SparkNotes: Hamlet: Character List Character List Plot Overview Analysis of Major Characters Hamlet - The Prince of Denmark, the title character, and the protagonist. About thirty years old at the start of the play, Hamlet is the son of Queen Gertrude and the late King Hamlet, and the nephew of the present king, Claudius. Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical, full of hatred for his uncle’s scheming and disgust for his mother’s sexuality. A reflective and thoughtful young man who has studied at the University of Wittenberg, Hamlet is often indecisive and hesitant, but at other times prone to rash and impulsive acts. Read an in-depth analysis of Hamlet. Claudius - The King of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle, and the play’s antagonist. The villain of the play, Claudius is a calculating, ambitious politician, driven by his sexual appetites and his lust for power, but he occasionally shows signs of guilt and human feeling—his love for Gertrude, for instance, seems sincere. Read an in-depth analysis of Gertrude. Polonius - The Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court, a pompous, conniving old man.

Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Horatio - Hamlet’s close friend, who studied with the prince at the university in Wittenberg. Horatio is loyal and helpful to Hamlet throughout the play. After Hamlet’s death, Horatio remains alive to tell Hamlet’s story. Ophelia - Polonius’s daughter, a beautiful young woman with whom Hamlet has been in love. Ophelia is a sweet and innocent young girl, who obeys her father and her brother, Laertes. Dependent on men to tell her how to behave, she gives in to Polonius’s schemes to spy on Hamlet. Even in her lapse into madness and death, she remains maidenly, singing songs about flowers and finally drowning in the river amid the flower garlands she had gathered. Laertes - Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother, a young man who spends much of the play in France. Passionate and quick to action, Laertes is clearly a foil for the reflective Hamlet. Fortinbras - The young Prince of Norway, whose father the king (also named Fortinbras) was killed by Hamlet’s father (also named Hamlet).

Now Fortinbras wishes to attack Denmark to avenge his father’s honor, making him another foil for Prince Hamlet. The Ghost - The specter of Hamlet’s recently deceased father. The ghost, who claims to have been murdered by Claudius, calls upon Hamlet to avenge him. However, it is not entirely certain whether the ghost is what it appears to be, or whether it is something else. Hamlet speculates that the ghost might be a devil sent to deceive him and tempt him into murder, and the question of what the ghost is or where it comes from is never definitively resolved. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - Two slightly bumbling courtiers, former friends of Hamlet from Wittenberg, who are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to discover the cause of Hamlet’s strange behavior. Osric - The foolish courtier who summons Hamlet to his duel with Laertes. Voltimand and Cornelius - Courtiers whom Claudius sends to Norway to persuade the king to prevent Fortinbras from attacking. Marcellus and Bernardo - The officers who first see the ghost walking the ramparts of Elsinore and who summon Horatio to witness it.

Marcellus is present when Hamlet first encounters the ghost. Francisco - A soldier and guardsman at Elsinore. Reynaldo - Polonius’s servant, who is sent to France by Polonius to check up on and spy on Laertes. No Fear Shakespeare: Hamlet: Characters No Fear Shakespeare Act 1, Scene 1 Hamlet The prince of Denmark, and a student at the University of Wittenberg. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has recently died, and his mother, Queen Gertrude, has married the new king, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical, full of hatred for his uncle and disgust at his mother for marrying him. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and claims to have been murdered by Claudius, Hamlet becomes obsessed with avenging his father’s death but keeps thinking of reasons why he should wait before killing Claudius—then chastizes himself for failing to act boldly. Hamlet is a character of contradictions.

He admires characters like Fortinbras and the Player King, who behave passionately and even violently for no good reason, but is himself thoughtful, reflective, and philosophical. At times Hamlet is indecisive and hesitant, but at other times he is prone to rash and impulsive acts of violence. Claudius The king of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle. The villain of the play, Claudius is a calculating, ambitious politician, adept at manipulating others for his own ends and willing to execute, assassinate, or murder to stay in power. He doesn’t understand Hamlet or Hamlet’s motives, but he is quick to perceive Hamlet as a threat and take decisive action against him. Claudius does occasionally show signs of remorse and human feeling—his affection for Gertrude, for instance, seems sincere. Gertrude The queen of Denmark, Hamlet’s mother, recently married to Claudius. We never get to observe Gertrude on her own, so we know much more about how Hamlet feels about her than about how she sees herself. She seems clearly to love Hamlet, but Hamlet sees her as a weak, even depraved, woman motivated wholly by lust.

Hamlet has such strong feelings about her sex life that he becomes momentarily distracted from his revenge quest, urging her toward a life of chastity. Polonius The Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court, and the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Polonius has good intentions, but he tends to be somewhat conniving and underhanded. He frequently leaps to the wrong conclusions, and his speeches are comically pompous and long-winded. He is completely incapable of figuring out what Hamlet is up to. Horatio Hamlet’s close friend, who studied with the prince at the University of Wittenberg. Hamlet trusts Horatio above any of the other characters, valuing him for his even temper and equanimity—qualities that Hamlet seems to despise in himself. Horatio is loyal and helpful to Hamlet throughout the play. After Hamlet’s death, Horatio remains alive to tell Hamlet’s story. Ophelia Polonius’s daughter, a beautiful young woman with whom Hamlet has been in love.

A sweet and innocent young girl, Ophelia dutifully strives to obey her father and her brother, Laertes, allowing Polonius to use her in his scheme to spy on Hamlet. When her father dies, her sanity unravels, and in her madness she paints a scathing picture of young men as sexually exploitative and unfaithful, and her mad speeches about flowers conceal implied condemnations of Claudius and Gertrude. Laertes Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother, a young man who spends much of the play in France. Passionate and quick to action, Laertes is a foil for the reflective and agonized Hamlet. Fortinbras The young prince of Norway, whose father the king (also named Fortinbras) was killed by Hamlet’s father (also named Hamlet). Now Fortinbras wishes to attack Denmark to avenge his father’s honor, making him another foil for Prince Hamlet. Hamlet admires Fortinbras for his willingness to fight for no good reason. The Ghost The specter of Hamlet’s recently deceased father. The ghost, who claims to have been murdered by Claudius, calls upon Hamlet to avenge him.

