Hamlet
Many consider Shakespeare's "Hamlet" to be the most problematic play ever written (Croxford pp). Leslie Croxford writes in his article, "The Uses of Interpretation in Hamlet" for a 2004 issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, that the play presents inconsistencies that arise from the "variousness" of its medieval and Renaissance sources, from discrepancies between printed version of the drama, and from a host of unresolved thematic and psychological problems, such as the famous question of why Hamlet delays his revenge (Croxford pp). Thus, there are endless interpretations of the play (Croxford pp). T.S. Eliot called Hamlet "the 'Mona Lisa' of literature," and it is true, for no other work has presented more uncertain meanings (Croxford pp).
In giving interpretation such significance, Shakespeare had to develop previous versions of the story, thus, when one considers the issue of interpretation in the play, one is also examining a prime example of how tests undergo alteration from period to period (Croxford pp). There are two specific influences on the metamorphosis of Hamlet: "the intellectual climate in which it was written and the nature of the sixteenth-century political world," and together they put at the author's disposal transformations of his inherited versions that reveal his creative process, therefore giving an important dramatic voice to a newly "emergent form of Europe's early modern self" (Croxford pp).
In 1817, William Hazlitt wrote that the world is so used to this tragedy that it is difficult to know how to criticize it any more than an individual knows how to describe his or her own face (Hazlitt pp). Hazlitt believed that it was the one play of Shakespeare's that people think of most often because it "abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred,...
In other words, whatever happens to him, people apply to themselves because he applies it "so himself as a means of general reasoning" (Hazlitt pp). Hamlet is regarded as a great moralizer because he moralizes his own feelings and experiences (Hazlitt pp). Hazlitt writes that if "Lear" is distinguished by the greatest depths of
passion, then "Hamlet" is the most remarkable for the ingenuity,
originality, and unstudied development of
character (Hazlitt pp).
Hazlitt believed that Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet ever has and showed more of it in "Hamlet" than in any other piece of work (Hazlitt pp). There is no attempt to force an interest, for the author leaves everything for time and circumstances to unfold (Hazlitt pp). Excitement is attained without effort as the incidents succeed each other as matters of course and the characters think, speak and act just as they might if left entirely to themselves (Hazlitt pp). Moreover, there is no set purpose, no contriving to make a point, for the observations are suggested by the passing scenes (Hazlitt pp). The entire play is an exact transcript of what might have taken
place at the Denmark court, "at the remote period of time fixed upon, before the modern refinements in morals and
manners were heard of" (Hazlitt pp). Shakespeare, together with his own comments, offers the original texts so that the world can judge for itself (Hazlitt pp). The character of Hamlet stands by itself and is not a character "marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment" (Hazlitt pp).
In 1768, Samuel Johnson remarked that is Shakespeare's dramas were to be characterized, each by the particular excellence that distinguishes it from the others, the one must allow the tragedy of "Hamlet" the praise of variety (Johnson pp). According to Johnson, the incidents are so numerous that the
argument of the play itself…
