Hamlet

TEXTS IN CONTEXT

Hamlet

Hamlet was first performed in 1601 and has long been thought of as a revolutionary tragedy that writes the modern self

Introduction to the text

Coleridge claimed, ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself’ (1827), and Jan Kott writing in the early 1960s saw Hamlet as an existentialist, ‘a Marxist who has revolted’. Yet this tendency to see the play as ahead of its time ignores the pull of the play to the past, and its expression of the anxieties of the final years of Elizabeth’s reign.

The plot focuses on the young prince of Denmark, who is in mourning for the death of his father, the king. He faces the new order with despair: his uncle Claudius on the throne, flanked by his mother Gertrude. Meeting his father’s ghost sets his revenge in motion but the play’s structure is circular, with plots that might move the action forward being frustrated. While it is tempting to focus on Hamlet’s identity alone, the play’s political and cultural contexts reveal how it is very much of its own time.

Historical and political contexts

Rumours and anxieties

1600 was a year of enormous change in England — the past and future seemed uncertain. There were rumours of Spanish preparations for invasion, and London was full of restless soldiers. Anti-Catholic feeling was rife, and recusants (those who remained Catholics after the Reformation) were rounded up. Other rumours abounded — of the ageing Queen Elizabeth being dead, the Earl of Essex being wounded, his soldiers routed. The Irish wars continued with no hope of a speedy victory.

More significant was the anxiety over the succession. It was far from clear that Mary Queen of Scots’ son James, who was a Protestant (unlike his mother), would succeed Queen Elizabeth. The Jesuits advocated a Spanish successor for Elizabeth, Philip II of Spain’s daughter, Infanta Isabella. The Earl of Essex, James’ chief ally in England, was executed for supposedly launching a rebellion. Secrecy governed the contact between the rival parties and their allies — with a ban on open discussion.

Exploring indirectly

From 1589 all playwrights were forbidden to treat ‘matters of divinity or state’ but Hamlet allowed Shakespeare to explore these uncertainties indirectly. The strange avoidance of explaining why the young, intelligent heir Hamlet should not become king, would not have passed unnoticed in London. The fear that the next monarch would be a foreigner is examined in the threat and eventual success of Fortinbras. Claudius’ corrupt court (with Polonius as councillor, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as spies) reflects the suspicious backstabbing among rival office holders in the English court, fearful for their future under a new monarch.

The play opens with Jittery soldiers standing guard on the freezing battlements, uncertain why such frantic war preparations are afoot: ‘Who is’t that can inform me?’(1.1.79). As a new century begins, Hamlet draws on the prevailing atmosphere of secrecy, threats and repression.

Cultural contexts

When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in armour, he represents not just the Catholic past but also the lost chivalric past. As James Shapiro suggests, the play stands ‘at the crossroads of the death of chivalry and the birth of globalisation’, with one nostalgic eye on the old ways of honour but the other alert to alternative ways of thinking. When Shakespeare addressed the issue of ‘Who should rule and how?’, two European writers influenced his thinking: Machiavelli (1469 –1527) and Montaigne (1533–92).

Machiavelli and Montaigne

In Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy Book II (1531) worldly politics are shaped not by God but by the will, desire, cunning and energy of man: ‘Men rise from humble to high Fortunes by Fraud rather than by Force’ (Ch. XIII). Motivated by Machiavellian duplicity, Claudius schemes to have Hamlet murdered in England and manipulates Laertes’ anger. Though he has a conscience of sorts, his actions are pragmatic: he plans forwards rather than looking backwards or inwards.

By contrast, in essays examining the contradictory nature of truth, Montaigne turned his mind inwards to explore his ambiguous and changing self. In his letter ‘to the Reader’, he wrote that ‘it is my selfe I pourtray’ in all my ‘imperfections’ (p. xvii) —a phrase that encapsulates Hamlet’s tormented soliloquies.

Theatrical and textual context

While Hamlet seems to undermine the basic premise of the revenge tragedy (it is more about not doing than doing), it includes many echoes of earlier examples of the genre. Thomas Kyd’s blockbuster The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587) has a ghost who returns to give an account of his murder, a woman driven mad with grief who kills herself, and a play within a play. Shakespeare’s play also contains nuggets of even earlier tragedies. ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ echoes the dumbshow in Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville, 1561) —a feature that would have seemed either nostalgic or very out of date to a 1601 audience.

Problematic text

The text of the play is as problematic as locating its genre. It exists in three printed editions, which shows us that there is not one stable ‘true’ text that came fully formed from Shakespeare’s pen.

■ Q1 (known as the bad quarto) is seen as a touring version of the play, imperfectly remembered by one of the actors.

■ Q2 was written in 1603–04, perhaps to better fit the demands of a revenge play.

■ F (folio) is a further, later revision, published in 1623.

Early editors started putting their favourite bits together and this practice has continued ever since. Comparing the three can reveal some interesting undercurrents and remind us that Hamlet was a work-in-progress, very much of its age.

Religious context

Hamlet enacts the unresolved religious conflicts that followed the Reformation. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is trapped in purgatory, a Catholic doctrine now outlawed in Elizabeth’s officially Protestant realm, yet Hamlet studies at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, where the Protestant reformer Martin Luther spent his academic career.

So, the play suggests an ambivalence towards a Catholic past that was unwillingly relinquished by some in England: Shakespeare’s own father was fined for suspected recusancy. Although the imposition of Protestantism was officially complete by the 1570s, the religious questions and ambiguities of Hamlet suggest lingering uncertainties in the face of a Catholic past.

Cathy O’Neill teaches English at Oxford High School and is a teacher consultant for ENGLISH REVIEW.