custom 3
|
Chapter 9: custom 3 |
|
William Shakespeare
|
||
|
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, in western England. He attended the Stratford
grammer school, married in 1582, and had three children. He left his family and moved to London
sometime between 1585 and 1592. During this period he became a professional actor and began writing
plays and poems. Because the London theaters were closed during the plague years of 1592 to 1594,
he apparently worked at other jobs, about which we know nothing. By 1595, however, he was recognized
as a major writer of comedies and tragedies. He soon became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men,
the leading theatrical company, and as we have seen, he became a shareholder in the new Globe Theater
in 1599. Because he realized good returns from the business venture and also from his plays, he
became moderately wealthy. He stopped writing for the stage in 1611, having written a total of
thirty -seven plays, of which eleven are tragedies. He spent his retirement years in Stratford.
He died in 1616 and is buried next to the alter of Stratford's Trinity Church, beneath a bust and
an inscribed gravestone.
When the Lord Chamberlain's Men first staged Hamlet in 1600 or 1601 at the Globe,
it was not the first time the story had been dramatized on the London stage. There is evidence
that a play based on the Hamlet story, now lost, had been performed before 1589. Therefore, at
least some of the theatergoers might have known the story.
Even if none of them knew it, however, they would have known the tradition of revenge tragedy.
The Elizabethans had been introduced to the drama of vengeance through the English translations
of Seneca's tragedies during the 1570s and early 1580s. Another important precedent was Thomas Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587), which was the first English play in the revenge tradition and which
featured a hero who commits suicide. The genre features a number of conventions. The major ones were
a ghost who calls for vengeance and a revenger who pretends to be insane at least part of the time.
Above all, the tradition required that the revenger would also die, no matter how good the person or
how just the cause.
Although elizabethian audiences were prepared for Hamlet by the revenge formula,
they could have anticipated neither a protagonist of Hamlet's likableness and complexity nor a
play of such profundity. The earlier revengers were flat characters with a single fixation on getting
even through personal vengeance. Hamlet, however, is acutely aware of the political and moral
corruption of the Danish court, and he reflects on the fallen state of humanity. Experiencing despair
and guilt, he even contemplates suicide. He learns from his experiences and meditations, discovering
that he must look beyond reason and philosophy for ways of coping with the world. He also develops
patients and learns to trust in Providence, the "divinity that shapes our ends" (Act V, scene 2,
line 10).
The play itself demonstrates the far-reaching effects of evil, which branches inexorably outward
from Claudius's initial act of murder. The evil ensnares the innocent and guilty alike. Hamlet,
the avenger, becomes the direct and indirect cause of deaths, and as a result, he also becomes an
object for revenge. By the play's end, all of the major and two of the minor characters are dead:
Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and finally Hamlet himself.
The plays crowning irony is that Hamlet does not complete his vengeance because of the murder of his
father, King Hamlet; rather he kills Claudius immediately upon learning that the king has murdered
Gertrude, his mother.
In the centuries since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, the play has remained among the most
popular, most moving , and most effective plays in the world. It has been translated into scores
of languages. Major actors from Shakespeare's day to ours-including Richard Burbage, the first Hamlet,
and Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh, the most recent-have starred in the role. Beyond the play's stage
popularity, Hamlet has become one of the central documents of Western Civilization. Somehow,
we all know about Hamlet, and we know passages like "to be or not to be," "the play's the thing,"
and "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/No traveler returns" even if we have never read the
play or seen a live or filmed performance.
Author Links
|
"Sonnet CXXX: My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun"
"Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"
|
A Pearson Company Distance Learning at Prentice Hall Legal Notice |