However, it is not entirely certain whether the ghost is what it appears to be. Hamlet speculates that the ghost might be a devil sent to deceive him and tempt him into murder, and the question of what the ghost is or where it comes from is never definitively resolved. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Two slightly bumbling courtiers, former friends of Hamlet from Wittenberg, who are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to discover the cause of Hamlet’s strange behavior. Osric The foolish courtier who summons Hamlet to his duel with Laertes. His speeches are pretentious and difficult to understand. Voltimand and Cornelius Courtiers whom Claudius sends to Norway to persuade the king to prevent Fortinbras from attacking. Marcellus and Barnardo The officers who first see the ghost walking the ramparts of Elsinore and who summon Horatio to witness it. Marcellus is present when Hamlet first encounters the ghost. Francisco A soldier and guardsman at Elsinore. Reynaldo Hamlet (1996) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later.

X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, returns home to find his father murdered and his mother remarrying the murderer, his uncle. Meanwhile, war is brewing. Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 42 titles created 23 Apr 2012 a list of 32 titles created 16 Nov 2014 a list of 42 titles created 04 Jan 2015 a list of 34 titles created 19 Feb 2015 a list of 33 titles created 28 Nov 2015 Search for " Hamlet " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 9 wins & 19 nominations. See more awards » Videos Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, finds out that his uncle Claudius killed his father to obtain the throne, and plans revenge.

Director: Franco Zeffirelli In the midst of the Hundred Years' War, the young King Henry V of England embarks on the conquest of France in 1415. Director: Kenneth Branagh The Moorish general Othello is manipulated into thinking that his new wife Desdemona has been carrying on an affair with his lieutenant Michael Cassio when in reality it is all part of the scheme of a bitter ensign named Iago. Director: Oliver Parker Young lovers Hero and Claudio, soon to wed, conspire to get verbal sparring partners and confirmed singles Benedick and Beatrice to wed as well. Director: Kenneth Branagh Prince Hamlet struggles over whether or not he should kill his uncle, whom he suspects has murdered his father, the former king. Director: Laurence Olivier The RSC puts a modern spin on Shakespeare's Hamlet in this filmed-for-television version of their stage production. The Prince of Denmark seeks vengeance after his father is murdered and his mother marries the murderer. Director: Gregory Doran Edit Storyline Hamlet, son of the king of Denmark, is summoned home for his father's funeral and his mother's wedding to his uncle.

In a supernatural episode, he discovers that his uncle, whom he hates anyway, murdered his father. In an incredibly convoluted plot--the most complicated and most interesting in all literature--he manages to (impossible to put this in exact order) feign (or perhaps not to feign) madness, murder the "prime minister," love and then unlove an innocent whom he drives to madness, plot and then unplot against the uncle, direct a play within a play, successfully conspire against the lives of two well-meaning friends, and finally take his revenge on the uncle, but only at the cost of almost every life on stage, including his own and his mother's.

Written by John Brosseau <brossj5683@aol.com> Rated PG-13 for some violent images and sexuality | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 25 December 1996 (USA) See more » Also Known As: William Shakespeare's Hamlet See more » Filming Locations: $148,321 (USA) (27 December 1996) Gross: 70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints)| Dolby Digital (35 mm prints)| SDDS (35 mm prints) Color: Did You Know? Trivia Released just six years after a previous Hamlet (1990), which starred Mel Gibson . Ophelia was played in that film by Helena Bonham Carter , who at the time of this film's release, was romantically involved with director Kenneth Branagh . Claudius was played by Alan Bates who, like Derek Jacobi , came to the role having previously played Hamlet. See more » Goofs When Laertes is shouting at Claudius on his return it is shot from two angles.

From Claudius' view Laertes' sword is pressing against his neck and he pushes on it as he speaks, but from Laertes' view his sword is not touching and he waves it slightly as he speaks. See more » Quotes Version of Hamlet (2015) See more » Soundtracks (United States) – See all my reviews Part of the genius of Branagh's interpretation of Hamlet is in the use of the techniques of the cinema to enhance the production. Branagh has not condensed the acts like some mass market soup, as was done in Olivier's 1948 Oscar-winning production, or in, say, Zeffirelli's 1989 Hamlet lite starring Mel Gibson (both excellent, though, within their scope), but has kept every word while directing our understanding so that even those only casually familiar with the play might follow the intent and purpose with discernment. Recall that for Shakespeare--the ultimate actor's playwright who wrote with precious few stage directions--interpretation was left to the direction and the actors, an open invitation that Branagh rightly accepts.

The use of flashback scenes of things implied, such as the amorous union of Ophelia and her Lord Hamlet abed, or of a vast expanse of snow darkened with distant soldiers to represent the threat of Fortinbras' army from without, and especially the vivid remembrance in the mind's eye of the new king's dastardly deed of murder most foul, helps us all to more keenly appreciate just what it is that torments Hamlet's soul. I also liked the intense closeups. How they would have bemused and delighted an Elizabethan audience. Branagh's ambitious Hamlet is also one of the most accessible and entertaining, yet without the faintest hint of any dumbing down or abbreviation. A play is to divert, to entertain, to allow us to identify with others who trials and tribulations are so like our own. And so first the playwright seeks to engage his audience, and only then, by happenstance and indirection, to inspire and to inform. Shakespeare did this unconsciously, we might say.

He wrote for the popular audience of his time, a broad audience, it should be noted, that included kings and queens as well as knaves and beggars, and he reached them, one and all. We are much removed from those times, and yet, this play, this singular achievement in theatre, still has the power to transcend mere entertainment, to fuse poetry and story, as well as the high and the low, and speak once again to a new audience twenty generations removed. Branagh himself is a wonderful Hamlet, perhaps a bit of a ham at times (as I think was Shakespeare's intent), a prince who is the friend of itinerant players. He also lacks somewhat in statute (as we conceive our great heroes); nonetheless his interpretation of the great prince's torment and his singular obsession to avenge his father's murder speaks strongly to us all. Branagh, more than any other Hamlet, makes us understand the distracted, anguished and tortured prince, and guides us to not only an appreciation of his actions, wild and crazy as they sometimes are, but to an identification and an understanding of why (the eternal query) Hamlet is so long in assuming the name of action.

