From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, Hamlet has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most imitated, and most analyzed play . The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex. Even within the narrower field of literature, the play's influence has been strong. As Foakes writes, "No other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in literature, have come to embody an attitude to life ... and been converted into a noun in this way."
History Renaissance period Interpretations of Hamlet in Shakespeare's day were very concerned with the play's portrayal of madness. The play was also often portrayed more violently than in later times. The play's contemporary popularity is suggested both by the five quartos that appeared in Shakespeare's lifetime and by frequent contemporary references (though at least some of these could be to the so-called Ur-Hamlet). These allusions suggest that by the early Jacobean period the play was famous for the ghost and for its dramatization of melancholy and insanity. The procession of mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama frequently appears indebted to Hamlet. Other aspects of the play were also remembered. Looking back on Renaissance drama in 1655, Abraham Wright lauds the humor of the gravediggers' scene, although he suggests that Shakespeare was outdone by Thomas Randolph, whose farcical comedy The Jealous Lovers features both a travesty of Ophelia and a graveyard scene. There is some scholarly speculation that Hamlet may have been censored during this period: see Contexts: Religious below. Theatres were closed under the Puritan Commonwealth, which ran from 1640 to 1660.
Restoration When the monarchy was restored in 1660, theatres re-opened. Early interpretations of the play, from the late 17th to early 18th century, typically showed Prince Hamlet as a heroic figure. Critics responded to Hamlet in terms of the same dichotomy that shaped all responses to Shakespeare during the period. On the one hand, Shakespeare was seen as primitive and untutored, both in comparison to later English dramatists such as Fletcher and especially when measured against the neoclassical ideals of art brought back from France with the Restoration. On the other, Shakespeare remained popular not just with mass audiences but even with the very critics made uncomfortable by his ignorance of Aristotle's unities and decorum.
Thus, critics considered Hamlet in a milieu which abundantly demonstrated the play's dramatic viability. John Evelyn saw the play in 1661, and in his Diary he deplored the play's violation of the unities of time and place. Yet by the end of the period, John Downes noted that Hamlet was staged more frequently and profitably than any other play in Betterton's repertory.
In addition to Hamlet's worth as a tragic hero, Restoration critics focused on the qualities of Shakespeare's language and, above all, on the question of tragic decorum. Critics disparaged the indecorous range of Shakespeare's language, with Polonius's fondness for puns and Hamlet's use of "mean" (i.e., low) expressions such as "there's the rub" receiving particular attention. Even more important was the question of decorum, which in the case of Hamlet focused on the play's violation of tragic unity of time and place, and on the characters. Jeremy Collier attacked the play on both counts in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, published in 1698. Comparing Ophelia to Electra, he condemns Shakespeare for allowing his heroine to become "immodest" in her insanity, particularly in the "Flower Scene".
Collier's attack occasioned a widespread, often vituperative controversy. Hamlet in general and Ophelia in particular were defended by Thomas D'urfey and George Drake almost immediately. Drake defends the play's justice on the grounds that the murderers are "caught in their own toils" (that is, traps). He also defends Ophelia by describing her actions in the context of her desperate situation; D'urfey, by contrast, simply claims that Dennis has discerned immorality in places to which no one else objected. In the next decade, Rowe and Dennis agreed with Collier that the play violated justice; Shaftesbury and others defended the play as ultimately moral.
Early eighteenth century Criticism of the play in the first decades of the 18th century continued to be dominated by the neoclassical conception of plot and character. Even the many critics who defended Hamlet took for granted the necessity of the classical canon in principle. Voltaire's attack on the play is perhaps the most famous neoclassical treatment of the play; it inspired numerous defenses in England, but these defenses did not at first weaken the neoclassical orthodoxy. Thus Lewis Theobald explained the seeming absurdity of Hamlet's calling death an "undiscovered country" not long after he has encountered the Ghost by hypothesizing that the Ghost describes Purgatory, not death. Thus William Popple (in 1735) praises the verisimilitude of Polonius's character, deploring the actors' tradition of playing him only as a fool. Both Joseph Addison and Richard Steele praised particular scenes: Steele the psychological insight of the first soliloquy, and Addison the ghost scene.
The ghost scenes, indeed, were particular favorites of an age on the verge of the Gothic revival. Early in the century, George Stubbes noted Shakespeare's use of Horatio's incredulity to make the Ghost credible. At midcentury, Arthur Murphy described the play as a sort of poetic representation of the mind of a "weak and melancholy person." Slightly later, George Colman the Elder singled out the play in a general discussion of Shakespeare's skill with supernatural elements in drama.
