Cezara Dragomir, group 4

Hamlet
An Introduction

Up to the end of the First World War and for some time thereafter, Hamlet was
generally regarded as the greatest of all Shakespeares plays, the most exciting ,
absorbing, and profound drama ever written.Since then the balance of academic
judgement, as distinct from interest, has tipped somewhat in favour of King Lear; but
the theatre-going public remains unconvinced; so does the common reader; and so
do the actors. Hamlet is still the most often produced of the plays, as well as the
most widely read; and the role of the Prince continues to be the ultimate goal to
which actors aspire. Moreover, Hamlet himself is part of the consciousness of the
modern world in a more intimate and familiar way than King Lear has ever been or
seems likely to become. Of all Shakespeares tragic heroes, the Prince of Denmark,
his rank notwithstanding, is the one whose experience comes closest to and
impinges most intimately on that of men in general. It has, despite its highly unusual
and , at times, almost bizarre nature, a representative quality about it. Spectators
and readers alike feel drawn to identify themselves with Hamlet.
Yet, while it has this universal appeal, Hamlet is also for many the most
personal of the plays, conveying , as does no other, a sense of the playwrights
involvement with his own creation. In part this is due, no doubt, to the remarkable
similarities between the great central soliloquy in it, To be or not to be, and Sonnet
66 , Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, which may well lead one to think
that at this point in the action Hamlets sentiments are very close to Shakespeares
own.But this is by no means the end of the connection.There is a strong temptation
to take the Princes views on the act of acting as a faithful reflection of his authors;
and, still more fascinanting, the very length of the tragedy, even in the Folio version,

