Hamlet

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The American actor Edwin Booth as Hamlet, c.1870.

For other uses, see Hamlet (disambiguation).

Hamlet is a tragedy and revenge play by William Shakespeare. It is one of his best-known works, and also one of the most-quoted writings in the English language. Hamlet has been called "Shakespeare's greatest play" and it is universally included on lists of the world's greatest books. It is also one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays, judging by the number of productions; for example, it has topped the list at the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1879. With 4,042 lines and 29,551 words, Hamlet is also the longest Shakespeare play.

Sources

Further information: Hamlet (legend)

A facsimile of Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, which contains the legend of Amleth.

The story of the prince who plots revenge on his uncle, the current king, for killing his father, the former king, is an old one. Many of the story elements—the prince's feigned madness, his mother's hasty marriage to the usurper, the testing of the prince's madness with a young woman, the prince talking to his mother and killing a hidden spy, his being sent to England with two retainers and substituting his execution for theirs—are also part of a medieval tale by Saxo Grammaticus called Vita Amlethi (part of his larger Latin work Gesta Danorum) written around 1200 AD. Saxo was affected in his writing by older written and oral traditions from various cultures. Amleth, as Hamlet is called in his version, probably derived from a story passed orally throughout Denmark and Scandinavia. Scholars have most notably uncovered references to it in Icelandic legend. Although there is no existing copy of the Icelandic version of the story, Torfaeus, an early Icelandic scholar (born 1636), described parallels to the Icelandic story of Amloi in the Spanish story of the Ambales Saga. This story contains similarities to Shakespeare's Hamlet in Prince Ambales' feigned madness, his accidental killing of the King's counselour in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of his uncle.

The two most popular candidates for written works which may have affected Saxo, however, are the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki and the Roman legend of Brutus, recorded in two separate Latin works. In Hrolf Kraki, there are two sons of the murdered king: Hroar and Helgi, who later take the names Ham and Hrani as a disguise. They spend most of their story in hiding, rather than feigning madness, though Ham does behave in a childlike manner to avoid suspicion at one point. The sequence of events is different from Shakespeare's as well. The Roman story of Brutus focuses on feigned madness, as a man named Lucius changes his name to Brutus ("dull, stupid") and enacts the part in order to avoid the fate of his father and brothers. He eventually slays his family's killer, King Tarquinus. Saxo seems to have been influenced at least in part by both of these stories. Saxo, along with writing in the Latin language of the Romans, adjusted the story to meet Roman, classical concepts of pagan virtue and heroism. Scholars have speculated about the Hero as Fool story's ultimate source, but no clear candidate has been proposed. Given the many different cultures from which Hamlet-like legends come from (Roman, Spanish, Scandinavian and Arabic), a few have guessed that the story may be generally Indo-European in origin.

The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd. This play may have influenced Hamlet. Its author may have also written the Ur-Hamlet.

A reasonably accurate version of Saxo was rendered into French in 1570 by François de Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques. Belleforest embellished Saxo's text incredibly, nearly doubling the total prose. His version added descriptions of the hero's melancholy. Shakespeare's main source, however, is believed to be an earlier play—now lost—known as the Ur-Hamlet. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd, this earlier Hamlet play was in performance by 1589, and seems to have introduced a ghost for the first time into the story. Shakespeare's playing company, the Chamberlain's Men, may have purchased the play and performed a version reworked by Shakespeare for some time. However, scholars are unable to assert with any confidence how much Shakespeare took from this play, how much from Belleforest or Saxo, and how much from other contemporary sources (such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy). There is no evidence clearly pointing to Shakespeare's directly referring to Saxo, although the Latin text was widely available at the time. There are, however, elements of Belleforest's version which are in Shakespeare's play but not in Saxo's. Whether Shakespeare picked these up directly from Belleforest, or through the Ur-Hamlet, remains unclear. One scholar, Eric Sams, in a less-popular theory supported by Harold Bloom, has advanced the notion that Shakespeare himself wrote the Ur-Hamlet as an early draft. The idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died at age eleven, has been debunked by scholars. Hamlet is too obviously connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was actually quite popular at the time, making the connection far from unique.

