Twenty seven facts about Hamlet

Delacroix, Freud, Baudelaire, Berlioz

1. Though Hamlet is thought of as a philosophical play, it was also quite political. First performed in the 1580s (in a lost version), then in 1600, this play about an insecure succession was obviously topic as Elizabeth aged. The Reformation and the rising popularity of Stoicism (as an opposition to tyranny, not just the milk-and-water stuff we use as self-help today) were disruptive religious and philosophical ideas that made Hamlet’s abstruser musings more “relevant”. The time, we might say, was out of joint.

2. Ghosts, justice, and vendettas were familiar plot devices from R&J, RIII, Titus, Merchant, and Julius Caesar. It’s true that Hamlet is a very high-minded play, but it also has many of the things audiences want: a ghost that calls his son to take revenge, a murder mystery, a failing romance, a surprise killing, sexual misbehaviour, pirates, skulls tossed up out of graves, rampant madness, sword fights. Hell, depending on how you want to play it, you can make Ophelia semi-gothic and throw in a young woman running through castles with their hair streaming out behind them, a look of abject terror on her face.

3. The lost Catholic practice of memorialising dead loved ones as they passed through purgatory was strange matter for a Protestant country to become obsessed with: all the blood and gore of the play are somewhat an excuse to keep the memory of Hamlet’s father alive in a way that religious practice now precluded. Audiences would respond to this lost (and missed) ritual.

4. In C18th, critics like Johnson and novelists like Charlotte Lennox thought Hamlet himself was not admirable. He fails to punish Claudius, treats Ophelia with needless cruelty, and only stabs the end at the end in revenge for his own death. Tobias Smollett thought the “to be or not to be” speech was “a heap of absurdities.

5. The Romantics thought Hamlet was a tragedy of thought. Schiller saw him as a doubter with “no firm belief within himself or anything else.” Coleridge thought it was a play full of potential action with a protagonist who was “over balanced in the contemplative tragedy.” An over thinker’s tragedy.

6. Carlyle and Poe saw Shakespeare in Hamlet. How could he have written such a play without great suffering himself?

7. Nietzsche: “Knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion—that is the lesson of Hamlet.”

8. Russians like Turgenev and Checkhov saw Hamlet as an ineffectual self-involved aristocrat.

9. Freud, talking about melancholy patients: “When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind. For there can be no doubt that if anyone holds and expresses to others an opinion of himself such as this (an opinion which Hamlet held both of himself and of everyone else), he is ill, whether he is speaking the truth or whether he is being more or less unfair to himself.”

10. Freud again: “The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego.”

11. Garrick developed a famous naturalistic style when he played Hamlet, full of real terror when he was confronted by the ghost. Edmund Keen played a brooding, Romantic Hamlet. John Kemble was sultry and solemn. Later on, Henry Irving played a tender, vulnerable prince. Female Hamlets were common in the USA by the mid-nineteenth century.