Hamlet

The tragedy was composed in 1600-1601.

Of the sources of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the most direct seems to have been an older Hamlet,
conventionally called Ur-Hamlet, but which unfortunately was lost or was not published.
Among the paradigms of the tragedy, there are murder, the ghost, insanity, and revenge.
The base elements of Shakespeare’s plot are fratricide, an incestuous marriage, and simulated
madness.
The proverbs, songs, fragments of ballads, and connotative hints to folklore tradition are
elements “gathered from the world and given back to the world again”.
The Bible, especially through paraphrases, is frequently cited.
“Words, words, words” is a commentary taken over by Hamlet directly from Giordano
Bruno. “To be or not to be” evokes first the syntagm on kai me on from Doctor Faustus by
Cristopher Marlowe.
Borrowings from the classics of Antiquity, first of all those with a gnomic character, are
extremely frequent, among the source-authors there are Cicero, Aristotel, Ovidius, and
Vergilius, but especially Seneca.
Jenkins interprets the drama of Ophelia:
“Hamlet cannot resist to her attraction, as we can see from his behaviour during the
performance; but the obscene jokes he utters there turn Ophelia loved in such an ambiguous
manner, into the target of his disgust for the whole sexual process. The last word he addresses
to her is a joke about the way women mis-take their men.”
The so beautifully imagined and well-drawn up secondary plot, that of the stable and rejected
love of Ophelia, is one of the most bitter things in Shakespeare’s plays.
The bibliography was almost unrecognisably assimilated in order to create, besides the
poet’s, philosopher’s, and playwright’s own contributions, this “supreme tragedy, the greatest
and the most philosophical.” (G.M. Lewes, 1855).
Trying to take out a word of Hamlet is like trying to take out a stone of a pyramid (John
Keats).
C.S.Lewis has suggested that the poem is more important than the prince and that the interest
in Hamlet’s lines is stirred less by the man who utters them than by the things he talks about.
Hamlet is a prince, a soldier, a scholar, and an actor and a main director.
Indeed, Hamlet knows the way of living of courtiers, he behaves and talks like a courtier
when this is the case (with good manners); we have to add the extraordinary linguistic
mimicry of Hamlet as well as the capacity of “adjusting his style to the situation and person
to whom he adrresses” (Clemen).
He is a soldier; he is disciplined, he has a deep sense of duty. He behaves like a “mobilised in
times of war. He did things he would have preferred not to, like we all do at war; but he
considers it is a right war and we can say that he generally behaved well.” (Patrick Cruttwell,
The Morality of Hamlet, 1963)
He is a scholar – like a part of the images he uses proves:
“Hamlet’s world of images also proves the great education he had received, multilaterality
and the extraordinary tuning fork of his experience. The fact that his metaphors borrowed
from natural sciences are extremely frequent in Hamlet’s language emphasises once again his
power of observation, his critical and objective way of looking at things. Hamlet is in his
element both in classical Antiquity and Greek mythology, in judicial terminology, he is also
familiar with fine arts.” (Clemen)
The issue of “procrastination” and “undetermination” of Hamlet in performing the justice act
has stirred considerable controversies in the critics of Shakespeare, who considered it a
fundamental issue of the play.
“Hamlet has a role of waiting: in Elizabethan plays of revenge, the revenger hero does not
seek to create an occasion as much as to wait for the victim to provide it undeliberately”
(Helen Gardner, The Historical Approach to Hamlet, 1959)
According to Ioan Botez, “Hamlet is integral; he does not lack memory or will, but he does
not have in his soul the feeling of revenge… This feeling is imposed unto him”.
Al. Philippide wrote: “Shakespeare’s heroes are not super-humans, they are human beings
with strongly accentuated features and in whom usual human passions… are found at an
unusual level of intensity…It is not a structural differentiation or of nature, but only of
intensity in developing the movements of the soul.”
The themes of the play include that of human knowledge.
The Ghost appears again and Hamlet conjures him to answer several questions related to
knowing the truth.
The Ghost reveals to Hamlet that he is the spirit of his father and asks him to revenge him –
he was not bitten by a snake, as the entire country would believe, but poisoned by his brother.
In Claudius’ mind, the counter-attack had already arisen: a public duel, between Hamlet and
Laert, a sword with a poisoned edge, and if needed, a cup with poison.
“Lucidity seems to be the primordial element of the inner nature of the hero, doubled by a
sensitive and sentimental character, harmed by what he sees in life and which naturally
causes him suffering. The case of Shakespeare’s hero confirms the statement of Baudelaire,
according to which the greater the lucidity, the greater the suffering. Or even more striking,
that of Camil Petrescu: there is as much drama as lucidity.” (Raul Teodorescu)