Hamlet Many Consider Shakespeare\'s \"Hamlet\" to Be

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, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity" (Hazlitt pp). 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 would make a long drama (Johnson pp). The scenes are interchangeably diversified with happiness and sadness: the happiness includes judicious and instructive observations, and the sadness or "solemnity not strained by poetical violence above the natural sentiments of man" (Johnson pp). One example is found in Claudius' speech "Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage" (Shakespeare I ii).

New characters appear in continual succession, demonstrating various forms of life and particular modes of conversation (Johnson pp). Johnson remarks that Hamlet's 'pretend madness' causes much mirth, while the mournful distraction of Ophelia fills the heart with tenderness (Johnson pp). Moreover, every character produces the effect intended, from the "apparition that in the first act chills the blood with horror, to the fop in the last, that exposes affectation to just contempt" (Johnson pp). For the most part, the action is in continual progression, however, there are some scenes, according to Johnson, that neither forward, nor retard it (Johnson pp). There appears to be no adequate cause of Hamlet's feigned madness, for he does nothing that he might not have done with the reputation of sanity (Johnson pp).

T.S. Eliot wrote that Shakespeare's "Hamlet" was more puzzling and more disquieting than any of his plays, and of all his plays, it was the longest and "possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains," yet left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed (Eliot pp). Eliot believed that more people have thought of "Hamlet" as a work of art because they found it interesting, than the fact that they found it interesting because it was a work of art (Eliot pp).

Eliot believed that the "guilt of a mother' could not be handled the same way in which Shakespeare handled "the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus," for then the subject might have expanded into a tragedy like these, "intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight" (Eliot pp).

O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason,

Would have mourn'd longer, -- married with mine uncle,

My father's brother; but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules: within a month;