In Branagh's production, this old quibble with Hamlet's character dissolves itself into a dew, and we realize that he was acting strongly, purposely all the while. He had to know the truth without doubt so that he might act in concert with it. I was also very much impressed with Derek Jacobi's Claudius. One recalls that Jacobi played Hamlet in the only other full cinematic production of the play that I know of, produced in 1980 by the BBC with Claire Bloom as Gertrude; and he was an excellent Hamlet, although perhaps like Branagh something less than a massive presence. His Claudius combines second son ambition with a Machiavellian heart, whose words go up but whose thoughts remind below, as is the way of villains everywhere. Kate Winslet is a remarkable Ophelia, lending an unusual strength to the role (strength of character is part of what Kate Winslet brings to any role), but with the poor, sweet girl's vulnerability intact. She does the mad scene with Claudius as well as I have seen it done, and of course her personal charisma and beauty embellish the production.

Richard Briers as Polonius, proves that that officious fool is indeed that, and yet something more so that we can see why he was a counselor to the king. The famous speech he gives to Laertes as his son departs for France, is really ancient wisdom even though it comes from a fool. Julie Christie was a delight as the besmirched and wretched queen. In the bedroom scene with Hamlet she becomes transparent to not only her son, but to us all, and we feel that the camera is reaching into her soul. She is outstanding. The bit players had their time upon the stage and did middling well to very good. I liked Charlton Heston's player king (although I think he and John Gielgud might have switched roles to good effect) and Billy Crystal's gravedigger was finely etched. Only Jack Lemon's Marcellus really disappointed, but I think that was mainly because he was so poorly cast in such a role. Not once was he able to flash the Jack Lemon grin that we have come to know so well. The idea of doing a Shakespearean play with nineteenth century dress in the late twentieth century worked wonderfully well, but I know not why.

Perhaps the place and dress are just enough removed from our lives that they are somewhat strange but recognizable in a pleasing way. And perhaps it is just another tribute to the timeless nature of Shakespeare's play. There is so much more to say about this wonderful cinematic production. It is, all things considered, one of the best Hamlets ever done. Perhaps it is the best. See it, by all means, see it for yourself. (Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!) 103 of 121 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes An analysis of Gertrude, Hamlet's Mother Introduction to Gertrude in Hamlet Gertrude is, more so than any other character in the play, the antithesis of her son, Hamlet. Hamlet is a scholar and a philosopher, searching for life's most elusive answers. He cares nothing for this "mortal coil" and the vices to which man has become slave. Gertrude is shallow, and thinks only about her body and external pleasures.

Like a child she longs to be delighted. We do not see much of her in daily activity, but if we could we would see a woman enraptured by trinkets and fine clothes, soft pillows and warm baths. Gertrude is also a very sexual being, and it is her sexuality that turns Hamlet so violently against her. The Ghost gives Hamlet, who is already disgusted with his mother for marrying his uncle such a short time after his father's death, even more disturbing information about the Queen: Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,-- O wicked wit, and gifts that have the power So to seduce!--won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen. (I.V.42-5) Many critics misread the line "adulterate beast" as proof that Gerturde had been the lover of Claudius even before Hamlet's father had died. This would make the Queen a far more loathsome character than Shakespeare had intended, and the rest of the play makes no mention of this adultery.

Adulterate, by definition, means to change to a worse state by mixing; to contaminate with base matter. And Claudius has indeed, according to the Ghost, contaminated his precious Gertrude, but this does not mean that Claudius did so before Hamlet's father died. If Gertrude were an adulteress, she would have been almost certainly been involved in Claudius' plot of murder, and therefore she would be the play's villainess and not its child-like victim. Claudius would believe her to be an accomplice and confide in her, but he does not. Moreover, if it were true, it most surely would be foremost on Hamlet's mind, but when Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her closet and announces all her crimes, he does not once even imply that she has committed adultery. And, as Olav Lokse points out in his book Outrageous Fortune: [The scholar J.W.

Draper] also draws attention to the Ghost's complaint that he was "Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch'd" (I.v.75), which is echoed by Claudius's "My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen", in III, iii, 55, which may be taken to indicate the sequence in which the pre-play events had occurred. (82) That Gertrude has an aversion to the truth is not in dispute. She lies to herself about the consequences of her actions, and she lies to those around her. But she lies to protect. Hers are not cruel and wicked falsehoods; hers are white lies that she feels she must tell in order to keep her and those around her safe physically and emotionally. She must tell the King that Hamlet has killed Polonius, but, she does what she can to help Hamlet, telling Claudius that Hamlet "weeps for what is done" when clearly he does not. On the surface it is hard to comprehend why Hamlet, his father, and Claudius all have such a deep devotion to Gertrude. But the qualities that save her from condemnation along with Claudius are subtly woven into the play.

She loves Hamlet, and, underneath her shallow exterior, shows great emotion when he confronts her. Gertrude truly does not know what she has done to make Hamlet so furious, and it is only when he tells her that she understands her actions to be wrong: O Hamlet, speak no more: Thou turn'st my very eyes into my soul, And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct (III.iv.88-91) ...O speak to me no more; these words like daggars enter my ears; No more, sweet Hamlet! (III.iv.94-6) There is no reason to believe that Gertrude is lying to appease Hamlet in the above lines. No where else in the play is Gertrude portrayed as cunning or Janus-faced, as is Claudius. Even though Hamlet lashes out at her with all the rage he can muster, Gertrude remains faithful to him, protecting him fron the King. And, although her love for Claudius is wrong by moral standards, she is now his queen, and remains loyal to him.

We see she has the potential for great love -- she wants to protect Claudius from the mob, and she cares deeply about Ophelia and Polonius, and is concerned for Hamlet in the duel even though she has no idea that it is a trap. It is Gertrude's underlying propensity for goodness that redeems her. Her men forgive her for her shallow, sensual nature and her addictions to comfort and pleasure because they see that she is innocent of premeditation. It is sad but fitting that Gertrude meet her end drinking from the poisoned goblet, demanding that she taste what is in the pretty cup, as trusting as a new-born babe. How to cite this article: Mabillard, Amanda. Introduction to Gertrude. Shakespeare Online. 15 Aug. 2008. < > . References Hamlet: Q & A _____ Does Gertrude Lie to Laertes? ... "He is told that his sister was seen to clamber into the willow, upon a branch which broke, out of mere spitefulness says the Queen (1. 174); so she fell thence into the stream, whose moistness Her Majesty attributes to its tears of sympathy.

There, he is informed, they watched her float a while, and heard her sing 'melodiously' some 'snatches of song': at last they saw her sink, down to the 'muddy' bottom of the 'glassy-' surfaced stream: Ophelia was drowned! Laertes might well inquire who the witnesses were. Horatio was responsible for Ophelia's safe-keeping (ii. 75): was it then he that saw and heard all this? No, nor anyone else. The whole passage is absurd, and as undramatic as it could be, if it is regarded as the account of the actual death of Ophelia." Wilbraham Fitzjohn Trench. Read on... _____ Hamlet (1990) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, finds out that his uncle Claudius killed his father to obtain the throne, and plans revenge. Director: What Makes the Golden Globe Awards So Entertaining?

