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Hamlet_intro_essay_5.html
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<p>Whenever I have to write about <em>Hamlet</em>, I always wish I could obey Hamlet’s last words - “the rest is silence” - and just shut up, letting the play do all the talking. But Hamlet is one of those great cultural artifacts (like <em>Ulysses</em> <em>or Meet the Beatles</em>) that seem to say it all and yet leave so much to be discussed, and <em>Hamlet</em> has been the subject of a continuous discussion by scholars around the world, since its first performance around 1601.</p><p>I will here give some history of the play, some fascinating odds and ends about Shakespeare’s life around the time of its composition, brief descriptions of some of the more compelling critical approaches (from Coleridge, Hazlitt, Goethe, Eliot, Greenblatt, and a few others), while including throughout some modest ideas of my own.Curtain up.</p><p>****</p><p><strong>Part I: “Who’s there?”</strong></p><p align="center"> - In which the reader, aided by a brisk and entertaining plot summary,recalls what happens in this play, and graciously accepts a suggestionfrom the author as to how the play might be read -For the first-time reader of the play, it may help to know what, exactly, happens in it. Even returning readers may find it helpful to reacquaint themselves with the plot and characters.</p><p><em>Hamlet</em> looks, at first glance, like a revenge tragedy in the strictest sense. The play takes its plot from an Icelandic myth of the 11th century - of which more in the annotations - and its premise is very basic.</p><p>Before the play begins, Denmark is ruled by King Hamlet. This king has a wife named Gertrude, and together they have a son whose name is also Hamlet (”Hamlet Junior,” so to speak). But the king also has a jealous, evil brother, named Claudius, and Claudius wants two things that the king has: his throne, and his wife. So Claudius concocts a scheme to murder his brother in his sleep by pouring poison into his ear. Then, he plans to marry Gertrude, with whom, it must be assumed, he has been having an affair for quite a while <strong>[1]</strong>. Claudius’s plan comes off perfectly. King Hamlet goes to sleep one day in his orchard, as is his “custom always in the afternoon,” and, falling victim to Claudius’s fatal elixir, never wakes up.</p><p>At this point the action of the play begins, and Claudius is all set to marry Gertrude. By doing so, he will become king of Denmark - the title that should by all rights be Hamlet’s upon his father’s death. Claudius is riding high, but not for long.</p><p>Soon enough, King Hamlet’s ghost makes the schlep from Purgatory back to Elsinore Castle (the seat of the Danish monarchy in this play) to tell his son what’s happened to him. Hamlet now has a mission: to avenge his father’s death by killing Claudius.</p><p>To this end, Hamlet pretends to be mad (he puts on an “antic disposition,” in his own words) to throw Claudius off the trail and give himself some time to plan <strong>[2]</strong>. Letting only his friend Horatio (who is, in many ways, his only friend) into his confidence, Hamlet proceeds to terrorize his love(r) Ophelia, his mother Gertrude, the courtier Polonius, and just about everyone else who comes in his line of fire. And yet for all of Hamlet’s cruelty and confusion - and indeed there is much of it - there’s one thing that he’s unable to do for a very long time: take revenge on Claudius for the murder of his father. In one memorable scene, Hamlet has the chance to kill Claudius but he spares him because Claudius is praying, and Hamlet doesn’t want to do him the “favor” of sending his soul to heaven, as happens to a soul murdered in prayer. Most critics don’t buy Hamlet’s excuse here, though, and read the scene as indicative of Hamlet’s habit to “resolve to do, yet do nothing but resolve” (Coleridge’s words).</p><p>One thing that delays the revenge is that Hamlet wants to be sure the ghost is telling him the truth. This wasn’t an entirely irrelevant concern in England at the time of the play, because evil spirits sometimes took the forms of benevolent ones with the goal of tricking you into hell. To try to be as sure as he can that Claudius really is a murderer, Hamlet stages a play with a visiting troupe of actors. Hamlet’s play is modeled after the murder of his father by Claudius, and he plans to watch Claudius’s reaction to the play as a means of determining his guilt or innocence. If he really freaks out, which he does, then Hamlet will know that the ghost speaks truth.</p><p>Claudius responds to the play exactly as an unconfessed murderer would; by breaking up the show and screaming “Give me some light. Away!” And then Hamlet takes out his sword and impales this jerk, right? <em>Wrong</em>. It takes Hamlet two more acts to kill Claudius, and when he finally does, in a chaotic duel in the final scene, it looks nothing like the perfect revenge killing we’ve imagined back when the ghost first told Hamlet to avenge his “foul and most unnatural murder.”