As hell, whereto it goes....
Dr. Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century Christian of high moral sensitivity: "This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romantic poet with a smack of Hamlet himself, if he may say so: "Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking fiendishness!--Of such importance is it to understand the germ of a character."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the voice of Wilhelm Meister, hero of the archetypal Romantic Bildungsroman, the novel in which a young man or woman grows to emotional maturity (a genre for which Hamlet itself was a key model): " 'The time is out of joint: O, cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!' In these words, I imagine, will be found the key to Hamlet's whole procedure. To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed."
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Romantic critic: "Hamlet is singular in its kind: a tragedy of thought inspired by continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the dark perplexity of the events of this world, and calculated to call forth the very same meditation in the minds of the spectators."
Lord Byron, always glad to play the devil's advocate:
Who can read this wonderful play without the profoundest emotion? And yet what is it but a colossal enigma? We love Hamlet even as we love ourselves. Yet consider his character, and where is either goodness or greatness? He betrays Ophelia's gentlest love; he repulses her in a cruel manner; and when in the most touching way, she speaks to him, and returns his presents, he laughs her off like a man of the town. At her grave, at the new-made grave of Ophelia his first love, whom his unkindness had blasted in the very bud of her beauty, in the morn and liquid dew of youth, what is the behaviour of Hamlet? A blank--worse than a blank; a few ranting lines, instead of true feeling, that prove him perfectly heartless. Then his behaviour in the grave, and his insult to Laertes, why the gentlest verdict one can give is insanity. But he seems by nature, and in his soberest moods, fiend-like in cruelty. His old companions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he murders without the least compunction; he desires them to be put to sudden death, "not shriving-time allowed" ... Polonius, father of Ophelia, he does actually kill; and for this does he lament or atone for what he has done, by any regret or remorse? "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room"--"You nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby!" But suppose him heartless, though he is for ever lamenting, and complaining, and declaiming about the false-heartedness of every one else; Richard III is heartless--Iago--Edmund. The tragic poet of course deals not in your good-boy characters. But neither is he, as Richard is, a hero, a man of mighty strength of mind. He is, according to his own admission, as "unlike Hercules" as possible. He does not, as a great and energetic mind does, exult under the greatness of a grand object. He is weak, so miserably weak as even to complain of his own weakness.
Elaine Showalter, turn-of-the-millennium feminist, as if responding to Byron's remarks about Ophelia:
When Ophelia is mad, Gertrude says that "Her speech is nothing," mere "unshaped use." Ophelia's speech thus represents the horror of having nothing to say in the public terms defined by the court. Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia's story becomes the Story of O--the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality ... we could provide a manual of female insanity by chronicling the illustrations of Ophelia; this is so because the illustrations of Ophelia have played a major role in the theoretical construction of female insanity.
Soren Kierkegaard, melancholy Danish philosopher, himself a Hamlet wracked by sexual guilt, coming perhaps to the heart of the mystery: "Hamlet is deeply tragic because he suspects his mother's guilt."
Sigmund Freud, inaugurating the language of psychoanalytic criticism which Showalter has been employing and Kierkegaard subtly anticipating: "In Sophocles' Oedipus the child's wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought out into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and just as in the case of a neurosis, we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences ... Hamlet is able to do anything--except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his childhood realized."
James Joyce, Shakespeare-soaked Irish novelist, in the voice of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, weaving a somewhat Freudian reading into a biographical fantasy:
The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the cast-off mail of a court buck, a well-set man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name: "Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit," bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever. Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
T. S. Eliot, poet and stern critic, dissatisfied with the Freudian solution, but agreeing that there is a problem: "Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and ... Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the 'intractable' material of the old play.... So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure."
Jan Kott, Polish critic, writing under tyranny, swinging away from psychology to politics: his Hamlet is not "the moralist, unable to draw a clear-cut line between good and evil" or "the intellectual, unable to find a sufficient reason for action" or "the philosopher, to whom the world's existence is a matter of doubt," but rather "the youth, deeply involved in politics, rid of illusions, sarcastic, passionate and brutal ... a born conspirator ... a young rebel who has about him something of the charm of James Dean."
From Wilhelm Meister to Stephen Dedalus to James Dean and beyond, Hamlet is always our contemporary. To be or not to be Hamlet? That is the question for every young aspiring intellectual or actor. Or indeed actress: of all Shakespeare's major male roles, it is the one that has most often and most effectively been played by women. In Renaissance terms, action was the prerogative of the male and feeling of the female, so perhaps Hamlet's intense gift of feeling, and talking about his feelings, makes him a "feminine" character.
For those who do not get to play the part itself, there is the compensation of imagining themselves in a supporting role. Tom Stoppard's razor-sharp existential tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) rewrites the drama from the point of view of the two men on the ma
rgins who are cogs in the wheel, and in the cult film Withnail & I (1986), an old actor (Uncle Monty, played by Richard Griffiths) is broken by the realization that he will never "play the Dane" (he has only managed to secure the tiny part of Marcellus the nightwatchman) and a young unemployed actor (Withnail, played by Richard E. Grant) ends up in London Zoo reciting Hamlet's great prose discourse "I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth" (2.2.296-311) to an enclosure of bedraggled wolves. Hardly the "paragon of animals" and yet, because of Hamlet, still he can dream.*
*For further discussion of the play's complicated textual history, see "Text," this page-this page.
*See further the interview with Michael Boyd about his production in "The Director's Cut."
*Further selections from critical commentaries on the play, with linking narrative, are available on the edition website, www.therscshakespeare.com.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of "Quarto" editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of Hamlet, there are hundreds of differences between each of the three early editions: two Quartos (one short and frequently corrupt, the other very long and generally well printed) and the Folio. As explained above in the discussion of "How Many Hamlets?," some of the differences are far from trivial.
Generations of editors have adopted a "pick and mix" approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the two Quarto and the Folio texts represent three discrete moments in the life of Hamlet, that plays change in the course of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.
If you look at printers' handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor's case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rush-light and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand which had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers' lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.
But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse "promptbooks" were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a well-printed Quarto was available, Hamlet notable among them, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare's will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, "read him and again and again," but they also wanted "the great variety of readers" to work from texts that were close to the theater-life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes and Quarto-only passages are appended after the text of Hamlet.
The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Hamlet, so the list at the beginning of the play is provided by the editors, arranged by groups of characters. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus "HAMLET, Prince of Denmark").
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. We have emphasized broad geographical settings rather than specifics of the kind that suggest anachronistically realistic staging. We have therefore avoided such niceties as "another room in the palace."