Hamlet

April 2019 

Hamlet 

Shakespeare, William. "Hamlet." The Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Stanley Wells, Ed. Gary Taylor.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 683-718. 

It would be hard to name a play with more influence on western culture than William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has been performed almost continuously since first being written over four hundred years ago, and reinterpreted almost as many times as it has been shown to audiences. Structurally, Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, a popular genre of play in the English Renaissance. But at its heart, Hamlet touches on things deeply ingrained in the human subconscious: the very nature of life and death, good and evil, and what role we have to play in fate or in justice. 

Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is charged by his father’s ghost to get revenge against his Uncle for killing his father and the usurping Hamlet’s throne. Though lots of death and violence do commence (what the Elizabethan audience was expecting) Hamlet is far from a conventional revenge tragedy. Hamlet does not glory in his quest for revenge, his anger against his unjust uncle is checked by a long investigation into the claims of the ghost. Hamlet is a revenging hero who will not act unless he is certain that what he is doing is just. 

The play does not just go into the action of Hamlet’s revenge, but also the anguish of his mind. There are many beautifully crafted speeches of Hamlet contemplating the deeper questions of humanity as he tries to navigate his pain, anger and the lose-lose situation that his father’s ghost has put him in. These speeches and the honesty of Hamlet’s pain make this play more about every person who suffers than it is about a vengeful prince in Denmark, which speaks of the timeless quality of the piece.