</p><p>You’ll notice, of course, that I’m pushing a particular reading of Hamlet, focusing on the things that Hamlet <em>doesn’t</em> do rather than the things that he <em>does</em>. I’m doing this for a reason. When I first read Hamlet in high school, I wish that someone had told me that the plot of the play isn’t in the revenge plot so much as in Hamlet’s inability to execute it, in his haltings, in his doubts - in other words, the plot of this play is in the mind of the character whom some critics call Shakespeare’s “genius.” As Stephen Greenblatt puts it in his book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHamlet-Purgatory-Stephen-Greenblatt%2Fdp%2F0691102570%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201726014%26sr%3D8-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">Hamlet in Purgatory</a></em><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" />, which is required reading for all those who will be unsatisfied, as they should be, with the limited scope of this introductory essay, the ghost’s insistence that Hamlet “remember me” resonates more deeply than his order to avenge.</p><p>This play looks like a revenge play, sure, but the play is about remembering and not about “revenging.” I want to end this first section with a few lines from Hamlet in Purgatory. Take it away, Greenblatt:</p><blockquote><p> Hamlet will complain that conscience - here consciousness itself - “does make cowards of us all”…This corrosive inwardness - the hallmark of the entire play and the cause of its astonishing, worldwide renown - is glimpsed even in his first frantic response to the Ghost, and it is reinforced by the Ghosts’s command, “Remember me.” From this perspective, what is at skate in the shift of emphasis from vengeance to remembrance is nothing less than the whole play (Greenblatt 208).</p></blockquote><p>So how did it happen, the writing of this play with worldwide renown? What has been the response to it? For answers to these questions and more, we continue now to…</p><p><strong>Part II: “This Piece of Work”</strong></p><p align="center"> - In which are explained the circumstances of the play’s composition, asbest as are known to us, and in which the reader learns of the play’stroubled publishing history-</p><p>Any discussion of the historical circumstances of <em>Hamlet</em>’s composition will by its nature owe a debt to Greenblatt and the critical school that has come to be called New Historicism. Anyone interesting in learning about the man behind the curtain, as it were, would do well to pick up Greenblatt’s <em>Hamlet in Purgatory</em>, or his newer <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWill-World-How-Shakespeare-Became%2Fdp%2F039332737X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201726315%26sr%3D1-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">Will in the World</a></em><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" />. Both provide succulent morsels of Shakespeare biography, a few of which I will include here.</p><p>Shakespeare likely wrote <em>Hamlet</em> in 1601. In the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, this puts it after Julius Caesar but before the great run of tragedies that included Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra.</p><p>In the chronology of Shakespeare’s life, though, the play is situated more interestingly. First things first: Shakespeare had a son whose name was Hamnet (a variation of Hamlet), and Hamnet died around age 11, in 1596. Five years later - the year that <em>Hamlet</em> was composed - Shakespeare suffered another loss, the death of his father John Shakespeare, who is certainly the glove-maker to whom humanity owes the greatest debt. Without making too much of this pun (although Shakespeare himself makes a similar one in <em>Hamlet</em> and elsewhere), death was very alive for Shakespeare in the deepest sense in these few years.</p><p>It’s not inconceivable - and here I am unapologetically borrowing from Greenblatt - that Shakespeare would have been haunted by the same demons that haunt Hamlet. Namely, the fear of a father (and a son?) trapped in purgatory and dependent for salvation on the prayers of the living, as King Hamlet is, could have struck a chord with him for more reasons than simply artistic ones. This is not to suggest that Shakespeare was a believing Christian, and I would further caution readers from assuming that Shakespeare’s plays put all that much stock in the metaphysical. It seems silly to say that a play like Hamlet, which has, for heaven’s sake, a ghost, is not a metaphysical play. But it tends to be more productive to read Shakespeare as a rational, this-world playwright than to read him as a kind of mad sorcerer. More on this later, in the annotations.</p><p>Returning to our narrative we fast-forward to 1757, when renovations were being undertaken on the house where Shakespeare was born, in Stratford-upon-Avon. In the course of making improvements on the roof, the workers found a document that is of interest to us in our present New Historical mode, because Greenblatt makes it a piece of his argument in <em>Hamlet in Purgatory</em>. In it, John asks his survivors to pray for him, should he wind up “a long while in Purgatory,” so that his soul can eventually be saved (Greenblatt 249). The document bears more than passing resemblance to the ghost’s speech in act one.