IMDb Special Correspondent Dave Karger breaks down why the Golden Globes are so much more entertaining than other award shows. Don't miss our live coverage of the Golden Globes beginning at 5 p.m. PST on Jan. 8 in our Golden Globes section. a list of 25 titles created 14 Apr 2011 a list of 31 titles created 01 Nov 2012 a list of 27 titles created 21 Nov 2012 a list of 24 titles created 04 Feb 2013 a list of 43 titles created 7 months ago Search for " Hamlet " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 4 wins & 3 nominations. See more awards » Videos Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, returns home to find his father murdered and his mother remarrying the murderer, his uncle. Meanwhile, war is brewing.

Director: Kenneth Branagh Modern-day New York City adaptation of Shakespeare's immortal story about Hamlet's plight to avenge his father's murder. Director: Michael Almereyda Prince Hamlet struggles over whether or not he should kill his uncle, whom he suspects has murdered his father, the former king. Director: Laurence Olivier A farming family battles severe storms, a bank is threatening to repossess their farm, and there are other hard times in a battle to save and hold on to their farm. Director: Mark Rydell During a cryogenics test, a pilot frozen in 1939 awakes in 1992 but time is running out, as his body starts to age rapidly. Director: Steve Miner A young pilot finds himself recruited unwittingly into a covert and corrupt CIA airlift organization operating in Vietnam War Era Laos. Director: Roger Spottiswoode Chuck wants to leave home but can't make the grade for boarding school. Then he finds out the disfigured recluse living nearby is an ex-teacher. Director: Mel Gibson Mac Mckussic is an unlikely drug dealer who wants to go straight.

His old and best friend Nick Frescia is now a cop who is assigned to investigate and bring him to justice. Mac is very ... See full summary » Director: Robert Towne An old flame discovers her ex-boyfriend from the past is a relocated FBI informant out to stop the bad guys. Director: John Badham Peter Soffel is the stuffy warden of a remote American prison around the turn of the century. His wife, Kate, finds herself attracted to prisoner Ed Biddle. She abandons her husband and ... See full summary » Director: Gillian Armstrong The RSC puts a modern spin on Shakespeare's Hamlet in this filmed-for-television version of their stage production. The Prince of Denmark seeks vengeance after his father is murdered and his mother marries the murderer. Director: Gregory Doran The familiar story of Lieutenant Bligh, whose cruelty leads to a mutiny on his ship. This version follows both the efforts of Fletcher Christian to get his men beyond the reach of British ... See full summary » Director: Roger Donaldson Edit Storyline Hamlet returns to Denmark when his father, the King, dies. His mother Gertrude has already married Hamlet's uncle Claudius, the new King.

They urge Hamlet to marry his beloved Ophelia. But soon the ghost of Hamlet's father appears and tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius and Gertrude. Hamlet must choose between passive acquiescence and the need for a vengeance which might lead to tragedy. Written by Reid Gagle The extraordinary adaptation of Shakespeare's classic tale of vengeance and tragedy. Genres: 18 January 1991 (USA) See more » Also Known As: Did You Know? Trivia Mel Gibson 's only previous Shakespeare experience was playing Juliet in an all male production of "Romeo and Juliet" in Australia. By contrast, Alan Bates (who played Claudius) had played Hamlet in London in 1970 and Paul Scofield (who played the Ghost) had played the part in 1948 and 1955 and is considered one of the greatest twentieth century interpreters of the role. See more » Goofs The hole in the curtain when Polonius is stabbed. See more » Quotes [first lines] Claudius : Hamlet! Think of us as of a father. For let the world take note: you are the most immediate to our throne.

And with no less nobility of love than that which dearest father bears his son do I impart toward you. Not as good as Branagh's, but still enjoyable 29 June 2000 | by Spanner-9 (Australia) – See all my reviews Mel Gibson and Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Hamlet has filled some of the gaps left by Shakespeare. This version of the classic story is thoroughly watchable. Gibson is perfect as Hamlet the Prince of Denmark, and he is well supported by Glenn Close (Gertrude), Alan Bates (Claudius), Ian Holm (Polonius) and Helena Bonham Carter (Ophelia). However, after already seeing Kenneth Branagh's 4-hour long version, I was left a little let down. Although this version was only 2 hours 20 minutes approximately, it was more boring in parts than Branagh's was. And no one can beat Kate Winslet as Ophelia, though Bonham Carter performed the lunatic scenes extremely well. The acting, as is aboveforementioned, is the highlight of this version.

You can see the emotions boiling over on Gibson's face, and Close gives Gertrude's nature a remarkable realism as both a worried mother and a lustful lover. Bates is the best Claudius I have ever seen, and Holm displays in Polonius what makes him such a great actor. This Hamlet has an extremely good set design that complements the mood of each scene perfectly. The castle has a great look to it, both inside and outside. The costumes, particularly those worn by Close, are excellent. They really highlight the mood and temprament of her character perfectly. On top of this, all of the costumes worn by the players (actors in Hamlet's play) in colour and shape symbolise the message that Hamlet was trying to get across. Technically, this film is very well put together. The shots are each able to complement the action in that shot. Sound effects, especially in the ghost apparitions, as well as the lighting and juxtapositioning, set the moody feel of the film.

Of course, one cannot escape comparing this to Branagh's masterpiece, though in its own right is is a great version of Shakespeare's play that, through its star power and easier-to-follow storyline, should attract the younger audiences that saw Baz Lurmann's 'Romeo + Juliet', '10 Things I Hate About You' and will possibly see the upcoming 'O'. ***1/2 out of *****. 14 of 24 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet | by Stephen Greenblatt | The New York Review of Books The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet October 21, 2004 Issue 1. Shakespeare was in the business, all of his life, of probing the passions of his characters and arousing the passions of his audiences. His skill in doing so is almost universally acknowledged to have been unrivaled, but the inner sources of this skill remain largely unknown. Scholarship has tirelessly reconstructed at least something of his wide-ranging, eclectic reading, but his own passionate life—his access through personal experience and observation to the intense emotions he represents—is almost completely mysterious.

