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Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 3.15.97: Top | Help
Hamlet is Shakespeare's deliberate depiction of a genius--an extraordinary man trapped in a very ordinary world. In this regard, Hamlet is Shakespeare's surrogate: the author endowed his creation with most (if not all) of his own qualities: amazing verbal facility and wit; a far-reaching, intensely speculative mind; a ruthless sense of honesty that questions every appearance, every convention, every shibboleth, every bromide and every face; a deeply-felt moral sensitvity, often driven to horror and despair by the viciousness, faithlessness and dishonesty that surround him; an innate idealism that makes a religion of love, but cannot come to terms with the raw animal nature of sex. In fact the only Shakespearean quality which Shakespeare prudently denied Hamlet is literary genius--as we know from his letters to Ophelia, Hamlet is not much of a writer. But in every other respect he dazzles. He can out-talk, out-think and out-feel anyone on stage, and that is precisely what he spends most of his play doing. So enamored is Shakespeare of his creation (and alter-ego) that he seems willing to forgive him anything--even the repeated destruction of innocent lives. Think of how many people Hamlet kills: by my count, he is directly or indirectly responsible for six of the play's eight deaths, and some of his victims (Polonius, Ophelia) are guilty of nothing but incomprehension. Is there any other play in which the hero kills so many innocent people and yet still retains our sympathy and admiration? An uncomfortable point, but true. Hamlet, for all his crimes, is a great and terrible soul: in short, a genius and a peculiarly Shakespearean genius at that. Is it any wonder that he has fascinated so many other geniuses and non-geniuses for four centuries?Posted by Charles Weinstein on April 01, 1997 at 08:44:04
In Reply to "I need help this time." posted by Kari on March 25, 1997 at 19:40:05
Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 3.15.97: Top | Help