</p><p>Taken together, the death of Hamnet and subsequent death of John (with all of its attendant complications, like the “spiritual testament”), point to a writer in the grip of unique circumstances at the time he was composing his greatest work.Back to 1601: Shakespeare finishes the play and The King’s Men, his playing company, put it on. Richard Burbage, the actor who first played some of Shakespeare’s greatest roles - he’d just played Brutus in <em>Caesar</em> - would have been Hamlet, and we can be reasonable sure that our date for the first performance (1599? 1601?) is close, because a number of English diarists and writers mention it in their writing around that time.</p><p>As for the textual history of the play, something must of course be said. For a more detailed history of the <em>Hamlet</em> manuscripts than can reasonably be provided here, the introduction to the Oxford edition is a good place to start, and for the very curious, Thomas Clayton’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHamlet-First-Published-Origins-Intertextualities%2Fdp%2F0874134277%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201726562%26sr%3D1-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">The Hamlet First Published</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" /></em> a good place to finish. The text of the play first appeared in print around 1603 in Quarto form, which Clayton calls “the day’s paperback.” Strangely, the First Quarto was rediscovered by modern scholars <em>after</em> the Second Quarto and the Folio version of 1623, leading, as you can imagine, to intriguing questions for scholars.</p><p>What becomes immediately clear when we read about manuscript history is that the copies of <em>Hamlet</em> we read today are not necessarily authoritative - they are the admirable efforts by scholars and editors to provide us with a copy of the play that we can live with, that seems to make sense.</p><p>There are still maddening questions about some of Shakespeare’s words, which tend not to go away. Compare Hamlet’s final words in these three versions:</p><p>First Quarto of 1603: Farewell Horatio, heaven receive my soul. <em>Ham. dies.</em></p><p>Second Quarto of 1604: the rest is silence</p><p>Folio of 1623: The rest is silence. O, o, o, o, <em>Dyes</em>.</p><p>Oxford Shakespeare edition: the rest is silence. <em>He gives a long sigh and dies</em>(Quarto text from Clayton p. 34)</p><p>And believe it or not, these are some of the <em>less</em> contested lines in the play. What really ices the cake as far as textual inconsistencies are concerned is the “to be or not to be” monologue (3.1.57-91). You may want to refresh your memory by reading the text of the Folio version (<a href="http://www.thefinalclub.org/permalink.php?annotation=1240" title="Hamlet" target="_blank" class="standard">the one on this website</a>) first, just so you can see how messed up the following really is:</p><p><strong>First Quarto:</strong></p><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><p>To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,And borne before an everlasting Judge,From whence no passenger ever retur’ndTo undiscovered country, at whose sightThe happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.</p></blockquote><p>The infelicities of this abomination are too numerous to count. One critic aptly calls it “this farrago of nonsense,” and finds it hard to believe that Shakespeare could actually have written it. To be sure, the mangled syntax, inelegant interjections - “I there’s the point” - and all-around <em>averageness</em> of the fantasy it presents of the Christian afterlife, makes it hard to believe that the same author that produced it is also responsible for its more beautiful sister in the Folio.</p><p>But suggesting that the Quarto is some how a forgery, and that Shakespeare didn’t have a hand in it, precludes us from coming to a more reasonable conclusion about the Quarto text’s origins. The First Quarto of <em>Hamlet</em> is not by a long shot the only “bad” text attributed to Shakespeare. <em>Timon of Athens</em>, which also contains much rough versification, even has many passages that are simply lifted directly from Shakespeare’s Latin sources, with no modifications made to them. The Timon manuscript is therefore often regarded as a draft by Shakespeare, a glimpse into his method of working on plays. Can the same be said of the First Quarto of <em>Hamlet</em>?</p><p>No. The First Quarto is so different from the Folio that it can’t reasonably be thought of as a work-in-progress. What may help explain the ubiquity of mediocre manuscripts by Shakespeare (though I can make no claim to historically explain the First Quarto specifically - scholarship is still undecided) is the process by which cash-hungry London printers in the early 17th century sought to make money off Shakespeare’s wildly popular plays.</p><p>Printers often found members of Shakespeare’s company who played minor roles and were willing, for a couple of beers and some cash, to try to remember as much as they could of the text and recite it to a company scribe. Then, the printers would take their “pirated” Shakespeare to press and sell it for a quick profit. Given this trend, it’s no wonder that Shakespeare’s company’s versions of the plays bear promises on their title pages that they are official and true to the original.