I think it's safe to say that Hamlet is Shakespeare's most famous and most performed play. It was performed for the first time around 1603 and underwent several revisions before it became what it is now. Four-hundred years ago, the Ghost of Hamlet's father and his complicated demand that his son revenge his death struck audiences forcibly. An unusual sign of Hamlet's popularity is the record of it being performed aboard Captain William Keeling's ship Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in September 1607. Why is Hamlet so popular? Just like the lead character himself, it's impossible to be certain. It's the only story of revenge that questions human purpose and incites human error. In today's world, most revenge stories are concerned with 'how' the act of revenge will be carried out instead of 'why'. In the 2003-04 films Kill Bill Vol I & II, the bride never questions her actions or her motives as to what she's doing. All she does is answer her urge for revenge by killing her ex-colligues who massacred her wedding. Unlike Hamlet, Kill Bill is very closed-minded in how it treats the use of revenge, often making it seem like a comical joke.
Elizabethan audiences would have been mixed about how to understand views of revenge. Not until 1623 did Francis Bacon's essay "On Revenge" call the act "a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." An act of "wild justice"is an oxymoron because justice is a quality of civilization and "wild" being a form of savagery. Despite being condemned by church and state, personal revenge was very much frequent in all social groups and classes. So when a play concerning revenge involving a future heir to the throne of Denmark arrived, all social groups would most likely believe that Hamlet was in the right to defend his family's dignity. Shakespeare even justifies the use of revenge by adding a different point of view at the matter. Laertes' dilemma of a murdered father and a sister driven mad is directly reminiscent of Hamlet's dilemma.
I think what makes Hamlet so great is the build up of tension the play creates. More often than not, an audience screams at the protagonist to carry out revenge as quickly and brutally as possible to right the wrong. But not Hamlet. He instead runs from the responsibility and waits for the certainty that never comes. When he finally does decide to lash out, he makes a grave, reckless error by killing the wrong man. In the end, it's rather amazing that Hamlet actually accomplished his revenge.
There's so much to dissect in this play. Stay tuned.
Travis
Good one
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