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almost invites one to speculate that Shakespeare composed it, at the compulsive
urging of his daimon, for his own satisfaction. The last act in particular cries out for
some such explanation; for into it he brings, three entirely new figures: two Clowns,
for one of whom death is simply a means of livelihood; and the empty-headed fop
Osric. It is almost as though the creative impulse refuses, for once, to heed the
practical limitations and demands of the theatre .In the very process of bringing his
play to an end Shakespeare expands its reach and significance.He cannot let go of
it, and it will not let go of him.
Universal, yet with pronounced overtones of the personal and the private
about it, Hamlet is timeless in its preoccupation with the dilemmas and the
uncertainties that are the heart of life, and, simultaneously , very much of its own
time.It belongs to that period in the history of England and of Europe when the
assurances of the Elizabethan world, which had so much in common with the
mediaeval world, were being invaded and eroded by the new doubt, as D.G. James
calls it, which is so characteristic of the career as a practising dramatist, it comes as
the climax to three or four years of extraordinary fertility and achievement.
Exactly when Hamlet was composed depends in part on which Hamlet is
under consideration, for the play exists in three different forms. The relationships
between the First Quarto, published in 1603, the Second Quarto, published in 16041605, and the text of the tragedy that appeared in the First Folio of 1623 are
complicated and controversial.They are discussed in detail in the Textual Introduction
to this edition , where reasons are given for thinking that the Second Quarto
represents Shakespeares first draft of his play; that the Folio text is essentially his
revision of that first draft , together with some additions to it; and that the First Quarto
is a reported version of an abridgement of this revised text.
It has already been suggested in this introduction that Hamlet belongs to a
time when old certainties and long established ways of thinking began to collide with
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new doubts and revolutionary modes of thinking.The story that lies behind the play,
and to which its action ultimately goes back, might have been designed to produce
just such a collision when transferred, as Shakespeare transferred it, to a
Renaissance setting. The court where Hamlet unfolds is a Renaissance court , the
seat of a centralized personal government.Indubitably Danish in its explicit
references to Elsinore, in its close relations with Norway, and in its conformity to the
popular notion of the Danes, current in the England of the later sixteenth century, as
a nation much given to drinking, it is, simultaneously, in its preoccupation with
statecraft, intrigur, assassination, poisoning and lechery, decidedly in keeping with
the mental picture that many in the original audience for the play appear to have had
of Italy.Moreover, the Prince himself, a student of the University of Wittenberg, the
home of his illustrious predecessor among tragic heroes, Marlowes Dr. Faustus, is in
many ways the embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of lhuomo universale.
From the outset Hamlet was an unqualified success in the theatre.It is true
that no record has come to light of its being put in at the Globe, and that we have but
two references to its being staged at Court, in 1619 and 1637, but there is no
shortage of other evidence.
Unlike so many of Shakespeares other plays, Hamlet underwent no radical
alteration after the Restoration.It was not adapted; its story line was left untouched.
It was , however, very heavily cut,improved, in that many of its coarser
expressions were refined; and modernized.
The Players Quarto recognizes that by 1676 there were two Hamlet, not one..
On the one hand, there was the play script, a kind of quarry from which the theatre
manager might extract whatever he thought most suitable to make up an evenings
entertainment, provided, of course, that he included in that entertainment those
scenes, such as that in the graveyard, which no audience would forgo. This attitude
to the text was to remain the theatre tradition for the next two hundred years, and has
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not, for sound practical reasons, been completely superseded even now.Hamlet is a
very long play, especially when one recognizes that laconic stage directions, such as
They play in the duel scene, may cover actions that last for minutes.On the other
hand, however, there was the Shakespearian text, already establishing itself as a
literary masterpiece , which no reader of the play would forgo.
Full of riddles and paradoxical enigmatic statements, Hamlet is an even
greater paradox than any of those it contains.As its popularity in the theatre so amply
demonstrates, it appeals to all sorts and conditions of men.Yet, at the same time,
much in it seems designed for a rather select audience, for spectators who were
disposed to consider curiously and ha time in which to do so.Closely connected with
this paradox is another.Hamlet is, as we all know, a play in which the soliloquy is
exceptionally proeminent.Time after time, the action pauses while the hero gives vent
to his feelings , works put a plan, or speculates on the human condition in general.
Nevertheless, its basic appeal is to the curiosity of its audience, to the elementary
desire to find out what will happen next in the unremitting battle of wits between the
two mighty opposites, Hamlet and the King, as the advantage shifts from one to
other and back again.Nor is this all.The plays main concern is with death.The story it
tells, as distinct from the action it dramatizes, begins with a single combat between
the old King of Denmark and the old King of Norway, in which the latter is killed. It
moves thence to the murder of the old King of Denmark by his brother Claudius. And
only when all this has happened does the play proper start. As it reaches its end,
Horatio, with four bodies lying at his feet and five other corpses, including that of old
Hamlet, at the back of his mind, summarizes the main events in Hamlets story.
It all sounds like a dismal, dreary, senseless chain of activity , nothing more
than yet another instance of the wickedness and folly of mankind with which we are
all too familiar. Yet none of these adjectives applies to the tragedy Shakespeare has
made out of it all.Instead, that tragedy comes over to us as an intensely exciting,
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significant, and positive experience. It means something , even though, or perhaps

