Hamlet is without question the most famous play in the English
language. Probably written in 1601 or 1602, the tragedy is a milestone in
Shakespeare's dramatic development; the playwright achieved artistic maturity in
this work through his brilliant depiction of the hero's struggle with two
opposing forces: moral integrity and the need to avenge his father's murder.
Shakespeare's focus on this
conflict was a revolutionary departure from contemporary revenge tragedies,
which tended to graphically dramatize violent acts on stage, in that it
emphasized the hero's dilemma rather than the depiction of bloody deeds. The
dramatist's genius is also evident in his transformation of the play's literary
sources--especially the contemporaneous Ur-Hamlet--into an exceptional
tragedy. The Ur-Hamlet, or "original Hamlet," is a lost play that
scholars believe was written mere decades before Shakespeare's Hamlet,
providing much of the dramatic context for the later tragedy. Numerous
sixteenth-century records attest to the existence of the Ur-Hamlet, with
some references linking its composition to Thomas Kyd, the author of The
Spanish Tragedy. Other principal sources available to Shakespeare were Saxo
Grammaticus's Historiae Danicae (circa 1200), which features a popular
legend with a plot similar to Hamlet, and Francois de Belleforest's
Histoires Tragiques, Extraicts des Oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel (7 Vols.;
1559-80), which provides an expanded account of the story recorded in the
Historiae Danicae. From these sources Shakespeare created Hamlet,
a supremely rich and complex literary work that continues to delight both
readers and audiences with its myriad meanings and interpretations.
In the words of Ernest
Johnson, "the dilemma of Hamlet the Prince and Man" is "to disentangle himself
from the temptation to wreak justice for the wrong reasons and in evil passion,
and to do what he must do at last for the pure sake of justice.?From that
dilemma of wrong feelings and right actions, he ultimately emerges, solving the
problem by attaining a proper state of mind." Hamlet endures as the object of
universal identification because his central moral dilemma transcends the
Elizabethan period, making him a man for all ages. In his difficult struggle to
somehow act within a corrupt world and yet maintain his moral integrity, Hamlet
ultimately reflects the fate of all human beings.
