Hamlet

• 1. Introduction

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  Hamlet is the longest play William Shakespeare ever wrote, and it might require more than four hours to stage. A typical Elizabethan play needed two to three hours. The Second Quarto of 1604 runs to 28,628 words. By contrast, the First Quarto of 1603 holds just 15,983, barely more than half of that text. These numbers point to a strange truth at the heart of this tragedy. There is no single, settled Hamlet. Three different early versions survive, each carrying lines the others lack. Set in Denmark, the play follows Prince Hamlet as he tries to avenge his father, murdered by his uncle Claudius. Yet the story of how this work came to be, and how it has been read, is as restless as the prince himself. Where did the legend begin? Why has the play drawn the attention of psychoanalysts, feminists, novelists, and rebels under occupation? And how does a single role keep luring actors across four centuries and nearly two hundred countries?

• 2. Buried Legends

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  Hamlet-like legends appear in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia, so widely that the core hero-as-fool theme may be Indo-European in origin. The anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki gives the murdered king two sons, Hroar and Helgi, who survive in disguise under false names rather than feigning madness. The Roman legend of Brutus offers another precursor, recorded in two separate Latin works. Its hero Lucius, meaning shining or light, changes his name to Brutus, meaning dull or stupid, and plays the fool to escape his father's fate before slaying King Tarquinius. A 17th-century Nordic scholar named Torfaeus compared the Icelandic hero Amlodi and the hero Prince Ambales to Shakespeare's Hamlet. The shared features include feigned madness, the accidental killing of the king's counsellor in the mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of the uncle. Many of these strands twist together in the 13th-century Life of Amleth by Saxo Grammaticus, part of Gesta Danorum. Written in Latin and widely available in Shakespeare's day, it carries the prince's feigned madness, the mother's hasty marriage to the usurper, the killing of a hidden spy, and the prince swapping the execution of two retainers for his own. In 1570, Francois de Belleforest translated a reasonably faithful version of Saxo's story into French in his Histoires tragiques. Belleforest nearly doubled the length and introduced the hero's melancholy, a shade of feeling that would deepen in the prince to come.

• 3. The Lost Play

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  One theory holds that Shakespeare's main source was an earlier play, now lost, known today as the Ur-Hamlet. It would have existed by 1589 and would have included a ghost. Some believe Thomas Kyd wrote it; some believe Shakespeare did. Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men, may have bought that play and performed a version before he reworked it. No copy survives, so its language cannot be compared with the known works of any putative author. In 1936, Andrew Cairncross suggested that, until more is known, it may be assumed Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet. Eric Sams listed reasons for Shakespeare's authorship. Harold Jenkins disagreed, finding no grounds to think it an early Shakespeare work later rewritten. Professor Terri Bourus, one of three general editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, argued in 2016 that Shakespeare was interested in sixteenth-century French literature from the very beginning of his career. In her paper Enter Shakespeare's Young Hamlet, 1589, she wrote that he did not need Thomas Kyd to pre-digest Belleforest's histoire of Amleth and spoon-feed it to him. She considers the hypothesized Ur-Hamlet to be Shakespeare's Q1 text, drawn directly from Belleforest. The exact mix of sources stays unknown. Yet elements of Belleforest's version that are absent from Saxo do appear in the play. Another tempting link has been mostly rejected by scholars: Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, who died in 1596 at age eleven. Most note that the name Hamnet was popular at the time. Stephen Greenblatt disagrees, observing that the Stratford neighbour Hamnet Sadler was often written as Hamlet Sadler, the names virtually interchangeable in the loose orthography of the age.

• 4. Three Texts, No Text

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  In 1603, the booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundell published, and Valentine Simmes printed, the so-called bad first quarto, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. The next year Nicholas Ling published, and James Roberts printed, the second quarto under the same name. Some copies are dated 1605, so Q2 is often dated 1604/5. In 1623, Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard published The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke in the First Folio, the first edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works. Q2 omits about 77 lines found in F1, most likely to avoid offending James I's queen, Anne of Denmark. Each version contains material the others lack. Early editors, beginning with Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and Lewis Theobald in 1733, combined Q2 and F1 to build one inclusive text. Scarcely 200 lines are identical between the two. Theobald's full-text approach became standard and still shapes editorial practice. Some scholars now call an authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal, arguing there are texts of this play but no text. Q1 was discovered in 1823, and only two copies are extant. Jenkins called it corrupt, yet it has value. It carries stage directions, such as Ophelia entering with a lute and her hair down, that reveal real stage practice. It contains an entire scene, usually labelled 4.6, found in neither Q2 nor F1. Its language is its weakness, never plainer than in the famous soliloquy: To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. Q1 may be a memorial reconstruction by an actor in a minor role, most likely Marcellus. The idea that it is fit for the stage has led to at least 28 Q1 productions since 1881.

