HAMLET

Written during the first part of the seventeenth century (probably in 1600 or 1601) Hamlet
was probably first performed in July 1602. As was common practice during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary
works. 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 off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in
revenge.
Hamlet is faced with the difficult task of correcting an injustice that he can never have
sufficient knowledge of – a dilemma that is by no means unique, or even uncommon. And while
Hamlet is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be answered because they concern
supernatural and metaphysical matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the difficulty of
knowing the truth about other people – their guilt or innocence, their motivations, their feelings,
their relative states of sanity or insanity. The world of other people is a world of appearances, and
Hamlet is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty of living in that world.
What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays is that the action we expect to see,
particularly from Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more
certain knowledge about what he is doing.
Many people have seen Hamlet as a play about indecisiveness, and thus about Hamlet’s
failure to act appropriately. It might be more interesting to consider that the play shows us how
many uncertainties our lives are built upon, how many unknown quantities are taken for granted
when people act or when they evaluate one another’s actions.
Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. How is it possible to take
reasonable, effective, purposeful action? In Hamlet, the question of how to act is affected not only
by rational considerations, such as the need for certainty, but also by emotional, ethical, and
psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the idea that it is even possible to act in
a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act, he prefers to do it blindly, recklessly, and
violently. The other characters obviously think much less about ‘’action’’ in the abstract than
Hamlet does, and are therefore less troubled about the possibility of acting effectively. They simply
act as they feel is appropriate. But in some sense they prove that Hamlet is right, because all of
their actions miscarry.
Everything is connected in Hamlet, including the welfare of the royal family and the health
of the state as a whole. The play’s early scenes explore the sense of anxiety and dread that
surrounds the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. Throughout the play, characters draw
explicit connections between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of the nation. Denmark
is frequently described as a physical body made ill by the moral corruption of Claudius and
Gertrude, and many observers interpret the presence of the ghost as a supernatural omen indicating
that ‘’something is rotten in the state of Denmark’’. The dead king Hamlet is portrayed as a strong,
forthright ruler under whose guard the state was in good health, while Claudius, a wicked
politician, has corrupted and compromised Denmark to satisfy his own appetites. At the end of the
play, the rise to power of the upright Fortinbras suggests that Denmark will be strengthened once
again.

ROMEO AND JULIET

Shakespeare did not invent the story of Romeo and Juliet. He did not, in fact, even introduce
the story into the English language. A poet named Arthur Brooks first brought the story of Romeus
and Juliet to an English – speaking audience in a long and plodding poem that was itself not
original, but rather an adaptation of adaptations that stretched across nearly a hundred years and
two languages. Many of the details of Shakespeare’s plot are lifted directly from Brooks’ poem,
including the meeting of Romeo and Juliet at the ball, their secret marriage, Romeo’s fight with
Tybalt, the sleeping potion, and the timing of the lovers’ eventual suicides. Such appropriation of
other stories is characteristic of Shakespeare, who often wrote plays based on earlier works.
Shakespeare’s use of existing material as fodder for his plays should not, however, be taken
as a lack of originality. The play distinguishes itself from its predecessors in several important
aspects: the subtlety and originality of its characterization ( Shakespeare almost wholly created
Mercutio); the intense pace of its action which is compressed from nine months into four frenetic
days; a powerful enrichment of the story’s thematic aspects; and, above all, an extraordinary use
of language.
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in full knowledge that the story he was telling was old,
clichéd, and an easy target for parody. In writing Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare, then, implicitly
set himself the task of telling a love story despite the considerable forces he knew were stacked
against its success. Through the incomparable intensity of his language Shakespeare succeeded in
this effort, writing a play that is universally accepted in Western culture as the archetypal love
story.
Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is
naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love,
specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo
and Juliet love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties,
and emotions.
Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between
love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in love,
combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading
to the play’s tragic conclusion.
 The themes of death and violence permeate Romeo and Juliet, and they are always connected
to passion, whether that passion is love or hate.
The theme of death continues throughout the play until its inevitable conclusion: double
suicide. This tragic choice is the highest, most potent expression of love that Romeo and Juliet can
make. It is only through death that they can preserve their love, and their love is so profound that
they are willing to end their lives in its defense.

