Hamlet has been referred to as the most puzzling and challenging play of all time; some critics have gone farther and described it as the best example of Western literature, like, totally,
ever. T.S. Eliot is one the one voice of dissent in the fawning marketplace; he called the tragedy "an artistic failure" due to the title character's incessant delaying. The College Board loves this play and expects ALL seniors to not only have read it, but "gotten" it. So there.
Here are some cool introductory factoids to help you understand the roots of the play, which on one level is merely a story of
three sons mourning three dead fathers.
Primary Setting: Denmark (
Elsinore Castle)
Additional Settings: England, a boat on the ocean
Type of Play: Tragedy--but not a pure Aristotilean "fall from a great height". Hamlet, it can be argued, is a decent man beset by a corrupt universe, not merely a flawed man whose flaws lead him to ruin.
Central themes/motifs: appearance vs. reality; the role of family (specifically father/mother separation anxieties); indecision; decision; revenge; love; greed and its repercussions; the “rotten state of Denmark”; loyalty; intellect vs. action; garden imagery; sexual imagery; gender anxieties
Story: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, has been summoned home from his university studies in Wittenberg to face the death of his father. When he arrives, roughly two months after his father’s demise (travel was notoriously slow in the Middle Ages), he discovers much to his surprise and consternation that his mother has remarried his uncle, who is now king due to some odd switch to the law of primogeniture. Hamlet’s melancholy becomes more bitter when he finds out from his father’s ghost that the dastardly uncle, Claudius, actually killed the old king. Now, the choice is there—Hamlet must decide how to enact his revenge for his father’s foul murder, if he can work up the nerve to do so at all. Throw in a romance gone badly, spying, deception, and sexual intrigue, and you have the makings of the best Shakespearean tragedy ever made!
This is
not an entirely original play; Shakespeare most likely was aware of a contemporary work (sometimes called
the ur-Hamlet) about a Danish prince seeking revenge. Also, Shakespeare no doubt had read the historical accounts of Saxo Grammaticus, and drew heavily on the real Prince of Denmark and his dilemma.
I have a LOT of content vocabulary for you to help you understand this play; I'll try to figure out to imbed it in this blog as a PDF so I don't have to give each of you a gi-normous packet of words that only ten of you will actually read.
