Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Hamlet by William Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Theater

Hamlet is not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I don't care for all the "drama"; it is too much, really. More than drama, it is "melodrama".

Background of the play from the program:

The character of Hamlet first appears as “Amleth,” in the writings of the 12th-century Danish historian Saxo. Amleth’s uncle murders the prince’s father and marries his mother, and Amleth pretends to be insane in order to get his revenge. The narrative ends with Amleth killing his uncle and taking the throne. The story reached England through the 16th-century French author François de Belleforest, who enlarged the role of Amleth’s mother and gave him a young female love interest. Sometime in the 1580s, an English writer seems to have adapted Belleforest’s tale into a stage play called Hamlet.

Apparently using this earlier Hamlet as inspiration, Shakespeare created his own version in 1600 for the newly opened Globe Theatre. He wrote the play at the midpoint of his long career, turning from poetic comedies and histories to revolutionary tragedies and romances. But exactly what play that first audience heard remains a mystery, because the published texts of Hamlet vary widely. In 1603, an inexpensive quarto edition was issued to capitalize on the play’s popularity. It was likely a pirated text, either copied hastily by a spectator or reconstructed badly from memory by an actor in a minor role. A second quarto came out the next year in response, billing itself as “newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy.” The 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s complete works contained a version of Hamlet very similar to the second quarto, cutting about 200 lines (although it would still run more than four hours uncut).

My thoughts:

My first thought is that as he did in other plays, Shakespeare developed this play based on an earlier work by someone else. It is remarkable to me that he "rewrote" a play by the same name that had been written and performed only 20 years previously. Copyright laws would pevent that from happening today.

Shakespeare was a technical genius who had a great ability to write and produce successful plays. He took ideas from others and reworked them technically to produce successful plays. In his time, audiences seem to have been attracted to great violence, and as he did in other plays, Shakespeare killed off all the main characters in Hamlet in a very melodramatic fashion, the guilty and the innocent alike. But before they died, they first went through great melodramatic wailings.

This play was about revenge, and to be successful, Shakespeare developed a character so bent on revenge that he was willing to die in order to gain his revenge. In addition, he was willing to kill innocent people in order to gain his revenge. Thus, the play reminds us of political suicide killers of today, as well as the armies who seek to kill them and kill thousands of innocent people in the process. The only moral is that they are all equally insane, and their insanity hurts everyone.