Context Flashcards
The Question of Power
Hamlet was written around the year 1600 in the final years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1, who had been the monarch of England for more than forty years. The prospect of Elizabeth’s death and the question of who would succeed her was a subject of grave anxiety at the time, since Elizabeth had no children and the only person with a legitimate claim, James of Scotland. It is no surprise, then that many of Shakespeare’s plays from this period, including Hamlet, concern transfers of power from one monarch to the next. The situation Shakespeare presents at the beginning of Hamlet is that a strong and beloved King has dies, and throne has been inherited by not by his son, but his brother.
Shakespeare Changes the Story
The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish Prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother and claims the throne. The prince pretends to be feeble minded to throw his uncle of guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge. Shakespeare changed the emphasis of the story entirely, making his Hamler a philosophical minded prince who delays action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain.
Saxo Grammaticus
Shakespeare borrowed his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works. He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth century Latin history of Denmark complied by Saxo Grammaticus.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that began in fifteenth century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that has been lost to the Middle Ages.
Renaissance Humanism
This was a movement that generated a new interest in human experience and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of human understanding. For humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to a better understanding of how to act and their fondest hope was that the coordination of action and understanding would lead to a great benefits for society as a whole.
Michel de Montaigne
The sixteenth century French humanist, Michel de Montaigne, was no less interested in studying human experiences than the earlier humanists were, but he maintained that the world of experience was a world of appearances, and that human beings could never hope to see past those appearances into the ‘realities’ that lie behind them. This is the world in which Shakespeare places his characters. Hamlet is faced with the difficult tasks of correcting an injustice that he never had sufficient knowledge of.
Health of the Kingdom
Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed that the health of a kingdom depended upon the well being of its royal family: in Denmark as in Shakespeare’s England, the royal family is in decline, and the effects are felt in the Kingdom as a whole.
Elizabeth’s Heir
Elizabeth’s refusal to name an heir created opportunities for ambitious young noblemen: a further cause for political anxiety in Shakespeare’s England at the time Hamlet was written was the chaos and bloodshed these ambitions could cause. James 1V was considered a foreigner because he was Scottish and under English law foreigners could not inherit English land. In Hamlet there are rumours of a foreign prince, Fortinbras.
The Earl of Essex
In 1601, the Earl of Essex led an attempted rebellion and Elizabeth was forced to execute him. Fortinbras prepares to invade the kingdom, and a young Laertes leads a rebellion. Hamlet plays upon the its audience fear of ambitious young nobleman and the danger they posed to ordinary people when there was not a cleat line of inheritance of the throne.
Revenge Tragedies
In a revenge tradgedy the hero has suffered a great wrong, usually the murder of someone he loves and the plot is driven by his desire for revenge. At the end of the play, the hero murders the person who has wronged him, and typically the hero dies.
The Spanish Tragedy - Thomas Kyd
It was written more than a decade before Hamlet, and it was still being noticed that Hamlet borrows several features from Kyd’s play, including a vengeful ghost, a play within a play and hero that goes mad.
Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedy
Hamlet subverts many of the tropes to question both the genre of revenge tragedy, as well as the nature of revenge itself. In Hamlet, the hero learns the identity of his father’s murder at the end of the Act 1 and is in a position to kill Claudius from the beginning. Hamlets only real obstacle is internal. Shakespeare introduced philosophical questions to the revenge tragedy which had not appeared in the genre before.
The Play Within A Play
Scene two is a parody of revenge tragedy: its rhymes would have made it sound absurdly old fashioned to an audience in Shakespeare’s time.
Ancient Roman Code
The Ancient Roman code prized family honour above all things.
The Christian Church
The Christian Church commanded that it was God’s business not man’s.