Since all texts of the Ur-Hamlet have been lost, it is difficult to determine what Shakespeare's Hamlet borrowed from Saxo and Belleforest, and what he took from Ur-Hamlet. It is clear, though that several things did change somewhere between Belleforest and Shakespeare. For one, unlike Saxo and Belleforest, Shakespeare's play has no all-knowing narrator. The audience must draw its own conclusions about characters' motives. Also, the traditional story encompasses several years, while Shakespeare's covers a few weeks. Belleforest's version details Hamlet's plan for revenge, while in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet has no apparent plan. Shakespeare also added some elements placing the setting in 15th century, Christian Denmark, rather than a pagan, medieval one. Elsinore, for example, would have been familiar to Elizabethan England, as a new castle had recently been built there, and Wittenburg, Hamlet's University, was widely known for its Protestant teachings. Other elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet not found in medieval versions include the secrecy of the King's murder, the inclusion of Laertes and Fortinbras as parallels of Hamlet, the testing of the king via a play, and the Hamlet's death in gaining his tragic revenge.

Date and texts

The third quarto of Hamlet (1605); a straight reprint of the 2nd quarto (1604)

Hamlet was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on July 26, 1602. With the record is a note that the play was "latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne and his servantes." This statement, along with another note written by Gabriel Harvey in a 1598 edition of Chaucer, has led scholars to date the writing of the play to 1599 or 1600. Harvey writes Hamlet as an example of a play enjoyed by more educated audiences, alongside a brief mention of the Earl of Essex. Since Essex was executed in February 1601 for rebellion, the play seems to have been written within that time period. Another hint as to the play's date of writing is Hamlet's frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, dated to 1599.

A so-called "bad" First Quarto (referred to as "Q1") was published in 1603, by the booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundell. Q1 contains just over half of the text of the later Second Quarto ("Q2") published in 1604 again by Nicholas Ling. Reprints of Q2 followed in 1611 (Q3) and 1637 (Q5); there was also an undated Q4 (possibly from 1622). The First Folio text (often referred to as "F1") appeared as part of Shakespeare's collected plays published in 1623. The three main texts used by scholars today are the "first quarto", the "second quarto", and the First Folio. Later quartos and folios are considered derivatives of these first editions, and so are of little interest in capturing Shakespeare's original text. Q1 itself has been viewed with scepticism, and in practice Q2 and F1 are the editions editors mostly rely upon.

The first quarto's rendering of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy

Early editors of Shakespeare's works, starting with Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Lewis Theobald (1733), combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet then known, Q2 and F1. Each text contains some material the other lacks, and there are many minor differences in wording, so that only a little more than 200 lines are identical between them. Typically, editors have taken an approach of combining, "conflating," the texts of Q2 and F1, in an effort to create an inclusive text as close as possible to the ideal Shakespeare original. Theobald's version became standard for a long time. Certainly, the "full text" philosophy that he established has influenced editors to the current day. Although many modern editors have done essentially the same thing Theobald did, also using, for the most part, the 1604/5 quarto and the 1623 folio texts, two recent editions edit separate versions, adding the additional lines in an appendix.

The discovery of Q1 in 1823, when its existence had not even been suspected earlier, caused considerable interest and excitement, while also raising questions. The deficiencies of the text were recognized immediately—Q1 was instrumental in the development of the concept of a Shakespeare "bad quarto." Yet Q1 also has its value: it contains stage directions which reveal actual stage performance in a way that Q2 and F1 do not, and it contains an entire scene (usually labeled IV,vi) that is not in either Q2 or F1. Also, Q1 is useful simply for comparison to the later publications. At least 28 different productions of the Q1 text since 1881 have shown it eminently fit for the stage. Q1 is generally thought to be a "memorial reconstruction" of the play as it may have been performed by Shakespeare's own company, although there is disagreement whether the reconstruction was pirated, or authorized. It is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1, apparently because of significant cuts for stage performance. It is thought that one of the actors playing a minor role (Marcellus, certainly, perhaps Voltemand as well) in the legitimate production was the source of this version.

Another theory is that the Q1 text is an abridged version of the full length play intended especially for traveling productions (the aforementioned university productions, in particular.) Kathleen Irace espouses this theory in her New Cambridge edition, "The First Quarto of Hamlet." The idea that the Q1 text is not riddled with error, but is in fact a totally viable version of the play has led to several recent Q1 productions (perhaps most notably, Tim Sheridan and Andrew Borba's 2003 production at the Theatre of NOTE in Los Angeles, for which Ms. Irace herself served as dramaturge).

