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Hamlet (c. 1599) is one of Shakespeare's most famous and performed works, ranking among the greatest literature in the world. It is known for its complex characters and themes of melancholy, madness, morality, science, and the supernatural.

Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, learns that his uncle, Claudius, has usurped the Danish throne after murdering his father and marrying his mother. He is overrun with an existential anguish of grief and doubt as he contemplates revenge.

Few characters in Western literature have generated as much fascination and critical attention as Hamlet himself. He has been called the founding hero of Western secular consciousness (Harold Bloom); an expression of Oedipal conflict (Freud); "the most amiable of misanthropes" (William Hazlitt); a "marvelous Adam" created by a "divine action" of Shakespeare (Victor Hugo); "a prodigy" equal to "a new law-giver, a revolutionizing philosopher, or the founder of a new religion" (Herman Melville); a "lost soul" "trapped in dialectical conflict" (Hegel); and "the Dionysian man" that has "looked into the essence of things" and "gained knowledge" (Nietzsche).

Hamlet:

Supplemental:

Extracts:

  • "... the Captain made his ceremonious way to the cabin, disappearing behind the scenes, like the pasteboard ghost in Hamlet." (White-Jacket, 39)
  • “Very like a whale.” Hamlet. (Moby-Dick, Exracts)
  • "For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago.... And the English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakspeare had his fathers too. Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present day, so does that nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type." (Pierre, 7.6)
  • "Some moments passed, and he found the open Hamlet in his hand, and his eyes met the following lines: “The time is out of joint;—Oh cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” He dropped the too true volume from his hand; his petrifying heart dropped hollowly within him, as a pebble down Carrisbrook well." (Pierre, 9.2)
  • "If... the pregnant tragedy of Hamlet convey any one particular moral at all fitted to the ordinary uses of man, it is this:—that all meditation is worthless, unless it prompt to action; ... that in the earliest instant of conviction, the roused man must strike, and, if possible, with the precision and the force of the lightning-bolt...." (Pierre, 9.3)
  • "... reading in boyhood the advice of Polonius to Laertes—advice which, in the selfishness it inculcates, is almost on a par with a sort of ballad upon the economies of money-making..." (Confidence-Man, 30)
  • "He drules out some stale stuff about 'loan losing both itself and friend,' don't he?" (Confidence-Man, 30)
  • "Or, as Hamlet says, were it ‘to consider the thing too curiously?’" (Confidence-Man, 43)
  • "True, we sometimes hear of an author who, at one creation, produces some two or three score such characters; it may be possible. But they can hardly be original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton’s Satan." (Confidence-Man, 44)
  • "... the original character... is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet)" (Confidence-Man, 44)
  • "But Shakspeare’s pensive child / Never the lines had lightly scanned, / Steeped in fable, steeped in fate; / The Hamlet in his heart was ’ware, / Such hearts can antedate." ("The Coming Storm")
  • "Byron’s storm-cloud away has rolled— / Joined Werter’s; Shelley’s drowned; and—why, / Perverse were now e’en Hamlet’s sigh ... / with speed / Of passion, Clarel turned: “Forbear! / Ah, wherefore not at once name Job, / In whom these Hamlets all conglobe.“" (Clarel, 3.21)
  • "Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them." ("Hawthorne and His Mosses")
  • "And hardly a mortal man, who, at some time or other, has not felt as great thoughts in him as any you will find in Hamlet." ("Hawthorne and His Mosses")
  • "Before coming to Lucrino... you see the New Mountain. Curious to see this stranger (parvenue) from the abysses taking his rank among the elderly mountains... Could tell queer stories. 'But that the secrets of his prison house &c.'" (Journals, 23 Feb 1857)
  • "If you... should not feel an interest in these three “counterfeit presentments,” do not fail to show them to—" ("Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1")
  • "I have in “my mind’s eye, Horatio,” three..." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1")
  • "as with the reclining majesty of Denmark in his orchard, a sly ear-ache invaded me." ("The Piazza")
  • "if the helmsman be a clumsy, careless fellow, or ignorant of his duty, he keeps the ship going about in a melancholy state of indecision" (Redburn, 24)
  • "... resolving ere long to give the enemy a touch of certain Yankee steps, as yet undreamed of in their simple philosophy." (Israel Potter, 3)
  • ""There's method in his madness," thought the officer to himself." (Israel Potter, 20)
  • "Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress." (Moby-Dick, 42)
  • "The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand." (Moby-Dick, 127)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.

Related topics

Classic Books
Shakespeare Plays
Intellectual Discussions
Theater and Drama
Shakespeare

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