Just as directors have felt compelled to cut-and sometimes to rearrange-in order to stage Hamlet successfully, so scholars and critics have neglected those aspects of the play that have threatened to hinder their interpretations of its central character. Within this, the emphasis is placed squarely on Hamlet the morally and philosophically significant character at the expense of Hamlet the ambiguous and frequently bewildering work of drama. But a disconcerting fact remains: Shaftesbury was the first, or one of the first, to delineate an approach to Hamlet that has held the field since the second half of the eighteenth century. Faced with such comments, one might respond that Shaftesbury was a woefully bad reader of vernacular literature, and that his over-fastidious tastes are precisely the sort of thing that Shakespeare enjoyed turning on its head. It may properly be said of this Play, if I mistake not, that it has only One Character or principal Part”.
#Hamlet play series#
Hamlet was particularly noteworthy in this respect, and was to be viewed as “almost one continu’d Moral: a Series of deep Reflections, drawn from one Mouth, upon the Subject of one single Accident and Calamity, naturally fitted to move Horrour and Compassion. And yet Shakespeare was not to be dismissed out of hand: “the Justness of his Moral, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters” meant that he could help to nurture the self-examination and self-discourse on which Shaftesbury believed moral knowledge must be based.
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Surveying the development of English drama from the vantage of the early 1700s, he lamented Shakespeare’s “natural Rudeness, his unpolish’d Stile, his antiquated Phrase and Wit, his want of Method and Coherence, and his Deficiency in almost all the Graces and Ornaments of this kind of Writing”. Before Hamlet himself dies, he manages to stab Claudius and to entrust the clearing of his honour to his friend Horatio.įor a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare’s entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s plays and poems.Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was no fan of Shakespeare. Gertrude, also present at the duel, drinks from the cup of poison that Claudius has had placed near Hamlet to ensure his death. 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. Claudius is only too eager to arrange the duel. 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. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library CC-BY-SA 4.0 ( A Britannica Publishing Partner) See all videos for this article Short excerpts from a Folger Shakespeare Library production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, with critical analysis by the cast and crew. 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. 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.
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The ghost of his father appears to Hamlet, informs him that he was poisoned by Claudius, and commands Hamlet to avenge his death. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library CC-BY-SA 4.0 ( A Britannica Publishing Partner) See all videos for this articleĪs 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. This video provides a brief synopsis of the plot of Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
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