because , that something admits of no ready or simple definition.
Hamlet, despite its concern with death, is bursting with life.
It would be hard to think of anything less like a classical tragedy that Hamlet.
In it the Elizabethan tendency to all-inclusiveness is pushed to the limit by a
playwright who is fully conscious that he is doing just that.Polonius systematic and
unrelenting attempt to define the categories into which plays can be slotted
culminates in the absurdity of tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; yet even this
critical portmanteau is not big enough to hold the play in which it so appropriately
occurs, since it makes no mention of satire, epic, parody, and burlesque, nor does it
find room for a critique of acting styles and an extended topical reference to the War
of the Theatres.Moreover, Polonius takes no account of the pronounced lyrical
element in the play to which he belongs, althought Ophelias songs in Act 4 go far
towards anticipating the ballad operas of the eighteenth century.Hamlet himself may
question whether life is worth living, and reject love because it leads only to the
breeding of sinners; but the play in which he does this bears eloquent witness to its
authors fertility of invention and to his exuberant delight in the sheer variety of
human nature.There may or may not be more than meets the eye in the Princes
answer to the fishing Polonius, Youre a fishmonger.What is certain is that in the
theatre it is hilariously funny.The merriment that can be found in this tragedy is
demonstrably there; and the tragic hero contributes greatly to it. His mastery of what
Touchstone might have called the Retort Disconcerting is complete.
Concerning the type of language in use, the linguistic inventiveness is more
than a matter of vocabulary alone.Phrases and even whole sentences from Hamlet
have become indispensable parts of the contemporary language.
The novel interest the Hamlet story held out to Shakespeare was, surely, nor
its concern with the duty of revenge as such, but the situation within which that duty
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arises: that of the dutiful son who idealizes his dead father , the fratricidal usurping
uncle, and the adulterous incestuous mother. Both of political ambition coupled with
unbridled sexual passion, rich in its potential for conflict, and involving moral
decisions of an extremely difficult and distressing kind for the son, this was a far
more complex situation than any Shakespeare had dramatized hitherto. It offered a
challenge to his art as well as an opportunity .He responded to that challenge by
making the complex situation even more complex. He took over the Ghost from the
Ur- Hamlet; and then , either from that source, or by independently developing
Belleforests account , he created Polonius and Ophelia.To them he added Laertes
and young Fortinbras , who both appear to be his own inventions, serving as
contrasts to Hamlet as well as taking part in the action. There is now a girl for Hamlet
to love, distrust and reject; her father for him to kill by accident, and thus drive her
into madness, and her brother to take revenge on him, so making the chief revenger
a victim of revenge.
The additions and the alterations Shakespeare makes, together with his
shifting of the focus, go far towards solving the most difficult technical problem that
revenge tragedy posed for every playwright who sought to write it : that of how to fill
in the interval between the commission of the crime that calls for revenge, with which
such a play begins, and the carrying out of that revenge, with which it will end.An
extremely complicated situation demands a full and detailed exposition.Shakespeare
provides one, and in doing so copes, at least in part, with that central difficulty by
postponing the revelation of the crime to the last scene of his first act, which is
entirely expository.Yes, despite its length and the sheer mass of information it
contains, that first act remains consistently dramatic, holding the interest of an
audience riveted throughout its course. It is a demonstration of the art that conceals
art.

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Hamlet depends for its structure on connections that are thematic rather than
causal, the action does take place in time and is carefully organized.If falls into three
large movements, of roughly equal duration in the imagined time each covers, and
separated from one another by two intervals in which a considerable amount of time
is supposed to elapse.The first of these movements is the exposition , occupying the
first act and dramatizing the events of about thirthy hours.Then comes a long break
between two and three months, though we only discover this gradually.The long
second scene of Act 2 follows straight on from the first.By the openingof Act 3,
tomorrow night has become this night.The break that ensues is not clearly
defined, but during its course Polonius is buried in hugger-mugger , Ophelia goes
mad, Laertes comes back from Paris, and organizes an uprising against Claudius,
while Hamlet sails part of the way to England before making his unexpected and,for
the King, very disconcerting return to Denmark.The remaining events of Act 4,
beginning with Ophelias request to see the Queen and ending with the Queens
account of her death by drowning, are continuous.In the middle of them the King
receives Hamlets letter announcing his intention to see the King tomorrow.By the
opening of Act 5, tomorrow has come.Ophelia is buried; Hamlet and Laertes fight at
her grave.The final scene takes place later on the same day.Like the first movement,
the last deals with the events of about thirty hours at the most.
The three clearly defined movements beginning, middle, and end- in each of
which there are enough references to time to give what happens in it an air of
verisimilitude , leave little doubt that Shakespeare had the main outlines of his
tragedy, presumably in the form of a scenario, before him as he wrote.But what I
have called improvisations suggest that he had no hesitation about pursuing new
possibilities and interests as they opened up before him during the act of
composition.Indeed, when Hamlet says to Horatio Ere I could make a prologue to
my brains, They had begun the play(5.2.31-32) we may well be as close to
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Shakespeare actually working on Hamlet as we are likely to come.As for the two
intervals in the action, they are filled in for us solely, in the case of the first, and
mainly, in the case of the second, by Hamlet himself. He alone can tell us, in his
soliloquy at the end of Act 2, that he is ashamed because he has not yet carried out
the task the Ghost set him, and only he can relate the story of his adventures at sea.
The Princes is obviously the plays centre. And, because this is so, some
important motives and concerns, which have been obscurely nagging away at him,
as it were, for much of the time, do not receive their full and explicit formulation until
they become clear to him as the action nears its end.