Hamlet

Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. It was presented in 1600 or 1601, and printed in 1603. It is the longest of all Shakespeare's plays, containing about 4,000 lines. Hamlet himself speaks 1,569 lines, which far exceeds the total length of the speeches of any other of Shakespeare's characters. Shakespeare obtained the base of his plot from Saxo's Chronicle of Scandinavia. Hamlet is a young Danish prince, sensitive, refined, cultivated. Grown to manhood with no knowledge of the evil of the world, such knowledge comes to him suddenly and in a way which seems to demand of him decisive action.

Hamlet fails to "set it right," and tragedy inevitably results. The action is of slow development. The relief from the strain of tragedy, so often and so successfully supplied in Shakespeare's plays by the introduction of some humorous element, is perhaps less noticeable in Hamlet than in any other tragedy. The effect of the play as a whole is sombre in the extreme, yet the genius of Shapespeare has excited so intense an interest in the character of Hamlet that no other play has at all times and to all classes of readers, actors, students, and spectators been so universally attractive. The question as to whether Shakespeare intended to represent his hero as insane or as feigning insanity is one that has occasioned endless discussion, and upon which numerous books have been written.

A beautiful, pure, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which makes the hero, sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear nor throw off; every duty is holy to him,--this too hard. The impossible is required of him,--not the impossible in itself, but the impossible to him. How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances, and recoils, ever reminded, ever reminding himself, and at last almost loses his purpose from his thoughts, without ever again recovering his peace of mind. . . . . It pleases, it flatters us greatly, to see a hero who acts of himself, who loves and hates us a his heart prompts, undertaking and executing, thrusting aside all hindrances, and accomplishing a great purpose. Historians and poets would fain persuade us that so proud a lot may fall to man. In Hamlet, we are taught otherwise; the hero has no plan, but the piece is full of plan.

Hamlet is endowed more properly with sentiment than with a character; it is events alone that push him on; and accordingly the piece has somewhat the amplification of a novel. But as it is Fate that draws the plan, as the piece proceeds from a deed of terror, and the hero is steadily driven on to a deed of terror, the work is tragic in its highest sense, and admits of no other than a tragic end.--Goethe.