None of his letters, working notes, diaries, or manuscripts (with the possible exception of “Hand D” in Sir Thomas More) survives. His sonnets have been ransacked for autobiographical evidence, but, though written in the first person, they are baffling, elusive, and probably deliberately opaque. Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays—preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others—have focused on Hamlet. This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience. Sometime in the spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare must have received word that his only son Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill.

Whether in London or on tour with his company he would at best have only been able to receive news intermittently from his family in Stratford, but at some point in the summer he presumably learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time the father reached Stratford the boy—whom, apart from brief visits, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy—may already have died. On August 11, 1596, Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity Church: the clerk duly noted in the burial register, “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.” Unlike Ben Jonson and others who wrote grief-stricken poems about the loss of beloved children, Shakespeare published no elegies and left no direct record of his paternal feelings. It is sometimes said that parents in Shakespeare’s time could not afford to invest too much love and hope in any one child. One out of three children died by the age of ten, and overall mortality rates were by our standards exceedingly high. Death was a familiar spectacle; it took place at home, not out of sight.

When Shakespeare was fourteen, his seven-year-old sister Anne died, and there must have been many other occasions for him to witness the death of children. In the four years following Hamnet’s death, the playwright, as many have pointed out, wrote some of his sunniest comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It. This fact is, for some, decisive evidence that the father’s grief must at most have been brief. But the plays of these years were by no means uniformly cheerful, and at moments they seem to reflect an experience of deep personal loss. In King John, probably written in 1596 just after the boy was laid to rest, Shakespeare depicted a mother so frantic at the loss of her son that she is driven to thoughts of suicide. Observing her, a clerical bystander remarks that she is mad, but she insists that she is perfectly sane: “I am not mad; I would to God I were!” Reason, she says, and not madness, has put the thoughts of suicide in her head, for it is her reason that tenaciously keeps hold of the image of her child.

When she is accused of perversely insisting on her grief, she replies with an eloquent simplicity that breaks free from the tangled plot: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. (III.4.93–97) If there is no secure link between these lines and the death of Ham-net, there is, at the very least, no reason to think that Shakespeare simply buried his son and moved on unscathed. He might have brooded inwardly and obsessively, even as he was making audiences laugh at Falstaff in love or at the wit contests of Beatrice and Benedick. 1 Nor is it implausible that it took years for the trauma of his son’s death fully to erupt in Shakespeare’s work or that it was triggered by an accidental conjunction of names. For Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Shakespeare evidently named his son after his recusant neighbor and friend Hamnet Sadler, who was still alive in March 1616 when Shakespeare drew up his will and left 26 shillings, 8 pence to “Hamlett Sadler…to buy him a ringe.” Writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea. At least one play, now lost, about the Danish prince who avenges his father’s murder had already been performed on the English stage, successfully enough to be casually alluded to by contemporary writers, as if everyone had seen it or at least knew about it. Someone in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with an eye on revenues, may simply have suggested to Shakespeare that the time might be ripe for a new, improved version of the Hamlet story. For that matter, with his high stakes in the company’s profits, Shakespeare was sin- gularly alert to whatever attracted London crowds, and he had by now long experience of dusting off old plays and making them startlingly new.

The likely author of the early play, Thomas Kyd, was no obstacle: he had died back in 1594, at the age of thirty-six, possibly broken by the torture inflicted upon him when he was interrogated about the charges of blasphemy and atheism brought against his roommate, Christopher Marlowe. In any case, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries were squeamish about stealing from each other. Shakespeare had certainly seen the earlier Hamlet play, probably on multiple occasions. When he set to work on his new tragedy, he likely had it by heart—or as much of it as he chose to remember. It is impossible to determine, in this case, whether he sat down with books open before him—as he clearly did, for example, in writing Antony and Cleopatra—or relied on his memory, but he had also certainly read one and probably more than one version of the old Danish tale of murder and revenge. At the very least, to judge from the play he wrote, he carefully read the story as narrated in French by François de Belleforest, whose collection of tragic tales was a publishing phenomenon in the late sixteenth century.

Belleforest had taken the Hamlet story from a chronicle of Denmark compiled in Latin in the late twelfth century by a Dane known as Saxo the Grammarian. And Saxo in turn was recycling written and oral legends that reached back for centuries before him. Here then, as so often throughout his career, Shakespeare was working with known materials—a well-established story, a familiar cast of characters, a set of predictable excitements. If Shakespeare had died in 1600 it would have been difficult to think that anything was missing from his achievement and still more difficult to think that anything yet unrealized was brewing in his work. But Hamlet makes it clear that Shakespeare had been quietly, steadily developing a special technical skill. This development may have been entirely deliberate, the consequence of a clear, ongoing professional design, or it may have been more haphazard and opportunistic. The achievement was, in any case, gradual: not a sudden, once-and-for-all discovery or a grandiose invention, but the subtle refinement of a particular set of representational techniques. By the turn of the century Shakespeare was poised to make an epochal breakthrough. He had perfected the means to represent inwardness.

The task of conveying an inner life is an immensely challenging one in drama, since what the audience sees and hears is always in some sense or other public utterance—the words that the characters say to one another or, in occasional asides and soliloquies, directly to the onlookers. Playwrights can pretend, of course, that the audience is overhearing a kind of internal monologue, but it is difficult to keep such monologues from sounding “stagey.” Richard III, written in 1591 or 1592, is hugely energetic and powerful, with a marvelous, unforgettable main character, but when that character, alone at night, reveals what is going on inside him, he sounds oddly wooden and artificial: It is now dead midnight. Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes. I am. Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why? Lest I revenge? Myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself?

O no, alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain. Yet I lie: I am not. (V.5.134–145) Shakespeare is dramatizing his chronicle source, which states that Richard could not sleep on the eve of his death, because he felt unwonted pricks of conscience. But though it has a staccato vigor, the soliloquy, as a way of sketching inner conflict, is schematic and mechanical, as if within the character on stage there was simply another tiny stage on which puppets were performing a Punch-and-Judy show. In Richard II, written some three years later, there is a comparable moment that marks Shakespeare’s burgeoning skills. Deposed and imprisoned by his cousin Bolingbroke, the ruined king, shortly before his murder, looks within himself: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts.