Some contemporary scholarship is moving away from the ideal of the "full text," supposing its inapplicability to the case of Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare's 2006 publication of different texts of Hamlet in different volumes is perhaps the best evidence of this shifting focus and emphasis.

Characters

A detail of the engraving of Daniel Maclise's 1842 painting The Play-scene in Hamlet, portraying the moment when the guilt of Claudius is revealed.

• Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark.
• Claudius is the King of Denmark, elected to the throne after the death of his brother, King Hamlet. Claudius has married Gertrude, his brother's widow.
• Gertrude is the Queen of Denmark, and King Hamlet's widow, now married to Claudius.
• the Ghost, appears in the exact image of Hamlet's father, the late King Hamlet.
• Polonius is Claudius's chief advisor, and the father of Ophelia and Laertes. (This character is called "Corambis" in the First Quarto of 1603.)
• Laertes is the son of Polonius, and has returned to Elsinore Castle after living in Paris
• Ophelia is Polonius's daughter, and Laertes's sister, who lives with her father at Elsinore Castle.
• Horatio is a good friend of Hamlet, from the university at Wittenberg, who came to Elsinore Castle to attend King Hamlet's funeral.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are childhood friends and schoolmates of Hamlet, who were summoned to Elsinore by Claudius and Gertrude.
• Fortinbras is the nephew of old King Norway. He is also the son of Fortinbras Sr, who was killed in single combat by Hamlet's father.
• Marcellus, Barnardo, and Francisco are sentinels who help guard Elsinore Castle.
• Voltemand and Cornelius are ambassadors King Claudius sends to old King Norway.
• Reynaldo is Polonius's servant. (This character is called "Montano" in the First Quarto.)
• First Player in a company of Players who arrive at Elsinore.
• the Lad in the Players' company who plays the female characters.
• Other Players of the Players' company.
• a Captain in Fortinbras's army.
• a Gentleman who informs Gertrude of Ophelia's strange behavior.
• Messengers
• Switzers who are Claudius's bodyguards.
• Ladies in waiting to Queen Gertrude.
• Townspeople who are followers of Laertes.
• Sailors (are actually two pirates.)
• Two Clowns, a sexton and a bailiff.
• Yorick, a dead jester, who is honored by Hamlet.
• A Priest (identified as a Protestant cleric, a doctor of divinity, in the Second Quarto.)
• Osric, a courtier (originally named "Ostricke" in the Second Quarto.)
• English Ambassadors
• Lords, ladies, courtiers, servants, guards, and other extras as required.

Synopsis

On a cold winter night, two sentries try to convince the sceptical student Horatio that they have seen the ghost of the recently-deceased King Hamlet, when the ghost suddenly appears. Horatio tries to question it but it stalks away. He proposes they tell the old king's son, Hamlet.

Horatio, Hamlet, and the Ghost (1.4).

Claudius, the new king, proclaims an end to the official mourning for his brother, in light of his marriage to Gertrude, his brother's queen. Claudius and Gertrude try to persuade Hamlet to abandon his melancholy and not to return to university in Wittenburg. Hamlet promises to try to obey his mother. Left alone, he vents his frustration at her hasty remarriage. He is interrupted by Horatio and the sentries, who inform him of the portentous apparition.

That night, Hamlet speaks to his father's ghost, who reveals that he was poisoned by Claudius. He commands Hamlet to avenge his murder. Hamlet vows to do so and swears his companions to secrecy. He decides to disguise his true intents by feigning madness.

Terry and Irving in the 'nunnery scene' (3.1).

Ophelia reports to her father, the King's counsellor Polonius, how Hamlet came to her bedroom in a fit of madness. Polonius deduces an "ecstasy of love" is to blame. Meanwhile, Claudius enlists two of Hamlet's school-friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to discover the cause of Hamlet's madness. Polonius puts his theory to Claudius and Gertrude.

Hamlet greets Rozencrantz and Guildenstern warmly, but soon discerns their duplicity. He professes a disaffection with the world, for which Rozencrantz recommends a troupe of actors, who soon arrive. Hamlet solicits a passionate performance from one of them. Alone, he reflects on the feigned passion of the actor and his own failure to act. Uncertain whether the ghost was genuine, he resolves to confirm his uncle's guilt by observing his response to the staging of a play, which he later calls The Mousetrap.

