Hamlet by William Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare, or the “Bard” as people fondly call him, permeates almost all aspects of our society. He can be found in our classrooms, on our televisions, in our theatres, and in our cinemas. Speaking to us through his plays, Shakespeare comments on his life and culture, as well as our own. Actors still regularly perform his plays on the modern stage and screen. The 1990s, for example, saw the release of cinematic versions of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and many more of his works. In addition to the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays as he wrote them, other writers have modernized his works to attract new audiences. For example, West Side Story places Romeo and Juliet in New York City, and A Thousand Acres sets King Lear in Iowa corn country. Beyond adaptations and productions, his life and works have captured our cultural imagination. The twentieth century witnessed the production of a play and film about two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and a fictional movie about Shakespeare’s early life and poetic inspiration in Shakespeare in Love. Despite his monumental presence in our culture, Shakespeare remains enigmatic. He does not tell us which plays he wrote alone, on which plays he collaborated with other playwrights, or which versions of his plays to read and perform. Furthermore, with only a handful of documents available about his life, he does not tell us much about Shakespeare the person, forcing critics and scholars to look to historical references to uncover the true-life great dramatist. Anti-Stratfordians — modern scholars who question the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays — have used this lack of information to argue that William Shakespeare either never existed or, if he did exist, did not write any of the plays we attribute to him. They believe that another historical figure, such as Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth I, used the name as a cover. Whether or not a man named William Shakespeare ever actually existed is ultimately secondary to the recognition that the group of plays bound together by that name does exist and continues to educate, enlighten, and entertain us

Introduction of book

Hamlet is the first tragedy in Shakespeare's series of great tragedies which is believed to be published in between 1601 and 1603. This play is one of his successful, perfect and best plays ever known. Hamlet centers on the problems arising from love, death, and betrayal, without offering the audience a decisive and positive resolution to these complications for Hamlet himself is ambiguous and the answers to these problems are complex.

William Shakespeare

In Shakespearean tragedies, the characters are presented with abnormal state of mind. But Shakespeare does not allow this abnormal state to be dominant action. It provokes the suffering to the protagonist. The supernatural elements in the dramas of Shakespeare are subservient to the main action. It provokes the protagonist to do certain actions. Shakespeare links the supernatural elements with the natural. Hamartia leads the downfall of the characters in Shakespearean plays. Hamartia is a kind of force that is already inherited in characters which works as a spiritual force. And it ultimately leads to destruction. The use of this force makes the Shakespearean tragedy different from the Greek tragedies.

It was a common tradition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to borrow ideas and stories from earlier literary works. Shakespeare could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark, a prose work by the French writer and Thomas Kyd's Ur-Hamlet.

In the original version Hamlet’s uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The prince pretends to be weak to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge. But, Shakespearean version varies making his Hamlet a philosophical-minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain.

Shakespearean Hamlet can be studied as a Revenge play influenced by Seneca, the father of this genre. Shakespeare has revived the Senecan tragedy, in this sense, it is a Renaissance play. Here, Shakespeare uses the scene of violence, killing, murdering and bloodshed as Seneca used in his tragedy to satisfy the need of Elizabethan audiences. This revival made it Renaissance play. As a Renaissance character, Hamlet is suffering from the hangover between the medieval belief of superstition and reason, the belief of Renaissance. But, as a Renaissance student, he doubts on the appearance of the ghost. Hanging on the verge of scientific and superstitious belief is one of the features of Renaissance man. He doubts on the ghosts and thinks that it may be devil attempts to lure him to the crime. As a Renaissance character, Hamlet feels deeply and watches others to see what their feelings are. As a student of psychology, he experiments the crime through the similar story that matches to his father's killing. He wants to take revenge against his uncle when the crime is identified. And man centered philosophy of the Renaissance could be seen in the figure of Hamlet.

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