• 5. Appearance And Reality

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  The contrast between appearance and reality runs through the play as a significant theme. Hamlet is presented with an image, then reads its darker meaning, beginning with his doubt about the reality of the ghost. He takes on what is called an antic disposition, appearing mad though he is not. The same contrast surfaces in the spying scenes. Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes. Claudius and Polonius watch Ophelia as she meets Hamlet. Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on the prince. Hamlet turns the device back on his step-father with the play-within-a-play, exposing a hidden nature. There is no subplot. Instead, the affairs of Polonius, his daughter Ophelia, and his son Laertes echo and contrast with Hamlet's own dealings with madness, love, and a dead father. The soliloquies never interrupt the plot; they are the highlights of each block of action, where time stops and the meaning of action is questioned. The graveyard scene eases tension before the catastrophe. Holding the skull, Hamlet no longer fears damnation and accepts that there is a divinity that shapes our ends. By act five his enquiring mind has settled on a plan. In a dialogue with Horatio he answers his two earlier soliloquies on suicide: We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. The readiness is all.

• 6. Saying Several Things At Once

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  Much of Hamlet's language is courtly, the elaborate and witty discourse recommended by Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier, which advised royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. Osric and Polonius especially honour this injunction, while Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers speak more simply. Of all the characters, Hamlet has the greatest rhetorical skill. In nine memorable words he deploys both anaphora and asyndeton: to die: to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream. He can also be precise, as when he tells his mother, But I have that within which passes show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe. Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet by showing how a character's language can say several contradictory things at once. She points to his advice to Ophelia, get thee to a nunnery, claiming it means both a place of chastity and a brothel. Harold Jenkins disagrees, finding no support for that slang meaning and reading the nunnery as a sanctuary from marriage and from the world's contamination. Thompson and Taylor also call the brothel idea wrong, since Hamlet is trying to deter Ophelia from breeding. Hamlet's first words are a pun. When Claudius calls him my cousin Hamlet, and my son, he replies aside, A little more than kin, and less than kind. The rhetorical device hendiadys appears throughout, as in Ophelia's th'expectancy and rose of the fair state. Linguist George T. Wright suggests it was used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation.

• 7. The Hamlet Complex

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  Sigmund Freud first published his thoughts on Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, as a footnote to a discussion of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Freud argued that falling in love with one parent and hating the other is a common impulse in early childhood and an important source of later neurosis. He named these ideas the Oedipus complex, and at one point considered calling it the Hamlet complex. Freud said the play is based on Hamlet's hesitation in accomplishing the task of revenge, while the text gives no cause or motive. In his reading, Claudius has taken Hamlet's father's place with his mother and so realized Hamlet's own repressed childhood desires. The loathing meant to drive revenge is replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples. John Barrymore's long-running 1922 performance in New York, directed by Thomas Hopkins, broke new ground in its Freudian approach, imbuing the prince with virility and lust. Beginning in 1910, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer, developed these ideas into the 1949 book Hamlet and Oedipus. Several productions then staged the closet scene, where Hamlet confronts his mother, in a sexual light. In 1937, Tyrone Guthrie directed Laurence Olivier in a Jones-inspired Hamlet at The Old Vic, ideas Olivier reused in his 1948 film. Joshua Rothman has written in The New Yorker that the story is told wrong when we say Freud used the Oedipus complex to understand Hamlet. It was the other way around, he argues; Hamlet helped Freud understand, and perhaps even invent, psychoanalysis. In the 1950s, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan analyzed the play to illustrate his concepts, postulating that the human psyche is determined by structures of language.

• 8. A Role For The Ages

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  Shakespeare almost certainly wrote the role of Hamlet for Richard Burbage, the chief tragedian of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a man with a capacious memory for lines and a wide emotional range. Judging by reprints, the play was his fourth most popular during his lifetime, eclipsed only by Henry IV Part 1, Richard III, and Pericles. When the Puritan government closed all theatres during the Interregnum, a playlet called The Grave-Makers, based on act 5 scene 1, was performed illegally. After the Restoration, Sir William Davenant's Duke's Company secured Hamlet as its only Shakespearean favourite, and Thomas Betterton played the Dane until he was 74. David Garrick at Drury Lane vowed to rescue the play from the rubbish of the fifth act, cutting the grave-digger, Osric, and the fencing match. Lewis Hallam Jr. became the first known to play Hamlet in North America, in Philadelphia in 1759. Sarah Siddons was the first actress known to play him, and many women since have taken the part as a breeches role. Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in her popular 1899 London production, calling her character manly and resolute, but nonetheless thoughtful. Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth, played Hamlet for 100 nights in the 1864/5 season at the Winter Garden Theatre. Konstantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig collaborated on the Moscow Art Theatre's production of 1911-12, famous for Craig's large abstract screens. The play has long carried political weight. Leopold Jessner's 1926 Berlin production cast Claudius's court as a parody of Kaiser Wilhelm's. In China, Gu Wuwei's 1916 The Usurper of State Power, an amalgam of Hamlet and Macbeth, attacked Yuan Shikai. The role still draws the living. Ian Charleson, seriously ill from AIDS, performed it from the 9th of October to the 13th of November 1989 at the Olivier Theatre and died eight weeks after his last performance. Ian McKellen called it the perfect Hamlet. In 2014, the Globe Theatre set out to perform Hamlet in every country on earth, and over two years it reached 197 countries.