MACBETH

Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy, Macbeth tells the story of a brave Scottish
general (Macbeth) who receives a prophecy from a trio of sinister witches that one day he will
become king of Scotland.
Consumed with ambitious thoughts and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders king
Duncan and seizes the throne for himself. He begins his reign racked with guilt and fear, and soon
becomes a tyrannical ruler, as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself
from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly propels Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to
arrogance, madness and death.
Macbeth was most likely written in 1606, early in the reign of James I, who had been James
VI of Scotland before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603. James was a patron of
Shakespeare’s acting company, and of all the plays Shakespeare wrote under James’s reign,
Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwright’s close relationship with the sovereign. In focusing
on Macbeth, a figure from Scottish history, Shakespeare paid homage to his king’s Scottish
lineage. Additionally, the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will found a line of kings is a clear nod
to James’s family’s claim to have descended from the historical Banquo. In a larger sense, the
theme of bad versus good kingship, embodied by Macbeth, and Duncan, respectively, would have
resonated at the royal court where James was busy developing his English version of divine right.
The main theme of Macbeth – the destruction wrought when ambition goes unchecked by
moral constraints – finds the most powerful expression in the play’s two main characters. Macbeth
is a courageous Scottish general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet he deeply
desires power and advancement. He kills Duncan against his better judgement and afterward stews
in guilt and paranoia. Toward the end of the play he descends into a kind of frantic, boastful
madness. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, pursues her goals with greater determination, yet she
is less capable of withstanding the repercussions of her immoral acts. One of Shakespeare’s most
forcefully drawn female characters, she spurs her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges
him to be strong in the murder’s aftermath, but she is eventually driven to distraction by the effect
of Macbeth’s repeated bloodshed on her conscience. In each case, ambition – helped, of course,
by the malign prophecies of the witches – is what drives the couple to ever more terrible atrocities.
The problem, the play suggests is, that once one decides to use violence to further one’s quest for
power, it is difficult to stop. There are always potential threats to the throne – Banquo, Fleance,
Macduff – and it is always tempting to use violent means to dispose of them.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Written in the mid – 1590s, probably shortly before Shakespeare turned to Romeo and
Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of his strangest and most delightful creations, and it
marks a departure from his earlier works and from others of the English Renaissance. The play
demonstrates both the extent of Shakespeare’s learning and the expansiveness of his imagination.
The range of references in the play is among its most extraordinary attributes: Shakespeare draws
on sources as various as Greek mythology (Theseus, for instance, is loosely based on the Greek
hero of the same name, and the play is peppered with references to Greek gods and goddesses);
English country fairy love (the character of Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, was a popular figure in
the sixteenth – century stories); and the theatrical practices of Shakespeare’s London (the
craftsmen’s play refers to and parodies many conventions of English Renaissance theater, such as
men playing the roles of women). Further, many of the characters are drawn from diverse texts:
Titania comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Oberon may have been taken from the medieval
romance Huan of Bordeaux, translated by Lord Berners in the mid 1530s. Unlike the plots of many
of Shakespeare’s plays, however, the story in A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems not to have
been drawn from any particular source but rather to be the original product of the playwright’s
imagination.
‘’The course of true love never did run smooth’’ comments Lysander, articulating one of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s most important themes – that of the difficulty of love. Though
most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves
a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story, it distances the audience from the
emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and afflictions that those in love
suffer. The tone of the play is so lighthearted that the audience never doubts that things will end
happily, and it is therefore free to enjoy the comedy without being caught up in the tension of an
uncertain outcome.
The theme of love’s difficulty is often explored through the motif of love out of balance
– that is, romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a
relationship. The play has strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is in many ways
based on a quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers’ tangle resolves itself into
symmetrical pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved.