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Section one

Introduction

Life of the writer

William Shakespeare, (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire,

England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon), English poet, dramatist and actor often

called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time

(Britannica).

Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world Literature. Other poets, such as Homer

and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens have transcended national

barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays,

written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre are now performed

and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great

contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all

time,” has been fulfilled (Britannica).

Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly

large for one of his station in life, many find it a little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from

documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and burials; wills,

conveyances, legal processes, and payments by the court—these are the dusty details. There are,

however, many contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of

flesh and blood to the biographical skeleton (Britannica).

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It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult

to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that,

whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there. He is a writer of great

intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but

with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to

human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied

their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and

images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and

memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough, the

art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid

stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious

participation. Thus, Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into other languages and into

cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England (Britannica).

Globe Theatre, famous London theatre in which after 1599 the plays of William

Shakespeare were performed. The design of the original Theatre responded to a mix of traditions.

Its name, which up to then had been used for atlases (such as Mercator’s) rather than for

playhouses, drew attention to the Roman theatre tradition. Its circular shape, though, reflected

not the D-shape of a Roman amphitheater but the gatherings of crowds in a circle around the

actors in town marketplaces, where all the players of 1576 got their training. The concept of

building a scaffold with three levels of galleries surrounding a circular yard mimicked the

arrangement for audiences of existing bearbaiting and bullbaiting houses (Britannica).

Some of Shakespeare's famous plays are Romeo and Juliet (1597), Much ado about

nothing (1598), Henry V (1600), Hamlet (1603) and Othello (1622) (Pollard 24-62).
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About the play

Hamlet, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1599–1601

and published in a quarto edition in 1603 from an unauthorized text, with reference to an earlier

play. The First Folio version was taken from a second quarto of 1604 that was based on

Shakespeare’s own papers with some annotations by the bookkeeper (Britannica).

Shakespeare’s telling of the story of Prince Hamlet was derived from several sources,

notably from Books III and IV of Saxo Grammaticus’s 12th-century Gesta Danorum and from

volume 5 (1570) of Histoires tragiques, a free translation of Saxo by François de Belleforest. The

play was evidently preceded by another play of Hamlet (now lost), usually referred to as the Ur-

Hamlet, of which Thomas Kyd is a conjectured author (Britannica).

As Shakespeare’s play opens, Hamlet is mourning his father, who has been killed, and

lamenting the behaviour of his mother, Gertrude, who married his uncle Claudius within a month

of his father’s death. The ghost of his father appears to Hamlet, informs him that he was

poisoned by Claudius, and commands Hamlet to avenge his death. Though instantly galvanised

by the ghost’s command, Hamlet decides on further reflection to seek evidence in corroboration

of the ghostly visitation, since, he knows, the Devil can assume a pleasing shape and can easily

mislead a person whose mind is perturbed by intense grief. Hamlet adopts a guise of melancholic

and mad behaviour as a way of deceiving Claudius and others at court—a guise made all the

easier by the fact that Hamlet is genuinely melancholic (Britannica).

Hamlet’s dearest friend, Horatio, agrees with him that Claudius has unambiguously

confirmed his guilt. Driven by a guilty conscience, Claudius attempts to ascertain the cause of

Hamlet’s odd behaviour by hiring Hamlet’s onetime friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy

on him. Hamlet quickly sees through the scheme and begins to act the part of a madman in front
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of them. To the pompous old courtier Polonius, it appears that Hamlet is lovesick over Polonius’s

daughter Ophelia. Despite Ophelia’s loyalty to him, Hamlet thinks that she, like everyone else, is

turning against him; he feigns madness with her also and treats her cruelly as if she were

representative, like his own mother, of her “treacherous” sex (Britannica).

Hamlet contrives a plan to test the ghost’s accusation. With a group of visiting actors,

Hamlet arranges the performance of a story representing circumstances similar to those described

by the ghost, under which Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father. When the play is presented as

planned, the performance clearly unnerves Claudius (Britannica).

Moving swiftly in the wake of the actors’ performance, Hamlet confronts his mother in

her chambers with her culpable loyalty to Claudius. When he hears a man’s voice behind the

curtains, Hamlet stabs the person he understandably assumes to be Claudius. The victim,

however, is Polonius, who has been eavesdropping in an attempt to find out more about Hamlet’s

erratic behaviour. This act of violence persuades Claudius that his own life is in danger. He sends

Hamlet to England escorted by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with secret orders that Hamlet be

executed by the king of England. When Hamlet discovers the orders, he alters them to make his

two friends the victims instead (Britannica).

Upon his return to Denmark, Hamlet hears that Ophelia is dead of a suspected suicide

(though more probably as a consequence of her having gone mad over her father’s sudden death)

and that her brother Laertes seeks to avenge Polonius’s murder. Claudius is only too eager to

arrange the duel. Carnage ensues. Hamlet dies of a wound inflicted by a sword that Claudius and

Laertes have conspired to tip with poison; in the scuffle, Hamlet realises what has happened and

forces Laertes to exchange swords with him, so that Laertes too dies—as he admits, justly killed

by his own treachery. Gertrude, also present at the duel, drinks from the cup of poison that
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Claudius has had placed near Hamlet to ensure his death. Before Hamlet himself dies, he

manages to stab Claudius and to entrust the clearing of his honour to his friend Horatio

(Britannica).

Definition of Allusion

Allusion, in literature, an implied or indirect reference to a person, event, or thing or to a

part of another text. Most allusions are based on the assumption that there is a body of

knowledge that is shared by the author and the reader and that therefore the reader will

understand the author’s referent. The word allusion comes from the late Latin allusio meaning “a

play on words” or “game” and is a derivative of the Latin word alludere, meaning “to play

around” or “to refer to mockingly.” (Britannica).

In traditional Western literature, allusions to figures in the Bible and from Greek

mythology are common. However, some authors, such as the Modernist writers T.S. Eliot and

James Joyce, deliberately used obscure and complex allusions in their work that they knew few

readers would readily understand. An allusion can be used as a straightforward device to enhance

a text by providing further meaning, but it can also be used in a more complex sense to make an

ironic comment on one thing by comparing it to something that is dissimilar. Over time, as

shared knowledge changes, allusions can also reveal the unspoken assumptions and biases of

both authors and readers. Allusion shares some features with, but is to be distinguished from, the

literary devices of parody and imitation. All three require a reader and an author to share some

amount of knowledge, but an author’s intentions differ with each (Britannica).