(V.5.1–7) Much of the difference between the two passages has to do with the very different characters: the one a murderous tyrant full of manic energy, the other a spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive poet. But the turn from one character to the other is itself significant: it signals Shakespeare’s growing interest in the hidden processes of interiority. Locked in a windowless room, Richard II watches himself think, struggling to forge a metaphoric link between his prison and the world, reaching a dead end, and then forcing his imagination to renew the effort: “Yet I’ll hammer it out.” The world, crowded with people, is not, as he himself recognizes, remotely comparable to the solitude of his prison cell, but Richard wills himself to generate—out of what he pictures as the intercourse of his brain and soul—an imaginary populace. What he hammers out is a kind of inner theater, akin to that already found in Richard III’s soliloquy, but with a vastly increased complexity, subtlety, and above all self-consciousness.

Now the character himself is fully aware that he has constructed such a theater, and he teases out the bleak implications of the imaginary world he has struggled to create: Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. Sometimes am I king; Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king, Then am I kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased With being nothing. (V.5.31–41) Richard II characteristically rehearses the drama of his fall from kingship as a fall into nothingness and then fashions his experience of lost identity—“whate’er I be”—into an intricate poem of despair. Written in 1595, Richard II marked a major advance in the playwright’s ability to represent inwardness, but Julius Caesar, written four years later, shows that, not content with what he has mastered, Shakespeare subtly experimented with new techniques.

Alone, pacing in his orchard in the middle of night, Brutus begins to speak: It must be by his death. And for my part I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crowned. How that might change his nature, there’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him: that! (II.1.10–15) This soliloquy is far less fluid, less an elegant and self-conscious poetic meditation, than the prison soliloquy of Richard II. But it has something startlingly new: the unmistakable marks of actual thinking. Richard speaks of hammering it out, but the words he utters are already highly polished. Brutus’s words by contrast seem to flow immediately from the still inchoate toing-and-froing of his wavering mind, as he grapples with a set of momentous questions: How should he respond to the crowd’s desire to crown the ambitious Caesar? How can he balance his own personal friendship with Caesar against what he construes to be the general good?

How might Caesar, who has thus far served that general good, change his nature and turn dangerous if he is crowned? “It must be by his death”: without prelude, the audience is launched into the midst of Brutus’s obsessive brooding. It is impossible to know if he is weighing a proposition, trying out a decision, reiterating words that someone else has spoken. He does not need to mention whose death he is contemplating, nor does he need to make clear—for it is already part of his thought—that it will be by assassination. Brutus is speaking to himself, and his words have the peculiar shorthand of the brain at work. “Crown him: that!”—the exclamation is barely comprehensible, except as a burst of passionate anger provoked by a phantasmatic image passing at that instant through the speaker’s mind. The spectators are pulled in eerily close, watching firsthand the forming of a fatal resolution—a determination to assassinate Caesar—that will change the world. A few moments later Brutus, intensely self-aware, describes for himself the molten state of consciousness in which he finds himself: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in counsel, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. (II.1.63–69) Was it at this moment, in 1599, that Shakespeare first conceived of the possibility of writing about a character suspended, for virtually the whole length of a play, in this strange interim? Brutus himself is not such a character: by the middle of Julius Caesar, he has done the dreadful thing, the killing of his mentor and friend—possibly his own father—and the remainder of the play teases out the fatal consequences of his act. If Shakespeare did not grasp it at once, then certainly by the following year he understood perfectly that there was a character, already popular on the Elizabethan stage, whose life he could depict as one long phantasm or hideous dream. That character, the prince of the inward insurrection, was Hamlet. 2. Even in its earliest-known medieval telling, Hamlet’s saga was the story of the long interval between the first motion—the initial impulse or design—and the acting of the dreadful thing.

In Saxo the Grammarian’s account, the murder of Amleth’s father Horwendil (the equivalent of Shakespeare’s old King Hamlet) by his envious brother Feng (the equivalent of Claudius) was not a secret. Glossing over “fratricide with a show of righteousness,” the assassin claimed that Horwendil had been cruelly abusing his gentle wife Gerutha. In reality, the ruthless Feng had simply seized both his brother’s kingdom and his wife. No one was prepared to challenge the usurper. The only potential challenger was Horwen- dil’s young son Amleth, for by the time-honored code of this pre-Christian society a son was strictly obliged to avenge his father’s murder. Feng understood this code as well as anyone, so that it was reasonable to expect that he would quickly move to eliminate the future threat. If the boy did not instantly come up with a clever stratagem, his life would be exceedingly brief. In order to grow to adulthood—to survive long enough to be able to exact revenge—Amleth feigned madness, persuading his uncle that he could never pose a danger.

Filthy and lethargic, he sat by the fire, aimlessly whittling away at small sticks and turning them into barbed hooks. Though the wary Feng repeatedly used intermediaries (the precursors of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern) to try to discern some hidden sparks of intelligence behind his nephew’s apparent idiocy, Amleth cunningly avoided detection. He bided his time, slipped out of traps, and made secret plans. Mocked as a fool, treated with contempt and derision, he eventually succeeded in burning to death Feng’s entire retinue and in running his uncle through with a sword. He summoned an assembly of nobles, explained why he had done what he had done, and was enthusiastically acclaimed as the new king. “Many could have been seen marvelling how he had concealed so subtle a plan over so long a space of time.” Amleth thus spends years in the interim state that Brutus can barely endure for a few days. Shakespeare had developed the means to represent the psychological experience of such a condition—something that neither Saxo nor his followers even dreamed of being able to do.

He saw that the Hamlet story, ripe for revision, would enable him to make a play about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfillment. The problem, however, is that the theater is not particularly tolerant of long gestation periods: to represent the child Hamlet feigning idiocy for years in order to reach the age in which he could act would be exceedingly difficult to render dramatically exciting. The obvious solution, probably already reached in the lost play, is to start the action at the point in which Hamlet has come of age and is ready to undertake his act of revenge. In Saxo the Grammarian’s Hamlet, as in the popular tale by Belleforest, no ghost appeared. There was no need for a ghost, for the murder was public knowledge, as was the son’s obligation to take revenge. But when he set out to write his version of the Hamlet story, either following Kyd’s lead or on his own, Shakespeare made the murder a secret. Everyone in Denmark believes that old Hamlet was fatally stung by a serpent.