</p><p>It would take 20 years - until the publication of the great Folio of 1623, for the printed version of the play (of all the plays) to do justice to the genius of their author.</p><p>It may well be asked, at this point, how readers received the play, and what some of Shakespeare’s greatest critics have made of it. For these insights and more, we must turn to…</p><p><strong>Part III: “Wild and whirling words”</strong></p><p align="center"> - In which the author says a few words about his favorite criticsof the play, and presumes with great insolence to respond totheir theories -</p><p>We have spent some time by now with Stephen Greenblatt’s scholarship, which I’m sure you will agree has enriched us and fortified us considerably. But Greenblatt is just one in a long line of <em>Hamlet</em> scholars, and I want to turn our attention to a kind of golden age of Hamlet scholarship, the era in which “Bardolatry” began in earnest. I’m talking about the period from about 1790 to about 1840, when the Germans J. W. Goethe and Ludwig Tieck were writing along with the Englishmen Samuel Coleridge and William Hazlitt (among many, many others). I make use of the work of all four of these men in my annotations, and so I would do well to provide an introduction to their work at this point.</p><p>This period - the early 19th century - saw the emergence of a new kind of Hamlet. As T. S. Eliot notes, and as Hazlitt noted many years before him, each generation of scholars has the tendency to make Hamlet into a suitable focal point for their particular theoretical energies. But because I happen to like very much the Hamlet that these critics have handed down to us, I think it’s well worth describing him here, thereby committing the very pleasurable crime that Eliot describes in his essay (<a href="http://www.thefinalclub.org/view-work.php?work_id=29&section_id=836" title="Hamlet and his Problems" target="_blank" class="standard">available on this website</a>) and that let Hazlitt to observe, “We are Hamlet.”</p><p>Hamlet in the early 19th century becomes more Romantic. He becomes gentler, more brooding, less suited to action. He develops an active internal life that precludes him from making big moves in the world outside the self. In short, he becomes a genius. And he does all these things thanks to a newly internationalized school of <em>Hamlet</em> criticism, as evidenced by the presence of those two great continental philosophers - Goethe and Tieck - in my choice of critics to present in this essay. Without further ado, I will introduce the work of…</p><p><strong>J. W. Goethe</strong></p><p>Goethe (1749-1832) may well be the most influential reader of <em>Hamlet</em> to ever put pen to paper. In 1796 Goethe wrote a Bildungsroman (”coming of age novel,” more or less) called <em>The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister</em>, about a well-born and theater-obsessed boy named Wilhelm, who resembles his author in certain important ways and yet is not to be confused with him altogether. In the section of relevance to us, Wilhelm joins a theater troupe and persuades them to put on <em>Hamlet</em>, with himself in the leading role.</p><p>Immediately, Wilhelm finds it difficult to reconcile certain “inconsistencies” in the character. “The farther I advanced,” he says, “the more difficult did it become for me to form any image of the whole, in its general bearings; till at last it seemed as if impossible.” To try to get at an actable conception of his character, Wilhelm performs an elegant thought experiment, imagining what Hamlet was like before the beginning of the play, before the murder of his father. He wants to “distinguish” the essential parts of his character from the damaging repercussions of the traumatic event at the center of the play. What Wilhelm finds is that the teenage Hamlet would have been riding high. He had a nice girl named Ophelia, he was handsome, he was set to inherit the throne, he was smart as hell. Much of the inconsistencies we observe in Hamlet’s character (and, as will be seen when we discuss Coleridge, there are many indeed) can be seen as incomplete efforts to reconcile these two disparate lives into the elusive “whole” that Wilhelm the actor needs to play Hamlet.</p><p>Wilhelm follows his work through to the other characters in the play, and has especially sympathetic things to say about Ophelia, who suffers more than anyone else from the “inversion” of Hamlet’s affections - from love to spiteful madness - after his father’s death. Ophelia’s suicide becomes for Goethe a kind of collapse of the self in the wake of two traumatic events, abandonment by Hamlet and the death of Polonius. He writes, “Her heart breaks. The whole structure of her being is loosened from its joinings; her father’s death strikes fiercely against it; and the fair edifice altogether crumbles into fragments.” Not bad.Wilhelm Meister also offers an interesting discussion about the ethics of cutting the play for performance, and many more observations.<strong>S. T. Coleridge</strong></p><p>Coleridge (1772-1835) is the man when it comes to a particularly strange element of Hamlet’s character: the way he talks about revenge but doesn’t take it. One of Coleridge’s most compelling insights is this: That hamlet “mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them.”