by Cristina Nuta -

Shakespeare serves a wide variety of cultural purposes, from political nationalism around the globe to modern-day instruction in ‘leadership’ for business and corporate culture. He is in a way always two playwrights, not one: the playwright of his time and the playwright of our time, whatever time that is. Both ‘of an age’ and ‘for all time’, Shakespeare is the defining figure of the English Renaissance, and the most cited and quoted author of every era since.

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1599-1600 and this is considered to be the first great tragedy to be written in two thousand years. To quarrel with that view is perhaps only to quarrel with the relative term, ‘great’. Hamlet is of a higher order of art than any drama before it.

Hamlet responds to a mood, noticeable by 1599, entailing the charge that the ‘public’ stages are crowded-pleasing, unintelligent and lacking in audacity. The tragedy’s complex and intelligent hero, its fresh and subtle word-play, brilliantly evoked setting and new treatment of the revenge motif, refined and elegant soliloquies and philosophical richness all advertise the sophistication of the Globe’s public stage. The play has humour to match the satire of new ‘wits’, and no trace of insular narrowness. The hero is a scholar of Wittenberg and the action involves not only Denmark and Germany, but Norway, France, England, Poland, even a king’s ‘Switzers’ and a popular notion of Italy. Yet this tragedy is far more than an advertisement for the Globe or a response to a commercial situation.

With its wealth of meanings, ambiguities, high-handed contradictions and supreme and troubling beauty, Hamlet is nearly a chaos. It takes enormous risks as a work for the popular theatre and an easily baffled public. The confident writing in Hamlet suggests a poet whose best insights and observations are all before him. Suddenly, his all experience of life is relevant, or the Muses have made it so: indeed Hamlet is often felt to be an all-accommodating, ‘personal’ expression of its author.

Family love is at the play’s centre- but what is bizarre mixes with the ordinary. A sensitive son, idealizing his dead father, confronts his usurping and fratricidal uncle and incestuous adulterous mother. Shakespeare gives the son inwardness and intellect, so the Ghost’s return is the more shattering, and adds two more avengers in Fortinbras and Laertes. The Danish court is not excessively evil. Claudius is not horrendous, and his crime is more excusable than the two murders linked with the poet’s house at Stratford. Regicide was little more than an extension of medieval politics. As a villain, Claudius is miserably aware of his guilt, honest with himself, as regretful as he is fearful. Gertrude’s sensuality hardly destroys her conscience, and Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes further establish a sense of domestic ordinariness.

Finally, there appears a new emphasis on the interiority of human beings, on their unknowable qualities as opposed to their known social positions. Hamlet himself pretends to be mad, but the force of his acting is to throw into doubt any fixed conceptions about the differences between reason and madness. Suddenly, and in particular in Hamlet soliloquies, a new interior world is open up, a world which questions the old certainties of understanding: To be or not to be-that is the question.

Hamlet's Questions written by Cristina Nuta for FamousWhy.com
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Tags: hamlet, questions, william shakespeare, english renaissance

Category: Education  - ( Education Archive)

Date Added: 13 February '07

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