Claudius agrees to attend the play, but first he and Polonius hide themselves, to spy on Hamlet with Ophelia. Thinking he is alone, Hamlet reflects on his predicament, until Ophelia alerts him to her presence. Hamlet berates her for her immodesty and dismisses her to a nunnery, causing her great distress. The king decides to send Hamlet to England, but Polonius persuades him first to allow the Queen to try to discover the cause of Hamlet's distemper.

"The play's the thing" in 'Mousetrap scene' (3.2).

Confronting his mother in the 'closet scene' (3.4)

Hamlet directs the actors' preparations. The court assembles and the play begins; Hamlet offers a running commentary throughout. When the action shows a king poisoned, Claudius rises abruptly and leaves, from which Hamlet deduces his guilt.

Hamlet is summoned to his mother's bedchamber. On his way, he discovers Claudius praying. Poised to kill, Hamlet hesitates. He reasons that to kill Claudius in prayer would send him to heaven.

Hamlet confronts his mother in her chamber. Gertrude panics and cries out. Polonius, hiding behind a tapestry, responds, prompting Hamlet to stab wildly in that direction. Hoping it was the king, he discovers Polonius' corpse. Hamlet directs a sustained accusation at Gertrude, who admits some guilt. The ghost appears to bid him treat her gently and to spur him on to his revenge. Unable to see the apparition, Gertrude takes Hamlet's behaviour for a sign of madness. Hamlet drags the corpse away.

Claudius sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who carry a secret request for his execution. Having watched the army of Fortinbras (nephew to the Norwegian king) pass through, Hamlet reflects on his own inaction.

Ophelia, distracted by grief (4.5).

Ophelia wanders the court in grief-induced madness, singing incoherently. Laertes (Polonius’s son recently returned from abroad), seeking revenge for his father's murder, bursts into the royal chamber at the head of a rabble that clamours for him to be king. The sight of his sister, Ophelia, in her distracted state further incenses him. Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet is to blame. Learning of Hamlet's escape and return to Denmark, Claudius proposes a rigged fencing-match, using poisioned rapiers, as a surreptitious vehicle for Laertes' revenge. Gertrude interrupts to report that Ophelia has drowned.

The 'gravedigger scene' (5.1)

Two clowns debate the legality of Ophelia's apparent suicide, whilst digging her grave. Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with a gravedigger, who unearths the skull of a jester from Hamlet's childhood, Yorick. A funeral procession approaches. On hearing that it is Ophelia's and seeing Laertes leap into her grave, Hamlet advances and the two grapple.

Back at Elsinore, Hamlet tells Horatio the story of his escape and how he arranged the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. A courtier informs Hamlet of the King's wager on a fencing match with Laertes. Hamlet agrees to participate.

The court enters, ready for the match. Claudius orders cups of wine prepared, one of which he has poisoned. During the bout, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup. Laertes succeeds in piercing Hamlet with a poisoned blade, but, in the struggle, is wounded by it himself. Gertrude dies. With his dying breath Laertes reveals the king’s plot. Hamlet and Laertes forgive each other; Hamlet kills Claudius; a distraught Horatio contemplates suicide, but Hamlet eloquently dissuades him; and, before succumbing to the poison, Hamlet names Fortinbras as heir. As Fortinbras arrives, Horatio promises to recount the tale. Fortinbras orders Hamlet’s body borne off in honour.

Analysis and criticism

Further information: Critical approaches to Hamlet

Dramatic structure

As a drama, Hamlet is unique. In creating this strategy, Shakespeare broke several rules, one of the largest being the rule of action over character. In his day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poetics, which declared that a drama should not focus on character so much as action. The highlights of Hamlet, however, are not the action scenes, but the soliloquies, wherein Hamlet reveals his motives and thoughts to the audience. The first two quartos did not divide the play into acts and scenes, and the First Folio only divided the first two acts, leaving the rest continuous. Modern scholars still question whether the scene divisions are correct or even a part of the original intent of the author at all. Also, unlike Shakespeare's other plays, there is no strong subplot; all plot forks are directly connected to the main vein of Hamlet struggling to gain revenge. The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of plot action-wise. At one point, Hamlet is resolved to kill Claudius, the next scene, he is suddenly tame. Scholars still debate whether these odd plot turns are mistakes or intentional additions to add to the play's theme of confusion and duality.

