The Complexities Of Life And Death In Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Hamlet is a genuine tragedy that illumines our mind with high philosophical ideas about human life and fills us with genuine tragic-emotions of pity and terror. Hamlet is not a mere tragedy; it is a play that is easily ranked with the greatest tragedies of the world.

Hamlet, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, was written in about 1599–1601.It was published in a quarto edition in 1603 from an unauthorized text, with reference to an earlier play. The First Folio version was taken from a second quarto of 1604 that was based on Shakespeare’s own papers with some annotations by the bookkeeper.

Shakespeare derived the story of Prince Hamlet from several sources, notably from Books III and IV of Saxo Grammaticus’s 12th-century Gesta Danorum and from volume 5 (1570) of Histoires tragiques, a free translation of Saxo by François de Belleforest. The play was evidently preceded by another play of Hamlet (now lost), usually referred to as the Ur-Hamlet, of which Thomas Kyd is a conjectured author.

Hamlet can be traced back to a personal experience of Shakespeare and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare received word that his only son Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill. At some point in the summer he presumably learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time he reached Stratford, his son – whom, apart from brief visits, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy – was already dead. Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity Church on the 11th of August, 1596.

Hamlet was Shakespeare’s second tragedy, produced after an interval of about five years of his first tragedy Romeo and Juliet. It is supposed that Shakespeare laboured carefully for a long time over Hamlet. Despite the absence of tragedy in the earlier years of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, he looked upon the writing of tragedy as his chief vocation as an author.

Sustainable marks of immature judgement appeared in Shakespeare’s design for Romeo and Juliet. But after five years, when Hamlet was completed, Shakespeare had attained his full maturity and was master of his craft. He went on to produce, with sustained heart and imagination, the most marvellous feat of authorship during a period of ten years, from 1602 to 1612.

Shakespeare was the author of two or three tragedies at nearly 40 years of age. Of these of these, Romeo and Juliet may be locked upon us the work of the artist’s adolescence; and Hamlet as the evidence that he had become adult, and in this supreme department master of his craft. The broad history of the nation interested him; but also the passion of love and death in two young hearts; he could laugh brightly, and mock the affectations and fashionable follies of his day; but he must also stand before the tomb of the Capulets possessed by a sense of mystery, and that strenuous pain, in which something else than mere sorrow is predominant.

Now when writing Hamlet, his second tragedy, Shakespeare was determined that he would break away from the influence of his first tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet is steeped in passion; Hamlet is steeped in meditation. With Hamlet to resolve is to stand at gaze before an action, and to become incapable of achieving it. the necessary coupling between the purpose and the deed has been fatally dissolved. There is the central point in common between Hamlet and Romeo – the will in each is sapped; but in each it is sapped by a totally different disease of soul.

When Hamlet was written, Shakespeare had passed through his years of apprenticeship, and become a master dramatist. In point of style the play stands midway between his early and his latest works. His superintendence over the development of his thought and imaginings, very apparent in Shakespeare’s early writings, now conceals itself; but the action of imagination and thought has not yet become embarrassing in its swiftness and multiplicity of direction. Rapid dialogue in verse, admirable for its combination of verisimilitude with artistic metrical effects, occurs in the scene in which Hamlet questions his friends about the appearance of the ghost (Act 1 scene 2); the soliloquies of Hamlet are excellent examples of the slow, dwelling verse which Shakespeare appropriates to the utterance of thought in solitude; and nowhere did Shakespeare write a nobler piece of prose than the speech in which Hamlet describes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern his melancholy. The mystery, the baffling, vital obscurity of the play, and in particular the character of its chief person, make it evident that Shakespeare had left far behind him that early stage of development when an artist obtrudes his intentions, or distrusting his own ability to keep sight of one uniform design, deliberately and with effort holds that design persistently before him. When Shakespeare completed Hamlet he must have trusted himself and trusted his audience; he trusts himself to enter into relation with his subject, highly complex as that subject was, in a pure, emotional manner. Hamlet might so easily have been manufactured into an enigma, or a puzzle; which could be completely taken to pieces and explained. But since Shakespeare created it as a mystery, therefore it is suggestive; and not explicable.

In several of the tragedies of Shakespeare the tragic disturbance of character and life is caused by the subjection of the chief person of the drama to some dominant passion, essentially antipathetic to his nature, though proceeding from some inherent weakness or imperfection, a passion from which the victim cannot deliver himself, and which finally works out his destruction. However, it is true that Hamlet is the central point of the play Hamlet. It is not the general cataclysm in which a decayed order of things is swept away to give place to a new rough material; it is not the downfall of the Danish monarchy, and of a corrupt society, together with the accession of a new dynasty and of a hardier civilisation that chiefly inspired Shakespeare. The tragedy of Hamlet was not merely an idea; nor a fragment of political philosophy. Out of Shakespeare’s profound sympathy with an individual soul and a personal life, the wonderful creation came into being.

It is Hamlet’s intellect however, together with his deep and abiding sense of the moral qualities of things, which distinguishes him from other heroes of Shakespeare. When the play opens he has reached the age of 30 years- the age when the idealities of youth ought to become one with and inform the practical tendencies of manhood- he has received the culture of every kind except the culture of active life. There was no call to action for his meditative son during the reign of elder Hamlet. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, and an amateur in art, a pondering on the things of life and death, who has never formed a resolution or executed a deed.

When Hamlet first stands before us, his father has been two months dead; his mother has been for a month the wife of Claudius. He is solitary in the midst of the Court. A mass of sorrow and wounded feeling, of shame and of disgust has been thrown back upon him. The misery of self-suppression leaves him in a state of weak and intense irritability; he is longing to be alone.

When Hamlet was written, Shakespeare has gained a further stage in his culture of self-control, and that he had become not only adult as an author but had entered upon the full maturity of his manhood.

In the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, the protagonist, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and during the course of the play he contemplates death from numerous perspectives. He ponders the physical aspects of death, as seen with Yoricks’s skull, his father’s ghost, as well as the dead bodies in the cemetery. Hamlet also contemplates the spiritual aspects of the afterlife with his various soliloquies. Emotionally Hamlet is attached to death with the passing of his father and his lover Ophelia. Death surrounds Hamlet, and forces him to consider death from various points of view.

It is usual in Shakespeare’s plays for the main theme to be reflected in subsidiary incidents, persons, and detailed suggestion throughout. The theme of Hamlet is death. Life that is bound to perish to the grave, love that does not survive the loved one’s life— both, in their insistence on death as the primary fact of nature, are branded on the mind of Hamlet, burned into it, searing it with agony. The bereavement of Hamlet and his consequent mental agony bordering on madness is mirrored in the bereavement of Ophelia and her madness. The death of the Queen’s love is reflected in the swift passing of the love of the Player-Queen, in the ‘Murder of Gonzago’. Death is over the whole play; Polonius and Ophelia die during the action, and Ophelia is buried before our eyes. Moreover, Hamlet arranges the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The general thought of death, intimately related to the predominating human theme, the pain in Hamlet’s mind, is thus suffused throughout the whole play. We need not see through Hamlet’s eyes. Except for the original murder of Hamlet’s father, the Hamlet universe is one of healthy and robust life, good-nature, humour, romantic strength, and welfare: against this background is the figure of Hamlet pale with the consciousness of death. He is the ambassador of death walking amid life. The effect is at first primarily one of separation. It is, as it were, a nihilistic birth in the consciousness of Hamlet that spreads its deadly venom around.