By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The role of Hamlet is one of the most intellectually and emotionally demanding for an actor: as Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor mention in their detailed introduction to Hamlet: Revised Edition (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
To attempt an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a single blog post: surely a foolhardy objective if ever there was one. So here we’ll try to focus on some of the key points of Hamlet and analyse their significance, homing in on some of the most interesting as well as some of the most notable aspects of Shakespeare’s play.
Hamlet is a long play, but it’s also a fascinating one, with a ghost, murder, mistaken identity, family drama, poison, pirates, duels, skulls, and even a fight in an open grave. What more could one ask for?
A short introduction to the Shakespeare play Hamlet, in the form of five interesting facts
1. In the first printed copy, the play’s most famous line was somewhat different. Most editions of Hamlet which we read nowadays are slightly different from each other: there is no definitive text of Hamlet. This is because we have several sources for the original play-text: two quarto texts (a ‘quarto’ was a large sheet of paper folded into quarters, hence the name) published in the early 1600s, and the ‘Folio’ text, from the 1623 First Folio, the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays. There are significant differences between, say, the first quarto (known as the ‘bad quarto’, which wasn’t rediscovered until 1823) and the Folio text, and Hamlet’s celebrated line, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question‘, which begins his famous soliloquy in which he muses on the point of life and contemplates suicide, is rendered quite differently – as ‘To be or not to be, I there’s the point’. It also appears at a different point in the play, just after Polonius – who is called ‘Corambis’ in this version – has hatched the plot to arrange a meeting between Hamlet and Polonius’ (sorry, Corambis‘) daughter, Ophelia.
At the moment, Maxine Peake is playing Hamlet at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. The promotional blurb for the production on the Royal Exchange website states that Peake ‘creates a Hamlet for now, a Hamlet for Manchester’. But a woman playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet is, actually, nothing new. Numerous women have played the part in the … Read more
By Dr Michael Greaney, Lancaster University Imagine a reader – say, a Martian with a library card — whose sole acquaintance with human experience was from books. What picture of human life would this well-read alien carry around in its imagination? And what would be missing from that picture? One area of our creaturely existence … Read more