Language

Much of the play's language is in the elaborate, witty language expected of a royal court. This is in line with Baldassare Castiglione's work, The Courtier (published in 1528), which outlines several courtly rules, specifically advising servants of royals to amuse their rulers with their inventive language. Osric and Polonius seem to especially respect this suggestion. Claudius' speech is full a rhetorical figures, as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's, while Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers use simpler methods of speech. Claudius demonstrates an authoritative control over the language of a King, referring to himself in the first person plural, and using anaphora mixed with metaphor that hearkens back to Greek political speeches. Hamlet seems the most educated in rhetoric of all the characters, using anaphora, as the king does, but also asyndeton and highly developed metaphors, while at the same time managing to be precise and unflowery (as when he explains his inward emotion to his mother, saying "But I have that withing which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe."). His language is very self conscious, and relies heavily on puns. Especially when pretending to be mad, Hamlet uses puns to reveal his true thoughts, while at the same time hiding them. Psychologists have since associated a heavy use of puns with schizophrenia.

Hendiadys is one rhetorical type found in several places in the play, as in Ophelia's speech after the nunnery scene ("Th'expectancy and rose of the fair state" and "I, of all ladies, most deject and wretched" are two examples). Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, uses this rhetorical form throughout the play. Hamlet was written later in his life, when he was better at matching rhetorical figures with the characters and the plot than early in his career. Wright, however, has proposed that hendiadys is used to heighten the sense of duality in the play.

Hamlet's soliloquies have captured the attention of scholars as well. Early critics viewed such speeches as To be or not to be as Shakespeare's expressions of his own personal beliefs. Later scholars, such as Charney, have rejected this theory saying the soliloquies are expressions of Hamlet's thought process. During his speeches, Hamlet interrupts himself, expressing disgust in agreement with himself, and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly, and instead skirts around the basic idea of his thought. Not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, is Hamlet really able to be direct and sure in his speech.

Critical history

From the beginning, Hamlet has aroused questions from critics regarding Hamlet's supposed madness and melancholy. Critics in Shakespeare's day focused on these themes in their understanding of the play, which at the time was portrayed more violently than in later times. Analysts of the Restoration period disliked the play's lack of unity in time and space, as well as the perceived immodest madness of Ophelia in the flower scene. Views of the play improved, however, in the eighteenth century. Critics viewed Hamlet as a hero, saying that he was a pure, brilliant young man thrust into unfortunate circumstances. Psychological and mystical readings increased as well with the rise of Gothic literature in this period. Hamlet's madness and the ghost both attracted a lot of attention. The Romantic period viewed Hamlet as the epitome of a tragic fall. Critics of this century focused more heavily on the individual drive and internal struggle of Prince Hamlet, seeing him as more of a political rebel and intellectual than an over-sensitive melancholy. This period also introduced questions as to why Hamlet delays in killing the King. Early periods largely ignored this issue as a mere plot device. In the twentieth century, criticism branched in several directions. Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones theorized that Hamlet had an unresolved Oedipus Complex, and feminist critics introduced new points of view towards Gertrude and Ophelia. Most recently, New Historicist critics have begun looking at the play in its historical context, attempting to piece together the backdrop that created the play.

Themes and Motifs

Revenge and Hamlet's delay

Within Hamlet, the stories of five murdered father's sons are told: Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras, Pyrrhus, and Brutus. Each of them faces the question of revenge in a different way. For example, Laertes moves quickly to be "avenged most throughly of [his] father," while Fortinbras attacks Poland, rather than the guilty Denmark. Pyrrhus only stays his hand momentarily before avenging his father, Achilles, but Brutus never takes any action in his situation. Hamlet is a perfect balance in the midst of these stories, neither acting quickly nor being completely inactive.

Hamlet struggles to turn his desire for revenge into action, and spends a large portion of the play waiting rather than doing. Scholars have proposed numerous theories as to why he waits so long to kill Claudius. Some say that Hamlet feels for his victim, fearing to strike because he believes that if he kills Claudius he will be no better than him. The story of Pyrrhus, told by one of the acting troupe, for example, shows Hamlet the darker side of revenge, something he does not wish for. Hamlet frequently admires those who are swift to act, such as Laertes, who comes to avenge his father's death, but at the same time fears them for their passion, intensity, and lack of logical thought.

