Hamlet

(circa 1603-1604)

William Shakespeare
Source: www.sparknotes.com
And other web resources
• FULL TITLE · The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark
• TYPE OF WORK · Play
• GENRE · Tragedy, revenge tragedy
• LANGUAGE · English
• TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · London, England,
early seventeenth century (probably 1600–1602)
• DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · 1603, in a
pirated quarto edition titled The Tragicall
Historie of Hamlet; 1604 in a superior quarto
edition
 Source of the play
• As was common practice during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare borrowed for
his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works.
• He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several
possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin
history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus
‘Gesta Danorum’(History of Danes) and a prose
work by the French writer François de Belleforest,
entitled Histoires Tragiques.
• Thomas Kyd’s Ur-Hamlet
 Original story of Hamlet…
• The raw material that Shakespeare
appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of
a Danish prince whose uncle murders the
prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims
the throne. The prince pretends to be feeble-
minded to throw his uncle off guard, then
manages to kill his uncle in revenge.
 Shakespearean touch…
• Shakespeare’s poetic imagination gave
universal characteristics to tropical prince of
Denmark.
• He changed the emphasis of this story entirely,
making his Hamlet a philosophical-minded
prince who delays taking action because his
knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain.
 Hamlet: Characters
• PROTAGONIST · Hamlet
• Other Characters:
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, and mother to Hamlet.
• The Ghost appears in the image of Hamlet's father, the late King Hamlet (Old
Hamlet).
• Polonius ("Corambis" in "Q1") is Claudius's chief counsellor, and the father of Ophelia
and Laertes.
• Laertes is the son of Polonius, and has returned to Elsinore from Paris.
• Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, and Laertes's sister, who lives with her father
at Elsinore. She is in love with Hamlet.
• 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 Norwegian crown prince, who assumes the throne of Denmark after
Hamlet's death.
 Plot Overview
• Plot Overview:
• MAJOR CONFLICT · Hamlet feels a
responsibility to avenge his father’s murder by
his uncle Claudius, but Claudius is now the
king and thus well protected. Moreover,
Hamlet struggles with his doubts about
whether he can trust the ghost and whether
killing Claudius is morally appropriate thing to
do.
• RISING ACTION · The ghost appears to Hamlet
and tells Hamlet to revenge his murder;
Hamlet feigns madness to his intentions;
Hamlet stages the mousetrap play(play-within-
play); Hamlet forgoes the opportunity to kill
Claudius while he is praying.
• CLIMAX · When Hamlet stabs Polonius
through the arras in Act III, scene iv, he
commits himself to overtly violent action and
brings himself into unavoidable conflict with
the king. Another possible climax comes at the
end of Act IV, scene iv, when Hamlet resolves
to commit himself fully to violent revenge.
• FALLING ACTION · Hamlet is sent to England
to be killed; Hamlet returns to Denmark and
confronts Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral; the
fencing match; the deaths of the royal family
Play full of unresolved mysteries…
• Shakespeare went far beyond making
uncertainty a personal idiosyncrasy of
Hamlet’s, introducing a number of important
ambiguities into the play that even the
audience cannot resolve with certainty.
• For instance:
• whether Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudius’s
guilt;
• whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he
spurns her, in Act III;
• whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident;
• whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or seeks to
deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most
importantly,
• whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking
revenge on his uncle.
• Whether there is after life with rewards & punishment
• Whether justice can be found in this life or after death
• Whether we can ever know the truth of our situation
and then act with moral responsibility
• Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes
riding on some of these questions are
enormous—the actions of these characters
bring disaster upon an entire kingdom.
• At the end of the play, it is not even clear
whether justice has been achieved.
 Questions:
• By modifying unremarkable revenge story of
Prince of Denmark into a tragic play, how did
Shakespeare made it universally appealing
Tragedy?
– Renaissance spirit of Humanism
– Philosophical and meta-physical questions
pertaining to life & death, life after death…
 Renaissance spirit infused in revenge story…

• By modifying his source materials in this way,

Shakespeare was able to take an
unremarkable revenge story and make it
resonate with the most fundamental themes
and problems of the Renaissance.
• Renaissance Humanism:
 Rise of Humanism…
• The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that
began in fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of
classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to
the Middle Ages.
• The scholars who enthusiastically rediscovered
these classical texts were motivated by an
educational and political ideal called (in Latin)
humanitas—the idea that all of the capabilities and
virtues peculiar to human beings should be studied
and developed to their furthest extent.
• Renaissance humanism, as this movement is now
called, generated a new interest in human
experience, and also an enormous optimism about
the potential scope of human understanding.
• Hamlet’s famous speech in Act II,
• “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving
how express and admirable, in action how like an
angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty
of the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297)
• Directly based upon one of the major texts of the
Italian humanists, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on
the Dignity of Man.
 Main objective of Humanism…
• For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating
reason was to lead to a better understanding
of how to act, and their fondest hope was that
the coordination of action and understanding
would lead to great benefits for society as a
whole.
 Its spread and skepticism….
• As the Renaissance spread to other countries
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
however, a more skeptical strain of humanism
developed, stressing the limitations of human
understanding.
• For example,…
Limitations of human experience…
• the sixteenth-century French humanist, Michel de
Montaigne, was no less interested in studying
human experiences than the earlier humanists
were, but he maintained that the world of
experience was a world of appearances, and that
human beings could never hope to see past those
appearances into the “realities” that lie behind
them.
• This is the world in which Shakespeare places his
characters.
• Hamlet is faced with the difficult task of correcting an injustice
that he can never have sufficient knowledge of—a dilemma that is
by no means unique, or even uncommon.
“The time is out of joint, O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.”
• And while Hamlet is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be
answered because they concern supernatural and metaphysical
matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the difficulty of
knowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence,
their motivations, their feelings, their relative states of sanity or
insanity.
“To be or not to be, that is the question”
• The world of other people is a world of appearances, and Hamlet
is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty of living in that world.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (I v).
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all
 Question:
• Write brief note on various theme, motifs and
symbols in the play ‘Hamlet’.
– THEMES · The impossibility of certainty; the complexity
of action; the mystery of death; the nation as a
diseased body
– MOTIFS · Incest and incestuous desire; ears and
hearing; death and suicide; darkness and the
supernatural; misogyny
– SYMBOLS · The ghost (the spiritual consequences of
death); Yorick’s skull (the physical consequences of
death)