, perhaps the most complex, interesting and inventive play in the English language.
But, like almost every work of art, it doesn’t come new and fully-formed into its author’s head. Hamlet is a play written very much to satisfy the fashion of its time and ‘revenge tragedies’ like Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy are examples of contemporary works based on similar themes. Whatever is great about Hamlet, it isn’t necessarily any originality in the story or the theme. All of Shakespeare’s tragedies conform to at least one of the conventions that had been inherited from Ancient Greek tragedy- like those of Sophocles- which in the cases of Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, as well as Hamlet, the downfall of the hero depends on one fatal flaw in their character while they are otherwise noble, worthy, admirable and the tragedy is that we see a good person destroyed. But Shakespeare doesn’t use the ‘classical unities’ required of classical drama in which all the action on stage has to occur in the same place, on the same day and, perhaps, all of it written in the same style of poetry. But, at least, because of this, you see more people murdered on stage in Shakespeare than in an episode of Midsomer Murders whereas in Sophocles or Aeschylus you only hear about them, reported in long speeches by static actors who might then choose to tear their hair out in grief.
At the beginning of the play, the atmosphere is a tense and nervous. Even in the first line, Bernardo, who is coming to relieve Francisco from his watch on guard duty, says ‘Who’s there’ when it is really Francisco’s job to challenge anyone who advances on him. From the very first line, things are ‘out of joint’. The officers on night watch have literally ‘seen a ghost’, the ghost of Old Hamlet, the recently deceased King and Hamlet’s father. As Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. Hamlet is a student, just home from University at Wittenberg, and his friend Horatio tells him of the sightings of the ghost, which Hamlet must go, and witness for himself. When the ghost appears to Hamlet, he tells him he must take revenge on Claudius, Hamlet’s Uncle, who murdered Old Hamlet and then married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and became the new King. Each scene ends with a rhyme and when Hamlet realizes the horror of the situation and the enormity of the challenge, he despairs that,
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
Hamlet’s possible weakness is prevarication- thinking too much and not simply getting on with the job in hand. Such responsibilities weigh heavily upon him. We are shown how Laertes, a more passionate, sword-fighting young man less burdened by deep thought, would have acted later, in the sub-plot, when he wants to take revenge on Hamlet for the murder of his own father, Polonius.
Whereas Laertes springs into action and challenges Hamlet immediately to a duel when he discovers his father dead and sister driven mad by Hamlet, Hamlet is paralysed by doubt and the implications of his actions. It is not until the end of Act 4 that he resolves,
O ! from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.
First he frets about the challenge he has been set and makes sarcastic comments about his mother’s speedy re-marriage, then he gets a chance to kill Claudius at prayer but doesn’t because he finds an excuse not to, then he accidentally kills Polonius, guessing that the movement he sees behind the arras is Claudius spying on him and he also pretends to be mad perhaps in order to uncover Claudius’s guilt, which seems to send his girlfriend Ophelia mad in the process, all of which starts off the second revenge theme. The whole headlong dash into disaster in the court of Denmark seems to be generated by Hamlet’s delay and unwillingness to get on with the job.
However, we are told not to see Hamlet as a weak or ignoble character. The tributes to him after he has died, his friendship with Horatio and his obvious cleverness show him to be thought less ‘weak’ but more ‘melancholy’- aware of too many implications, a young man who thinks too much and dresses in black, brooding on circumstances when action would have saved so much more collateral death.
It can be debated either way whether Hamlet only pretends to be mad after he declares that he will put on an ‘antic disposition’ for strategic purposes, whether he had already been pushed over the limit or whether, once he starts pretending to be mad, he goes mad in the process.
Some critics suggest that from the earliest stages of the play, Hamlet wants to commit suicide to avoid the need to take revenge and that the most famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’, is not so much a debate with himself about whether he should kill Claudius but a contemplation of his own death.
While this can be left usefully ambiguous, it is useful for students to consider the later soliloquy, ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh / Would thaw, melt and resolve itself into a dew’. There is some uncertainty whether Shakespeare wrote ‘solid’, ‘sullied’ or ‘soiled’ and, if we knew for sure, it might help us interpret ‘To be or not to be’ better. While ‘sullied’ and ‘soiled’ both refer to roughly the same thing- the corruption of human nature that he wishes to be clear of- and would indicate that he is more motivated by the murder and the indecency of his mother’s quick re-marriage, reading ‘solid’ into that line, which makes it more metaphysical and less related to recent goings on, would make us think he was contemplating suicide and did just want, above all, to disappear.
But, as we have already seen in passing, the play is made up of any number of ‘doublings’. Not only are there actually two revenge plots; two Hamlets; an older and younger Fortinbras (the Norwegian invaders who threaten Denmark throughout the play) but there are also a play within the play, a undifferentiated double act called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, another called Cornelius and Voltimand (both of which could have been represented by one character) and an elongating linguistic effect called hendiadys, before we even care to namedrop the echo effect of stichomythia..