The ghost appears in order to tell the terrible truth: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (I.5.39–40). Shakespeare’s play begins just before the ghost reveals the murder to Hamlet and ends just after Hamlet exacts his revenge. Hence the decisive changes in the plot—from a public killing known to everyone to a secret murder revealed to Hamlet alone by the ghost of the murdered man—enabled the playwright to focus almost the entire tragedy on the consciousness of the hero suspended between his “first motion” and “the acting of a dreadful thing.” But something in the plot has to account for this suspension. After all, Hamlet is no longer, in this revised version, a child who needs to play for time, and the murderer has no reason to suspect that Hamlet has or can ever acquire any inkling of his crime. Far from keeping his distance from his nephew (or setting subtle tests for him), Claudius refuses to let Hamlet return to university, genially calls him “our chiefest courtier, cousin, and son,” and declares that he is next in succession to the throne.

Once the ghost of his father has disclosed the actual cause of death—“Murder most foul, as in the best it is,/But this most foul, strange, and unnatural”—Hamlet, who has full access to the unguarded Claudius, is in the perfect position to act immediately. And such instantaneous response is precisely what Hamlet himself anticipates: Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swift As meditation or the thought of love May sweep to my revenge. (I.5.29–31) The play should be over then by the end of the first act. But Hamlet emphatically does not sweep to his revenge. As soon as the ghost vanishes, he tells the sentries and his friend Horatio that he intends “to put an antic disposition on”—that is, to pretend to be mad. The behavior made perfect sense in the old version of the story, where it was a ruse to deflect suspicion and to buy time. The emblem of that time, and the proof of the avenger’s brilliant, long-term planning, were the wooden hooks that the boy Amleth, apparently deranged, endlessly whittled away on with his little knife.

These were the means that, at the tale’s climax, Amleth used to secure a net over the sleeping courtiers, before he set the hall on fire. What had looked like mindless distraction turned out to be brilliantly strategic. But in Shakespeare Hamlet’s feigned madness is no longer coherently tactical. Shakespeare in effect wrecked the powerful and coherent plot that his sources conveniently provided him. And out of the wreckage he constructed what most modern audiences would regard as the best play that he had ever written. Far from offering a cover, the antic disposition leads the murderer to set close watch upon Hamlet, to turn to his counselor Polonius for advice, to discuss the problem with Gertrude, to observe Ophelia carefully, to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy upon their friend. Instead of leading the court to ignore him, Hamlet’s madness becomes the object of everyone’s endless speculation.

And, strangely enough, the speculation sweeps Hamlet along with it: “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth.” “But wherefore I know not”—Hamlet, entirely aware that he is speaking to court spies, does not breathe a word of his father’s ghost, but then it is not at all clear that the ghost is actually responsible for his profound depression. Already in the first scene in which he appears, before he has encountered the ghost, he is voicing to himself, as the innermost secret of his heart, virtually the identical disillusionment he discloses to the oily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: O God, O God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.

(I.2.132–127) His father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage, public events and not secret revelations, have driven him to thoughts of “self-slaughter.” By excising the strategic rationale for Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare made it the central focus of the entire tragedy. The play’s key moment of psychological revelation—the moment that virtually everyone remembers—is not the hero’s plotting of revenge, not even his repeated, passionate self-reproach for inaction, but rather his contemplation of suicide: “To be or not to be; that is the question.” This suicidal urge has nothing to do with the ghost—indeed Hamlet has so far forgotten the apparition as to speak of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns”—but rather with a soul-sickness brought on by one of the “thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to.” 3. Hamlet marks a sufficient break in Shakespeare’s career as to suggest some more personal cause for his daring transformation both of his sources and of his whole way of writing.

A simple index of this transformation is the astonishing rush of new words, words that he had never used before in some twenty-one plays and in two long poems. There are, scholars have calculated, more than six hundred of these words, many of them not only new to Shakespeare but also—compulsive, fanged, besmirch, intruding, overgrowth, pander, outbreak, unfledged, unimproved, unnerved, unpolluted, unweeded, to name only a few—new to the written record of the English language. 2 Something must have been at work in Shakespeare, something powerful enough to call forth this linguistic explosion. As audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, passionate grief, provoked by the death of a loved one, lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Even if the decision to redo the old tragedy of Hamlet had come to Shakespeare from strictly commercial considerations, the coincidence of the names—the writing again and again of the name of his dead son as he composed the play—may have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed. But, of course, in Hamlet it is the death not of a son but of a father that provokes the hero’s spiritual crisis.

If the tragedy welled up from Shakespeare’s own life—if it can be traced back to the death of Hamnet and to the repeated writing of the name—something must have made the playwright link the loss of his child to the imagined loss of his father. I say “imagined” because Shakespeare’s father was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard on September 8, 1601: the handwriting may have been on the wall, but he was almost certainly still alive when the tragedy was written and may still have been alive when it was first performed. How might the father’s death have become bound up so closely in Shakespeare’s imagination with the son’s? Shakespeare undoubtedly returned to Stratford in 1596 for his son’s funeral. The minister, as the regulations required, would have met the corpse at the entry to the churchyard and accompanied it to the grave. Shakespeare must have stood there and listened to the words of the prescribed Protestant burial service.

While the earth was thrown onto the body—perhaps by the father himself, perhaps by friends—the minister intoned the words, “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take upon himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.” Did Shakespeare find this simple, eloquent service adequate or was he tormented with a sense that something was missing? “What ceremony else?” cries Laertes, by the grave of his sis-ter Ophelia; “What ceremony else?” Ophelia’s funeral rites have been curtailed because she is suspected of the sin of suicide, and Laertes is both shallow and rash. But the question he repeatedly asks echoes throughout Hamlet, and it articulates a concern that extends beyond the boundaries of the play. Within living memory, the whole relationship between the living and the dead had been changed.

Perhaps in conservative Lancashire, where Shakespeare may have sojourned briefly as a young man, if not closer to home, he could have seen the remnants of the old Catholic practice: candles burning night and day, crosses everywhere, bells tolling constantly, close relatives wailing and crossing themselves, neighbors visiting the corpse and saying over it a Pater noster or a De profundis, alms and food distributed in memory of the dead, priests secretly paid to say Masses to ease the soul’s perilous passage through Purgatory. 3 All of this had come under attack for decades; everything had been scaled back, forced underground, or eliminated outright. Above all, it was now illegal to pray for the dead. Belief in Purgatory may well have been abused—plenty of pious Catholics thought it was—but it attempted to address fears and longings that did not simply vanish when people were told by the officials of the church and the state that the dead were beyond all earthly contact. Ceremony was not the only or even the principal issue: what mattered was whether the dead could continue to speak to the living, at least for a short time, whether the living could help the dead, whether a reciprocal bond remained.