</p><p>Hamlet shouts, “that this too solid flesh would melt!” - he knows he wants somehow to escape from the body, from life, from the villainy at Elsinore - but he seems unable to <em>do</em> it. With Coleridge’s maxim in mind, much of the rest of the play makes more sense.</p><p>Hamlet is a man to whom every conceivable motive for drastic action has been provided. He has to revenge his father, a usurper is on his throne, a foreign invasion is imminent. Why, then, doesn’t he do anything until the very end, and even then only because he is manipulated into a messy duel that he cannot win?</p><p>Coleridge finds the answer in Hamlet’s internality: “[Hamlet] is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.” For Hamlet, to resolve is to act.</p><p>Coleridge puts Hamlet on the couch, then, in an interesting way. He sees in Hamlet a man with a highly perfected and complex mental life who is unable to translate his vision of the world onto the world itself. Hamlet has “that aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world in themselves.”</p><p>As for that “world” itself, Coleridge provides us with a vocabulary to talk about the way that Hamlet’s mind works. Specifically, in a phrase that will recur throughout my annotations, Coleridge describes something that he calls the “science of method.” By this he means the gift of Hamlet to assemble and associate things in a compressed, efficient, <em>relational</em> way. Hamlet does not see things in terms of how they <em>are</em> so much as in how they <em>relate</em> to each other:</p><blockquote><p> “method becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers.”</p></blockquote><p>When this tendency is combined with Hamlet’s mental energy and natural intelligence (recall that we are in the period of criticism in which Hamlet becomes a genius), it’s no wonder that Hamlet’s “world unto himself” is vivid and complex enough to out-real the real world.<strong>William Hazlitt</strong></p><p>I will take a page from Polonius’s book and make a “short tale” of this section, because I rely more heavily on Greenblatt, Goethe, and Coleridge than on these other two critics in my annotations.</p><p>Hazlitt (1778-1830) was Coleridge’s buddy and frequently wrote reviews of <em>Hamlet</em> in which he turns the most exacting of eyes on every detail of the performances. In one such review, of the actor Edmund Kean (the Richard Burbage of early 19th century England), Hazlitt takes issue with a finer point. “His pronunciation of the word ‘contumely’ in the last of these [soliloquies] is, we apprehend, not authorized by custom, or by the metre,” he wrote.</p><p>Hazlitt agreed with Coleridge about Hamlet’s all-around lack of resolution, and shared his reading of scene 3.3, in which Hamlet has the chance to slay Claudius but decides against it because he is praying (3.3.70-90). Both men agree that Hamlet’s nod to the notion that a man who dies in prayer goes straight to heaven - “this is hire and salary,” he says, “not revenge” - is merely a smoke-and-mirrors act to excuse his own cowardice and indecision.</p><p>Hazlitt also gave us the chestnut “it is we who are Hamlet” and provides a clear elaboration of some of Coleridge’s ideas, especially of the “world unto himself.” “Because he cannot have his revenge perfect,” Hazlitt writes, “according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines it altogether.”</p><p>Hazlitt would have agreed with Wilhelm on the point that acting the part of Hamlet is a very, very daunting task, like trying to “embody a shadow.”<strong>Ludwig Tieck</strong>One of the most distinguished German critics of his time, Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) provides insights on Ophelia in his <em>Observations on some Characters in Hamlet</em> of which I make considerable use in <a href="http://www.thefinalclub.org/permalink.php?annotation=2402" title="Hamlet Act IV scene 5" target="_blank" class="standard">my annotations of her mad scene</a>.</p><p>He also, like Hazlitt, notes that Hamlet is “charming” even at his most crazy, a note that fits nicely with Hazlitt’s characterization of Hamlet as the “most amiable of misanthropes.”</p><p>As for his observations on Hamlet himself, Tieck is as impressive a reader as any of his contemporaries. Since we’ve discussed the evolution of the “to be or not to be” speech in three manuscript versions, I will quote Tieck’s take on it (incidentally, “Tieck’s Take” would have been a great title for his weekly gossip column, if only he’d had one):</p><blockquote><p> “It all depends, he says to himself…whether the individual lives or does not live, that is to say, I do not dare more than life itself and then lose; therefore it is all a matter of life, whether I want to go to it! For he who does not fear death has nothing left to fear.”</p></blockquote><p>Tieck leaves no doubt as to the life-and-death stakes of Hamlet’s monologues, and I encourage you to return to this excerpt when you’ve read the “to be or not to be” speech in its context.