In 1735, Aaron Hill sounded an unusual but prescient note when he praised the seeming contradictions in Hamlet's temperament (rather than condemning them as violations of decorum). After midcentury, such psychological readings had begun to gain more currency. Tobias Smollett criticized what he saw as the illogic of the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, which was belied, he said, by Hamlet's actions. More commonly, the play's disparate elements were defended as part of a grander design. Horace Walpole, for instance, defends the mixture of comedy and tragedy as ultimately more realistic and effective than rigid separation would be. Samuel Johnson echoed Popple in defending the character of Polonius; Johnson also doubted the necessity of Hamlet's vicious treatment of Ophelia, and he also viewed skeptically the necessity and probability of the climax. Hamlet's character was also attacked by other critics near the end of the century, among them George Steevens. However, even before the Romantic period, Hamlet was (with Falstaff), the first Shakespearean character to be understood as a personality separate from the play in which he appears.
Not until the late 18th century did critics and performers begin to view the play as confusing or inconsistent, with Hamlet falling from such high status. Goethe had one of his characters say, in his 1795 novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, "Shakespeare meant...to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it...A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away." This change in the view of Hamlet's character is sometimes seen as a shift in the critical emphasis on plot (characteristic of the period before 1750) to an emphasis on the theatrical portrayal of the character (after 1750).
Romantic criticism Already before the Romantic period proper, critics had begun to stress the elements of the play that would cause Hamlet to be seen, in the next century, as the epitome of the tragedy of character. In 1774, William Richardson sounded the key notes of this analysis: Hamlet was a sensitive and accomplished prince with an unusually refined moral sense; he is nearly incapacitated by the horror of the truth about his mother and uncle, and he struggles against that horror to fulfill his task. Richardson, who thought the play should have ended shortly after the closet scene, thus saw the play as dramatizing the conflict between a sensitive individual and a calloused, seamy world.
Henry Mackenzie notes the tradition of seeing Hamlet as the most varied of Shakespeare's creations: "With the strongest purposes of revenge he is irresolute and inactive; amidst the gloom of the deepest melancholy he is gay and jocular; and while he is described as a passionate lover he seems indifferent about the object of his affections." Like Richardson, Mackenzie concludes that the tragedy in the play arises from Hamlet's nature: even the best qualities of his character merely reinforce his inability to cope with the world in which he is placed. To this analysis Thomas Robertson adds in particular the devastating impact of the death of Hamlet's father.
By the end of the 18th century, psychological and textual criticism had outrun strictly rhetorical criticism; one still sees occasional critiques of metaphors viewed as inappropriate or barbarous, but by and large the neoclassical critique of Shakespeare's language had become moribund. The most extended critique of the play's language from the end of the century is perhaps that of Hugh Blair.
Another change occurred right around the Romantic literary period (19th century), known for its emphasis on the individual and internal motive. The Romantic period viewed Hamlet as more of a rebel against politics, and as an intellectual, rather than an overly-sensitive, being. This is also the period when the question of Hamlet's delay is brought up, as previously it could be seen as plot device, while romantics focused largely on character. Samuel Coleridge, for example, delivered lectures on Hamlet during this period that evaluated his tragic state of mind in an interpretation that proved influential for over a century. For Coleridge, Shakespeare depicted Hamlet's light of indecisiveness as resulting from an imbalance between the human attention to external objects, and inward thoughts, and thus suffered a paralysis of action because his faculty of vivid imagination overpowered his will and induced an aversion to actually enacting any measure. He felt that Shakespeare aimed to convey the basic message that man must act, and not be trammeled by excessive thinking that only leads to delay. Later criticism has come to consider this view as much a reflection of Coleridge's own problematical nature as an insight into the Shakespearean character. Coleridge and other writers praised the play for its philosophical questions, which guided the audience to ponder and grow intellectually.
Late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries
At around the turn of the 20th century, two writers, A. C. Bradley and Sigmund Freud, developed ideas which built on the past and greatly affected the future of Hamlet criticism. Bradley held the view that Hamlet should be studied as one would study a real person: piecing together his consciousness from the clues given in the play. His explanation of Hamlet's delay was one of a deep "melancholy" which grew from a growing disappointment in his mother. Freud also viewed Hamlet as a real person: one whose psyche could be analyzed through the text. He took the view that Hamlet's madness merely disguised the truth in the same way dreams disguise unconscious realities. He also famously saw Hamlet's struggles as a representation of the Oedipus complex. In Freud's view, Hamlet is torn largely because he has repressed sexual desire for his mother, which is being acted out by and challenged by Claudius.
Mid- and late-twentieth century