When Shakespeare stood in the churchyard, watching the dirt fall on the body of his son, did he think that his relationship with Hamnet was gone without a trace? Perhaps. But it is also possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as a “thou,” its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate. 4 And if he could make his peace with the Protestant understanding of these things, others close to him assuredly could not. His wife, Anne, must have stood at Hamnet’s grave, and so too Shakespeare’s parents, John and Mary. Indeed the grandparents had spent far more time with the boy than the father had, for while Shakespeare was in London, they were all living together in Stratford in the same house with their daughter-in-law and the three grandchildren. They had helped to raise Hamnet, and they must have tended Hamnet through his last illness. And about his parents’ beliefs with regard to the afterlife—specifically, about his father’s beliefs—there is some evidence.

This evidence, which points to Catholic connections and half-concealed Catholic beliefs, suggests that John Shakespeare would have wanted something done for Hamnet’s soul, something that he perhaps appealed urgently to his son to do or that he undertook to do on his own. The arguments, or pleading, or tears that may have accompanied such appeals are irrevocably lost. But it is possible to surmise what Shakespeare’s father (and, presumably, his mother, linked by birth to a staunchly Cath-olic Warwickshire family) would have thought necessary, proper, charitable, loving, and, in a single word, Christian. Recusant Catholics, prevented from regular confession and communion, were often intensely fearful of a death that would prevent the ritual opportunity to settle the sinner’s accounts with God and to show appropriate, cleansing contrition. (This is precisely the death Hamlet’s father, murdered in his sleep, has suffered: “No reck’ning made, but sent to my account/With all my imperfections on my head./O, horrible! O, horrible!

most horrible!”) Any stains that remained after death would have to be burned away in purgatorial agony, unless the living took steps to alleviate the suffering and reduce the afterlife prison term. In 1596, at the funeral of Hamnet, the issue would almost certainly have surfaced. The boy’s soul needed the help of those who loved and cared for him. John Shakespeare may well have urged his prosperous son William to pay for masses for the dead child, just as he no doubt wanted masses to be said for his own soul. For his father was getting old and would soon be in need of the “satisfactory works” that could shorten the duration of his agony in the afterlife. If this delicate subject was broached, did the playwright angrily shake his head no or instead quietly pay for clandestine masses for Hamnet’s soul? Did he tell his father that he could not give his son—or, looking ahead, that he would not give his father—what he craved? Did he say that he no longer believed in the whole story of the terrible prison house, poised between heaven and hell, where the sins done in life were burned and purged away?

Whatever he determined at the time, Shakespeare must have still been brooding in late 1600 and early 1601, when he sat down to write a tragedy whose doomed hero bore the name of his dead son. His thoughts may have been intensified by news that his elderly father was seriously ill back in Stratford, for the thought of his father’s death is deeply woven into the play. And the death of his son and the impending death of his father—a crisis of mourning and memory—could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet. All funerals invite those who stand by the grave to think about what, if anything, they believe in. But the funeral of one’s own child does more than this: it compels parents to ask questions of God and the universe. Shakespeare must have attended the regular services in his Protestant parish; otherwise his name would have turned up on lists of recusants. But did he believe what he heard and recited? His works suggest that he did have faith, of a sort, but it was not a faith securely bound either by the Catholic Church or by the Church of England.

By the late 1590s, insofar as his faith could be situated in any institution at all, that institution was the theater, and not only in the sense that his profoundest energies and expectations were all focused there. Shakespeare grasped that crucial death rituals in his culture had been gutted. He may have felt this with enormous pain at his son’s graveside. But he also believed that the theater—and his theatrical art in particular—could tap into the great reservoir of passionate feelings that, for him and for thousands of his contemporaries, no longer had a satisfactory outlet. The religious reformation was in effect offering him an extraordinary gift—the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex edifice—and he knew how to accept and use this gift. He was hardly indifferent to the success he could achieve, but it was not a matter of profit alone. Shakespeare drew upon the confusion, pity, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals—the world in which most of us continue to live—because he himself experienced those same emotions in 1596, at the funeral of his child, and later, in anticipation of his father’s death.

He responded not with prayers but with the deepest expression of his being: Hamlet. With Hamlet Shakespeare made a discovery by means of which he relaunched his entire career. The crucial breakthrough did not involve developing new themes or learning how to construct a shapelier plot; it had to do rather with an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision. He had rethought how to put a tragedy together—specifically, he had rethought the amount of causal explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed to be strongly convincing. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays—that he could provoke in the audience and himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response—if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action to be unfolded. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.

Shakespeare’s work had long been wryly skeptical of official explanations and excuses—the accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why peo- ple behave the way they do. His plays had suggested that the choices people make in love are almost entirely inexplicable and irrational—that is the conviction that generates the comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. But at least love was the clearly identifiable motive. With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comforting rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper. The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.

This conceptual breakthrough in Hamlet was technical—that is, it affected the practical choices Shakespeare made when he put plays together, starting with the enigma of the prince’s suicidal melancholy and assumed madness. But it was not only a new aesthetic strategy. The excision of motive must have arisen from something more than technical experimentation; coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s deepest perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. The opacity was shaped by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations. 1 In “Death in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 51 (2000), pp. 127–153, Richard P. Wheeler argues that the death of Hamnet left significant traces in the great comedies, particularly in Twelfth Night. ↩ 2 See G.R.

Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet (Oxford University Press, 1987). ↩ 3 For the claim that William Shakespeare was the “Shakeshafte” mentioned in the will of a wealthy Catholic magnate in Lancashire, see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). For a sharply dissenting view, see Rob- ert Bearman, “‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’ Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 53 (2002), pp. 83–94. Bearman’s arguments are in turn countered by E.A.J. Honigmann, “The Shakespeare/Shakeshafte Question, Continued,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 54 (2003), pp. 83–86. The argument is likely to continue. ↩ 4 In The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c.

1580 (Yale University Press, 1992), Eamon Duffy gives a rich and eloquent account of the consequences to the community and the individual of the Reformation assault on Catholic ritual practices. Duffy tends to assume that those practices were almost universally efficacious, an assumption one can certainly call into question. It is less easy to call into question the cumulative force of changes that a recent scholar has characterized as a cultural revolution: see James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History: 1350– 1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩

Question: In ‘Hamlet’, what was the name of the title character’s mother?
Answer: GERTRUDE