Hamlet
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Hamlet returns home from school after learning that his father is dead. When he arrives at Elsinore, he discovers his uncle Claudius is married to his mother Gertrude and is now king. Hamlet is in a bad mood! Matters only get worse when his best friend Horatio and a couple guards show him a ghost who looks like his father. The ghost instructs Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing Claudius! Hamlet doesn't know what to do. He decides to act mad until he figures it out. While Hamlet feigns madness, he inadvertently kills his girlfriend Ophelia's father, Polonius (he thought Polonius was the king...hate it when that happens!). The death of her father causes Ophelia to literally go off the deep end. At the close of the play, Hamlet does get his revenge, yet he perishes along with 8 other characters!
The Play’s Historical Sources
It is probable that Hamlet has its origins in a popular Icelandic saga mentioned for the first time by Snaebjörn, an Icelandic poet of the tenth century. The Danish historian and poet Saxo Grammaticus refers to it at the end of the twelfth century. In this Latin work recounting the history of Denmark Shakespeare’s future character appears under the name Amleth in a story probably influenced by the classical history of Lucius Junius Brutus. Here is the story: Horvendill, the father of Amleth, is killed by his brother Feng, who then marries Gerutha, the widow of his victim. Amleth feigns madness in order to appear ineffectual and harmless in the eyes of Feng, who would spare him for these reasons. He evades the snare of a young woman sent by his enemies and kills a spy concealed in his mother’s bedroom. Ophelia and Polonius are already vaguely sketched, as is the episode concerning a letter ordering the assassination of Amleth by the king of England. Amleth manages to intercept this letter and it is the two messengers who are killed instead. Amleth marries the daughter of the king of England, returns to Denmark and assassinates Feng, whom the king of England has secretly promised to avenge. He sends Amleth to the court of the queen of Scotland, who falls in love with him and marries him in her turn. Amleth then defeats the king of England and returns to Jutland with his two wives. However there are controversies concerning the exact origins of Hamlet. Some see Hamlet as the product of Jutland’s folklore, an interpretation supported by the possible etymology of the name of the protagonist as meaning mad Onela, suggesting some identification with the Swedish king Onela mentioned in Beowulf. Others find Oriental (Persian) or Celtic (Irish) origins. Parallels can also be found in the English romances of Havelock, Horn and Bevis of Hampton. Saxo’s version was translated in the sixteenth century, with the horrific elements emphasised, by François de Belleforest in his collection Histoires Tragiques (Vol.5, 1570). An English version of this history was published in London in 1608 under the title The Historye of Hamblet. At the end of the 1580s a revenge tragedy in the tradition of Seneca about Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, based on Belleforest, was already popular in London. This Ur-Hamlet is traditionally attributed to Thomas Kyd and was contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s presence in London. It has similarities with the other predecessors of the latter’s play, which can be dated between 1599 and 1602, in that it is less psychologically complex concerning the central protagonist, whose prevarications are essentially due only to the practical problems of assassinating a king permanently surrounded by guards. This Ur-Hamlet has no soliloquies and no cemetery scene. Another source, this time Italian, The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet mentions in Act 2, Scene 2 and Act 3, Scene 2, might have provided Shakespeare with the idea of murder by poison poured into the ears. Not content with merely developing literary sources from the past, Shakespeare was, as always, concerned with building into his play references to contemporary events. One amongst several was the alleged suicide of Hélène de Tournon, a victim of tragic love and either the sister or daughter of one of Marguerite de Valois’ ladies in waiting. Accounts of the circumstances of her death and of her funeral are sufficiently similar to the fate of Ophelia to suggest they fathered them. It is reasonable to believe that Shakespeare reshaped Kyd’s play in the final years of the sixteenth century before writing up his work completely in 1601. Hamlet Illustrated
Abbey, Edwin Austin. "Hamlet" (1897) Calderon, Philip H. The Young Lord Hamlet (1868) Dadd, Richard. The Closet Scene from "Hamlet" (1840) Delacroix, Eugène. Lithographs and paintings Fuseli, Henry. Hamlet and the Ghost (1789) Hunt, Charles. The Play Scene in "Hamlet" (1868) Lawrence, Thomas. John Philip Kemble as Hamlet (1801) Maclise, Daniel. The Play Scene in "Hamlet" (1842) Rossetti, Gabriel Dante. Hamlet and Ophelia (1858) Rossetti, Gabriel Dante. The Question (1875) Hamlet in Popular Culture
It has often been noted that The Lion King has plot elements in common with the Hamlet story that Shakespeare inherited. In the Reduced Shakespeare Company version of The Complete Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged), the entire second act is their folded, spindled, and mutilated version of Hamlet. For an encore, they perform the 45-second version of Hamlet, followed by the 3-second version, followed by the 45-second version backwards. Richard Curtis's Skinhead Hamlet, a brief, very rude, parody of the play which, according to the editors, is meant to be: "Shakespeare's play translated into modern English. There is a one act play entitled Something's Rotten in the State of Denmark, which heavily spoofs Hamlet. It basically shows how bad Hamlet can get. The 2006 Chinese film The Banquet (also known as Legend of the Black Scorpion)has a storyline closely based on the story of Hamlet. In the 2009 animated movie CoralinIe, two characters deliver part of Hamlet's: "What a piece of work is a man" speech while performing a trapeze act. The 2008 film Hamlet 2 briefly mentions Hamlet merely as a device to be a companion with Jesus in a time machine. otherwise from that, there are very few similarities. The plot of 2011 Indian Malayalam film Karmayogi (English: The Warrior) is adapted from Hamlet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead is a 2009 American independent film written and directed by Jordan Galland. The film's title refers to a fictitious play-within-the-movie, which is a comic reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its aftermath. The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) character General Chang, a Klingon officer, is a Shakespeare aficionado, and opines that Shakespearian works were best experienced in the original" Klingon. Indeed, Klingonists Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader in 1996 published The Klingon Hamlet — a Klingon translation of the play. The Klingon version of the famous quote "to be or not to be", which Chang recites at a number of points in the film. The 1983 comedy, Strange Brew, is loosely based on Hamlet. However, the state of Denmark is replaced by the ownership of Elsinore Brewery and Hamlet is portrayed as a woman. In a VeggieTales episode with a short called "Omlet". It is a clever "interpretation" of the story of Hamlet. For example: One clever line is when omlet and another person are playing battleship. 2b? nope Not 2b. The Simpsons offered a shortened version of Hamlet in the episode "Tales from the Public Domain". After this, Homer claims that Hamlet was made into the film Ghostbusters. The Sons of Anarchy draws not only many character parallels to Hamlet, but much of its storyline also. It is, in fact, explicitly the story of Hamlet, written as if Denmark were a northern California small town and all its characters members of the motorcycle club. In the video game Mass Effect, Hamlet is re-enacted by an alien race known as Elcors. Due to the Elcor's slow speech, the stage production is a 14 hour experience. In the Warcraft Universe, Illidan Stormrage's character appears to be loosely based on Hamlet. He is known to have gone mad (partly due to rejection from his love) and is depicted peering into a skull (a la Hamlet's soliloquy). The plot of David Wroblewski's novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle closely follows the story line of Hamlet, and several of the novel's main characters have names similar to their corresponding characters in the play. At least 26 operas have been written based on Hamlet Steampunk band Abney Park recorded a song entitled "Dear Ophelia", in which the vocalist sings as Prince Hamlet, and apologizes to Ophelia for all the things he had done, even telling the story of his father, who died when "his brother crept out, and poured poison in his ear" |