We are invited to compare the invading Norwegians under the prince Fortinbras, seeking to reclaim land lost by his father, with the disarray of the Danish court where he, too, is seeking revenge for his father. At the beginning of the play they are out of sight, mentioned by Claudius but representing a further threat to the stability of Denmark but by the very end of the play, Fortinbras enters to represent a new age of power and control, not necessarily thoughtful or intellectual like Hamlet but orderly and likely to provide strong leadership.
The play within the play, The Mousetrap or The Murder of Gonzago, is part of Hamlet’s complicated web of scheming to undercover Claudius’ guilt but Shakespeare uses it to pass comment on the art of drama itself as well as providing an opportunity for a comic turn from the pedantic, old fool, Polonius. If we are not already aware of watching an artificial drama on stage, then this play is at a further remove in artificiality in its poetic language and exaggerated unreality.
Like Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can equally be played as comic turns although they are sinister, too. Used by Claudius to spy on Hamlet and then sent with Hamlet to England to make sure Claudius’ plan to have him put to death by the English king, Hamlet doesn’t trust them, sees through them and is clever enough to turn the tables on them and send them to their deaths instead.
Hendiadys means ‘one by means of two’ in such phrases as ‘law and order’ or ‘house and home’, in which each word has a slightly different meaning but refer to the same thing. In Hamlet there are numerous examples like ‘the trappings and the suits of woe’ or ‘a king of shreds and patches’. The effect, once noticed, is to deepen and extend the texture as well as the text of the play, making it richer, more various and giving it a shimmering effect where reality is not so precisely defined by one word but hovers between two that are close in meaning.
A further linguistic effect worth noting, if only for interest’s sake, is ‘stichomythia’ which has an echoing effect as one line follows the same pattern as the line before it such as in Hamlet’s exchange with his mother in her bedroom.
Gert. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Ham. Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gert. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Ham. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
As well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius, there is further comic relief in the gravedigger as well as Hamlet’s sometimes bitter and morose wit. The gravedigger is a literally ‘down to earth’ character whose dark humour and matter of fact view of the world comes at one of the sombrest, most reflective moments of the play as Hamlet contemplates Ophelia’s grave before her funeral.
So, the play is structured around two, if not three, revenge themes that are interwoven in the story and a set of ‘doublings’. If we must usually say that revenge is thus the main theme of the play, we might also reflect that the ‘human condition’ -the question of what it is like to be a human being- becomes a theme, too, as Hamlet is made to consider his own character, his delay and inaction, and reflects in a melancholy way on ‘what a piece of work is a man’, that the earth is a ‘sterile promontory’, ‘an unweeded garden, /That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.’
Staging a production of Hamlet presents any number of potential problems or challenges- not only the problem of the play’s length which means it must often be edited down to more manageable proportions but the fact that Hamlet is a very long and emotionally challenging role but, being 23 years old, a mature actor with the experience and range needed to carry it off will usually look too old for the part. It does, however, offer itself to any number of interpretations which can be taken up by directors. For example, one production in Portsmouth had Hamlet playing with paper boats on water and setting fire to them as he recited ‘To be or not to be’, suggesting that he was ‘burning his boats’ and was deciding in this soliloquy to take action and never mind the consequences; in another, following the accidental murder of Polonius, Ophelia came on dressed in her father’s clothes, suggesting that the killing of her father by her boyfriend was the reason for her madness.
Hamlet, of course, always wears black; the representation of the ghost in live theatre is a challenge to imaginative staging and one needs to consider the contrasts in the scenes between the loud, passionate parts and the reflective, contemplative passages- there is a range of loud/quiet, fast/slow and even funny/serious polarities in tone that need to be handled sensitively.
In the end, we don’t want to make firm decisions on questions like whether Hamlet is good or bad, weak or strong, mad or sane. We need to balance the arguments on either side and usually come to a considered but not always decisive point of view. For example, it might be a mad idea for Hamlet to put on his ‘antic disposition’ in the first place which means he has no need of it if he’s mad already but it might be a brilliant strategy that could just have worked and he wasn’t mad at all, just unlucky in a sword fight in which his opponent cheated but, on the other hand, perhaps the stress and strain send Hamlet mad and, while pretending to be mad, he does actually go over the edge.
Neither do we have to believe any of it. George Bernard Shaw was one who felt the play was a bit too melodramatic and if such a film were made nowadays with so much murder, madness and incest in it then it would surely be an X certificate. It isn’t necessarily the realism or likelihood of the story that we are looking at but the thoughts, ideas and even the language that are built into it. A successful work of art will allow us to ‘suspend our disbelief’, to not even worry about its overall unlikeliness and, for the duration of the play, take it all on trust
And we don’t even have to prove whether it is a great play or not, but interpret it as best we can, although having spent any amount of time interpreting it, we are likely to decide it is a great play.
Quotes to know-
It is very useful, if not essential for students to be able to quote significant parts of the text to illustrate their points. It would be useful to be able to reproduce the lines below, as well as many others, and talk about their significance in the play-
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I
To be or not to be: that is the question
O that this too, too solid flesh...
Useful books-
Two chapters on Hamlet in James Shapiro’s 1599, a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
One chapter in Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language.
The Casebook on Hamlet.
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