“I don't really agree with the notion of setting the plays anywhere in particular. When asked that question about Hamlet I tend to say that it was set on the stage.”-Neil Armfield1.
No other quote on Shakespeare’s Hamlet could have more precisely summed up the play’s echoic, reverberant and hauntingly evocative self-referential quality. No other playwright deployed the language, conventions and the resources of the theatre as effectively, so as to bring alive the whole world of the text/stage to the world of the audience. This connecting chord between the script on the page and the script in performance in Shakespeare leads to a plurification of significance and meanings to the play. Ian McKellan, in John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide, rightly avers of the connection:
“Perhaps it's because Shakespeare himself was an actor that he uses the metaphor of the actor and of the theater so often in his plays. Often when a character is at the peak of his emotional problems he compares himself with an actor: "struts and frets his hour upon the stage." This has a wonderful resonance for an audience...” Thus, it is clear that Hamlet is a play that implicates itself within the paradigm of “play” and the various acts of branching out thereof. These would include the notion of “play” itself, the centrality of “play” within the play, the simultaneous power of the ‘play’ and the threat it generates and the thin line of seperation between the ‘play’ within the play & the play and the play & reality. As frustrating and confusing as the above would sound, this particular phase of Hamlet has intrigued and fascinated literary critics, scholars, theatre-goers, drama critics, reviewers and the plebeian alike.
Therefore, the aim of t...
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Hamlet makes use of the idea of theatrical performance through characters presenting themselves falsely to others – from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spying on Hamlet to gain favor with the King, to Hamlet himself playing the part of a madman – and through the play within the play, The Mousetrap. This essay will discuss the ways in which Hamlet explores the idea of theatrical performance, ‘acting’, through analysis of the characters and the ‘roles’ they adopt, specifically that of Hamlet and Claudius. The idea, or the theme of theatrical performance is not an uncommon literary element of Shakespearean works, the most famous of which to encompass this idea being As You Like It. This essay will also briefly explore the ways in which Hamlet reminds its audience of the stark difference between daily life and dramatization of life in the theatre.
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Shakespeare’s Hamlet is arguably one of the best plays known to English literature. It presents the protagonist, Hamlet, and his increasingly complex path through self discovery. His character is of an abnormally complex nature, the likes of which not often found in plays, and many different theses have been put forward about Hamlet's dynamic disposition. One such thesis is that Hamlet is a young man with an identity crisis living in a world of conflicting values.
In conclusion, within Hamlet, meta-theatre provides space for the “moving parts”, or the ‘actor’, necessary to the drama (Flaherty 17). Meta-theatre develops this space of play by provoking acceptance of the unique nature of each performance of the play (Flaherty 17). Meta-theatricality is a device in which a play may comment on itself, attracting awareness to the true circumstances of its own production, such as the audience or the reality that the actors are in fact actors (Dixon 1). Meta-theatrical moments in Hamlet contribute to the play’s elaborate dialogue of play by calling upon the many, and interrelated meanings of the word ‘play’.
Hamlet is one of the most often-performed and studied plays in the English language. The story might have been merely a melodramatic play about murder and revenge, butWilliam Shakespeare imbued his drama with a sensitivity and reflectivity that still fascinates audiences four hundred years after it was first performed. Hamlet is no ordinary young man, raging at the death of his father and the hasty marriage of his mother and his uncle. Hamlet is cursed with an introspective nature; he cannot decide whether to turn his anger outward or in on himself. The audience sees a young man who would be happiest back at his university, contemplating remote philosophical matters of life and death. Instead, Hamlet is forced to engage death on a visceral level, as an unwelcome and unfathomable figure in his life. He cannot ignore thoughts of death, nor can he grieve and get on with his life, as most people do. He is a melancholy man, and he can see only darkness in his future—if, indeed, he is to have a future at all. Throughout the play, and particularly in his two most famous soliloquies, Hamlet struggles with the competing compulsions to avenge his father’s death or to embrace his own. Hamlet is a man caught in a moral dilemma, and his inability to reach a resolution condemns himself and nearly everyone close to him.
The perfection of Hamlet’s character has been called in question - perhaps by those who do not understand it. The character of Hamlet stands by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can be. He is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility - the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from his natural disposition by the strangeness of his situation.
Rosenberg, Marvin. “Laertes: An Impulsive but Earnest Young Aristocrat.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware P., 1992.