Hamlet's speech in act three, where he chooses not to kill Claudius in the midst of prayer, have taken a central spot in this debate. Scholars have wondered whether Hamlet is being totally honest in this scene, or whether he is rationalizing his inaction to himself. Critics of the Romantic era decided that Hamlet was merely a procrastinator, in order to avoid the belief that he truly desired Claudius' spiritual demise. Later scholars suggested that he refused to kill an unarmed man, or that he felt guilt in this moment, seeing himself as a mirror of the man he wanted to destroy. Historical discoveries, however, assert that Elizabethan ideas of revenge required spiritual and physical destruction for complete justice. Thus, for Hamlet to truly keep the oath he made to his father, he must wait for the right moment, as he explains.

The play is also full of constraint imagery. Hamlet describes Denmark as a prison, and himself as being caught in birdlime. He mocks the ability of man to bring about his own ends, and points out that some divine force molds men's aims into something other than what they intend. Other characters also speak of constraint, such as Polonius, who orders his daughter to lock herself from Hamlet's pursuit, and describes her as being tethered. This adds to the play's description of Hamlet's inability to act out his revenge.

Madness

Hamlet has been compared to the Earl of Essex, who was executed for leading a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. Essex's situation has been analyzed by scholars for its revelations into Elizabethan ideas of madness in connection with treason as they connect with Hamlet. Essex was largely seen as out of his mind by Elizabethans, and admitted to insanity on the scaffold before his death. Seen in the same context, Hamlet is quite possibly as mad as he is pretending to be, at least in an Elizabethan sense. One of the reasons Hamlet may be so difficult for modern scholars to diagnose is that Shakespeare created him under Elizabethan ideas of madness, making contemporary diagnoses inaccurate. Another explanation of madness in Shakespeare's time was demonic possession, which is altogether possible within the play as well, with its ghost.

Other Interpretations

Feminist

The characters of Ophelia and Gertrude have been interpreted in various ways.Many feminists have defended Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet. Gertrude is sexually appealling, though Hamlet denounces her for that.

Ophelia is surrounded by powerful men—her father, brother, and Hamlet. All three disappear—Laertes leaves, Hamlet abandons her, and Polonius dies. Without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia is driven into madness.

Gothic

Hamlet contains many elements that would later show up in Gothic Literature. From the growing madness of Prince Hamlet to the violent ending to the constant reminders of death, to, even, more subtly, the notions of humankind and its structures and the viewpoints on women, Hamlet evokes many things that would recur in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, widely regarded as the first piece of Gothic literature.

Performance history

Thomas Betterton as Hamlet during the Restoration Period

David Garrick as Hamlet in 1769

Further information: Shakespeare in performance

Shakespeare's day to the Interregnum

Shakespeare wrote the role of Hamlet for Richard Burbage, chief tragedian of The Lord Chamberlain's Men: an actor with a capacious memory for lines, and a wide emotional range. Hamlet appears to have been Shakespeare's fourth most popular play during his lifetime, eclipsed only by Henry VI Part 1, Richard III and Pericles. Although the story was set many centuries before, at The Globe the play was performed in Elizabethan dress.

Hamlet was acted by the crew of the ship Dragon, off Sierra Leone, in September 1607. Court performances occurred in 1619 and in 1637, the latter on January 24 at Hampton Court Palace. G R Hibbard argues that since Hamlet is second only to Falstaff among Shakespeare's characters in the number of allusions and references to him in contemporary literature, the play must have been performed with a frequency missed by the historical record.

Restoration and 18th century

The play was revived early in the Restoration era: in the division of existing plays between the two patent companies, Hamlet was the only Shakespearean favourite to be secured by Sir William Davenant's Duke's Company. David Garrick at Drury Lane produced a version which heavily adapted Shakespeare, saying: "I had sworn I would not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act. I have brought it forth without the grave-digger's trick, Osrick, & the fencing match.". The first actor known to have played Hamlet in North America was Lewis Hallam, Jr. in the American Company's production in Philadelphia in 1759.

John Philip Kemble made his Drury Lane dubut as Hamlet, in 1783. His performance was said to be twenty minutes longer than anyone else's and his lengthy pauses led to the cruel suggestion that "music should be played between the words." Sarah Siddons is the first actress known to have played Hamlet, and the part has subsequently often been played by women, to great acclaim. In 1748, Alexander Sumarokov wrote a Russian adaptation focusing on Prince Hamlet as the opposition to Claudius' tyranny: a theme which would pervade Eastern European adaptations into the twentieth century. In the years following America's independence, Thomas Abthorpe Cooper was the young nation's leading tragedian, performing Hamlet (among other plays) at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and the Park Theatre in New York. Although chided for "acknowledging acquaintances in the audience" and "inadequate memorisation of his lines", he became a national celebrity.

