He or she wants the violation addressed – wants balance restored – but recognizes that social institutions are unable to deal with the outrage. A protagonist discovers a fatal or destructive deed that wrecks his or her sense of justice and order. These plots were characterized by a flexible set of conventions. Although the term ‘revenge tragedy’ is a modern invention, plots of vengeance and vendetta – like Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1588–90) and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589–90) – captured the dramatic imagination in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Perhaps most strikingly, the play – which takes shape around a son’s pursuit of vengeance for his father – would have echoed for its audience the concerns and conventions of the popular dramatic genre of revenge tragedy.
These include the biblical accounts of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel – Judaeo-Christian culture’s primal scenes of marital betrayal, fraternal hatred, and death – as well as Greek and Roman drama and epic by Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca, and Virgil.
In addition, viewers would have recognized in the play ancient themes and narratives of intimate violence, adultery, and retaliation. And its dramatic events and concerns were guaranteed to resonate for its audience with familiar, topical issues: the ageing of the female ruler, Queen Elizabeth I the question of her successor the declining fortunes of the charismatic figure of the Earl of Essex and with him a model of chivalric honour the deep challenges to religious belief and practice as a result of Reformation religious change and the revival of philosophical stoicism and its concerns with liberty and tyranny. Its story was not new: a dramatic version – what scholars call the Ur- Hamlet – had been performed as early as the late 1580s, when it was mentioned by the prolific writer Thomas Nashe in a scornful attack on contemporary dramatists. Eliot’s Prufrock (‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’), that they are different and distant from him? Footnote 3 Or does it ask them to see the whole drama as something strange, and to welcome it into their lives with both interest and trepidation?Īt the turn of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare’s Hamlet was first played, it may have seemed as familiar as it did strange on the London stage. Does Hamlet’s invitation summon them into the narrative in order for them to discover that they, like the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘have a smack of Hamlet’ in themselves? Footnote 2 Or does it usher them into the world of the play only to remind them, as it does T. S. Recipients of his welcome, then, face an interpretive challenge. But he also feels a stranger to himself, absorbed in the kinds of tortured self-reflection seen today as a model of modern consciousness. His attitude is informed, surely, by his own identification with the ‘outsider’: in the wake of the death of his royal father and the remarriage of his mother, Gertrude, to his uncle Claudius, who has assumed the throne, Hamlet understands himself as a kind of foreigner, an alien in his native Denmark and its court at Elsinore.
Hamlet’s hospitality, with its echoes of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Footnote 1 gives way to hesitation his tenderness towards the ghostly stranger, to suspicion. By now, in a tradition that extends over 400 years, the protagonist’s line beckons to actors, spectators, readers, and adapters around the world, bidding them to detect themselves in its address.Īs with so many aspects of the play, that address is a complicated one. When Shakespeare’s play was first performed, that audience included the men and women assembled for an afternoon performance at the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. The welcome, however, expands in the moment of delivery to invite into Hamlet’s story a wider audience. Hamlet is speaking of the ghost of his dead father, whose ‘wondrous strange’ appearance the men have just witnessed. ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome’, Prince Hamlet instructs his friend Horatio at the close of the play’s first act.
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