Criticism On Hamlet

Interpreting Hamlet: Understanding the Character of Shakespeare's ...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is more than the hero of a tragedy, he is a cultural icon. He’s the owner of the most famous line in all Western drama – “to be or not to be”, as well as the most famous pose – tragic look, right arm outstretched with skull in hand – and probably the most frequently misquoted line as well – the one which people always recite as “Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well.”

Along with these go a definite image of Hamlet in the popular imagination, in stage productions and in paintings. He is usually depicted as thin, pale, dressed in black and somewhere between a teenager and a young man. In the play, however, there is surprisingly little to support our image of the Great Dane.

Hamlet does indeed refer to his black clothes, in mourning for his dead father, but there is nothing in the script about him being pale and thin. Indeed Gertrude refers to him in the duel scene as “fat and out of breath”, though critics disagree over whether she is joking. Hamlet is also mentioned as just having returned from studying at the University of Wittenberg, but that certainly doesn’t tie him to the same age as modern university students.

We seem to owe most of our vision of Hamlet to the Romantics, who established Shakespeare’s standing as the greatest genius of the English language. Coleridge was a major editor of the Bard, and Keat’s copy of Shakespeare is lavishly and enthusiastically annotated. The Romantics found in their Hamlet a congenial figure; a melancholy, poetic prince, too sensitive for this world. It seems too much of a coincidence that the popular image of Keats as a wan, tragic genius who died young, maps very easily onto that of Hamlet.

The nineteenth century picked up this reading of the Prince of Denmark and adopted it – though it is, after all, only one out of many possible interpretations of the character. Hamlet as sensitive youth was taken to another level when the role became a vehicle for female stars such as Sarah Bernhardt.

The twentieth century added further buttressing to this image when Freudian criticism was brought to bear on Hamlet , providing the Oedipus complex as an “explanation” for Hamlet’s behaviour. Whether or not this is a reasonable reading of the character, it has focussed attention on Hamlet’s role as a child in the royal family, and reinforced the stereotype of him as a nervy adolescent. Our image of Hamlet, one of the most famous characters in drama, seems to have been established by a series of cultural coincidences, rather than by the text itself.