19th century

In the romantic and early Victorian eras, the highest-quality Shakespearean performances in the United States were tours by leading London actors, including George Frederick Cooke, Junius Brutus Booth, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready and Charles Kemble. Of these, Booth remained to make his career in the States, fathering the nation's most famous Hamlet and its most notorious actor: Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth. Charles Kemble initiated an enthusiasm for Shakespeare in the French: his 1827 Paris performance of Hamlet was viewed by leading members of the Romantic movement, including Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, who particularly admired Harriet Smithson's performance of Ophelia in the mad scenes. Edmund Kean was the first Hamlet to abandon the regal finery usually assiciated with the role in favour of a plain black costume, and to play Hamlet as serious and introspective. The actor-managers of the Victorian era (including Kean, Phelps, Macready and Irving) staged Shakespeare in a grand manner, with elaborate scenery and costumes. In stark contrast, William Poel's production of the first quarto text in 1881 was an early attempt at reconstructing Elizabethan theatre conditions, and was simply set against red curtains.

The tendency of the actor-managers to play up the importance of their own central character did not always meet with the critics' approval. Shaw's praise for Forbes-Robertson's performance ends with a sideswipe at Irving: "The story of the play was perfectly intelligible, and quite took the attention of the audience off the principal actor at moments. What is the Lyceum coming to?" Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in her popular 1899 production, and in contrast to the "effeminate" view of the central character which usually lay behind a female casting, she described her character as "manly and resolute, but nonetheless thoughtful... [he] thinks before he acts, a trait indicative of great strength and great spiritual power." Hamlet had toured in Germany within five years of Shakespeare's death, and by the middle of the nineteenth century had become so assimilated into German culture as to spawn Ferdinand Freiligrath's assertion that "Germany is Hamlet" From the 1850s in India, the Parsi theatre tradition transformed Hamlet into folk performances, with dozens of songs added. In the United States, Edwin Booth's Hamlet became a thetrical legend. He was described as "like the dark, mad, dreamy, mysterious hero of a poem... [acted] in an ideal manner, as far removed as possible from the plane of actual life." Booth played Hamlet for 100 nights in the 1864/5 season at the Winter Garden Theatre, inaugurating the era of long-run Shakespeare in America.

20th century

Apart from some nineteenth-century visits by western troupes, the first professional performance of Hamlet in Japan was Otojiro Kawakami's 1903 Shimpa ("new school theatre") adaptation. Hamlet was successfully translated by Shoyo Tsubouchi who produced a performance in 1911, blending Shingeki ("new drama") and Kabuki styles. This hybrid-genre reached its height in Fukuda Tsuneari's 1955 Hamlet. In 1998, Yukio Ninagawa produced an acclaimed version of Hamlet in the style of Noh theatre, which he took to London.

Hamlet, a political play, is often played with contemporary political overtones: Leopold Jessner's 1926 production at the Berlin Staatstheater portrayed Claudius' court as a parody of the corrupt and fawning court of Kaiser Wilhelm. Hamlet is also a psychological play: John Barrymore introduced Freudian overtones into the closet-scene and mad-scene of his landmark 1922 production in New York, which ran for 101 nights (breaking Booth's record). He took the production to the Haymarket in London in 1925, and it greatly influenced subsequent performances by John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. Gielgud has played the central role many times: his 1936 New York production ran for 136 performances, leading to the accolade that he was "the finest interpreter of the role since Barrymore." Although "posterity has treated Maurice Evans less kindly", throughout the 1930s and 1940s it was he, not Gieldgud or Olivier, who was regarded as the leading interpreter of Shakespeare in the United States, and in the 1938/9 season he presented Broadway's first uncut Hamlet, running four and a half hours.

In 1937, Tyrone Guthrie directed Olivier in a Hamlet at the Old Vic based on psychiatrist Ernest Jones' "Oedipus complex" theory of Hamlet's behaviour. Olivier was involved in another landmark production, directing Peter O'Toole as Hamlet in the inaugural performance of the newly formed National Theatre, in 1963.

