Hamlet Across Space and Time

Summary

The never-waning interest in Hamlet has, since the beginning of the twentieth century, spilled over to fields of intellectual endeavour beyond that of literary criticism, causing Hamlet to be interpreted more variously than before – in the light of Freudian psychology or of existentialist philosophy, for instance – with the result that ‘Hamletology’ has practically become a multidiscipline research challenge. Likewise, throughout the lay world reader and audience response continues to be enthusiastic, a credit to Ben Jonson’s prophetic tribute that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age, but for all time’. It is true that Hamlet’s forte does not lie in an unswerving resolve or in a single-minded and vigorous execution of it, so much so that Hamlet, in Bradley’s opinion, is not entitled to the giant stature that Shakespeare’s later tragic heroes such as Othello have customarily been accorded. However, it is precisely here, if anywhere, that resides the durable Hamlet motif – neither ‘all virtue’ nor ‘all vice’ simplistically, being at once ‘the Nemean lion’ and a ‘muddy-mettled’ and ‘pigeon-livered’ ‘John-a-dreams’ – a motif, in short, of the three-dimensional man of flesh and blood rather than of a dramatis persona.