</p><p>Having laid some important critical foundation, we now turn to…<strong>Part IV: “Let us haste to hear it”</strong></p><p align="center">- in which the reader, who, like Fortinbras in 5.2, is by this time eager to come to thepoint already (and begin reading the play), puts up with the author’sfinal words on his annotations, and is well rewarded for his patience -</p><p>It should be abundantly clear by now that there is a wealth of scholarship about this play, much of it very good, some of it astonishingly brilliant. What on earth, then, is the purpose of one more set of annotations? What’s the use?</p><p>In annotating this play, I have sought to combine some of the great readings of <em>Hamlet</em> that precede us with some new and unlikely insights. You will find links to YouTube videos sharing space with bits of Goethe and Coleridge, and Bob Dylan lyrics rubbing up against Stephen Greenblatt. In some cases I present readings of the play with which you may not agree. I hope that such disagreement will be productive and interesting, and I encourage you to join in the discussion by posting responses to the annotations.</p><p>Where I borrow from published work I always note it parenthetically, and the reader will find it helpful to consult the bibliography at the end of this essay to facilitate further reading.</p><p>But this is much ado about nothing! I hope you enjoy meeting Hamlet for the first time, if you are a new reader, and I hope that returning readers will find many things here to deepen their appreciation of what is perhaps the greatest English play of all time.<strong>NOTES:</strong>[1] The careful reader will see the affair between Claudius and Gertrude if indeed it has been going on for a long time leads to a dizzying possibility: is Hamlet Claudius’s son?</p><p>[2] Whether or not this device is necessary at all is up for debate. You might say that Hamlet’s plan to pretend to be a madman is itself the work of a madman.</p><p><strong>Further Reading (works cited)</strong></p><p>Hibbard, G. R. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHamlet-Oxford-Classics-William-Shakespeare%2Fdp%2F0192834169%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201728031%26sr%3D1-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">Oxford World’s Classics: Hamlet</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" />. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. (”OC” in annotations)</p><p>Clayton, Thomas, ed. <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHamlet-First-Published-Origins-Intertextualities%2Fdp%2F0874134277%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201726562%26sr%3D1-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">The Hamlet First Published</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" /></em> a good place to finish. The text of the play first appeared in print around 1603 in Quarto form, which Clayton calls “the day’s paperback.” Strangely, the First Quarto was rediscovered by modern scholars <em>after</em>. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.</p><p>Greenblatt, Stephen. <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHamlet-Purgatory-Stephen-Greenblatt%2Fdp%2F0691102570%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201726014%26sr%3D8-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">Hamlet in Purgatory</a></em><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" />. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.</p><p>For Goethe, Coleridge, Tieck, Hazlitt, and others, consult the excellent series “Critical Responses to Hamlet,” which comes in many volumes. Volume 2 covers 1790-1838:Farley-Hills, David, ed. The Hamlet Collection: Critical Responses to Hamlet 1600-1900. New York: AMS Press, 1996.</p><p>For a silly but entertaining mock trial of the characters in Hamlet, courtesy of the New York State Bar Association, try “The Elsinore Appeal.” Burr, David, ed. The Elsinore Appeal: People v. Hamlet. USA: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.</p><p>Bloom, Harold. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHamlet-Poem-Unlimited-Harold-Bloom%2Fdp%2FB000ESSRPS%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201727694%26sr%3D1-1&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">Hamlet: Poem Unlimited</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" />. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.</p><p>For cool drawings of characters in the play, go to “Hamlet and the Visual Arts.”Young, Alan R. Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002.</p><p>As for different editions, I recommend <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FArden-Shakespeare-Complete-Works%2Fdp%2F1903436397%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1201727780%26sr%3D1-2&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">The Arden Shakespeare</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" /> or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Furl%3Dsearch-alias%253Dstripbooks%26field-keywords%3Doxford%2Bclassic%2Bshakespeare%26x%3D0%26y%3D0&tag=thficl03-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank" class="standard">The Oxford Classics</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thficl03-20&l=ur2&o=1" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important" border="0" height="1" width="1" />.</p>