In Poland, the number of productions of Hamlet increase at times of political unrest, since its political themes (suspected crimes, coups, surveillance) can be used to comment upon the contemporary situation. Similarly, Czech directors have used the play at times of occupation: a 1941 Vinohrady Theatre production was said to have "emphasised, with due caution, the helpless situation of an intellectual attempting to endure in a ruthless environment." In China, performances of Hamlet have political significance: Gu Wuwei's 1916 The Usurper of State Power, an amalgam of Hamlet and Macbeth, was an attack on Yuan Shikai's attempt to overthrow the republic. In 1942, Jiao Juyin directed the play in a Confucian temple in Sichuan Province, to which the government had retreated from the advancing Japanese. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the protests at Tiananmen Square, Lin Zhaohua staged a 1990 Hamlet in which the prince was an ordinary individual tortured by a loss of meaning. The actors playing Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius exchanged places at crucial moments in the performance: incuding the moment of Claudius' death, at which the actor usually associated with Hamlet fell to the ground.

Adaptations and cultural references

Further information: References to Hamlet

Screen versions

Main article: Hamlet on screen

There are at least 65 motion picture and television versions of the play dating back to the earliest days of silent movies. The oldest is probably Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was 60 when his performance was filmed in 1913. Other actors who have played Hamlet on film or television include Laurence Olivier, Maximillian Schell, Derek Jacobi, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Nicol Williamson,Ethan Hawke, and Richard Chamberlain. Many of the motion picture versions, however, did not receive a wide release at all, unknown to even the most rabid cinema enthusiasts and/or Shakespeare lovers. The only film versions (so far) to receive wide release in the U.S. (not counting the silent ones) are the ones starring Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, and Ethan Hawke, respectively. Jacobi and Chamberlain portrayed Hamlet in television productions of the play.

Musical adaptations

A rock musical adaptation of the play entitled Rockabye Hamlet had a brief Broadway run in 1976.

The Scottish singer Adam McNaughtan put Hamlet (Oor Hamlet) into song on his 1988 album "Words Words Words".

Bibliography

• Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Phillip Edwards, ed., Cambridge, 1985, 2003. (New Cambridge Shakespeare)
• Hamlet. G.R. Hibbard, ed., Oxford, 1987. (Oxford World's Classics)
• Hamlet, The Texts of 1603, 1604, and 1623. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds, 2 vols, Thompson Learning, 2006. (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)
• Brown, John Russell, Hamlet: a guide to the text and its theatrical life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (Shakespeare Handbooks)
• Crystal, David, & Ben Crystal, The Shakespeare Miscellany. New York, 2005.
• Dawson, Anthony B., Hamlet. Manchester University Press, 1995. (Shakespeare in Performance)
• Duthie, G. I., The "Bad" Quarto of "Hamlet," A Critical Study, Cambridge University Press, 1941.
• Eliot, T.S., ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays in Poetry and Criticism. Faber & Gwyer, 1920.
• Foakes, R. A., Hamlet versus Lear. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Halliday, F. E., A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
• Lennard, John, Shakespeare: Hamlet. Humanities-Ebooks, 2007. (Literature Insights)
• Pennington, Michael, Hamlet: A User’s Guide. Nick Hern Books, 1996.
• Tomm, Nigel Shakespeare's Hamlet Remixed. BookSurge, 2006.
• Wilson, John Dover, The Manuscript of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Cambridge, 1934.
• -- What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge University Press, 1935, 1959.

External links

• Hamlet on the Ramparts - from MIT's Shakespeare Electronic Archive
• Hamletworks.org A highly-respected scholarly resource with multiple versions of Hamlet, numerous commentaries, concordances, facsimiles, and more.
• ISE - Internet Shakespeare Editions provides authentic transcripts and facsimilies of the First Quarto, Second Quarto, and First Folio versions of the play.
• Hamlet (Regained) has the complete Hamlet text, modernized, side-by-side with a modern English translation, and extensive notes.
• Hamlet - plain vanilla text at Project Gutenberg.
• Hamlet Summary Literature summary of the play.
• "Nine Hamlets" — An analysis of the play and 9 film versions, at the Bright Lights Film Journal
• The Switzer's Guide to Hamlet An Extra's view of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2004 production of Hamlet with Toby Stephens in the title role
• Original text and Modern English translation
• "The Hamlet Weblog" - a weblog about the play.
• "The Women Who Have Played Hamlet" - Interview with Tony Howard on research into female Hamlets
• "Character of Life" in Hamlet from Humanscience wikia
• "HyperHamlet" - A project at the University of Basel