Hamlet
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Some Historical Notes:
Two things to consider when reading Shakespeare: 1) the particular meanings and connotations that were true during Shakespeare's time; 2) the relation of the writing of the play to Shakespeare's history and needs.
This will help us in discovering "reasonable" New Critical or traditional historicist readings of the play. If we ignore these meanings, we are left with discussing the text asynchronically, outside of history. This is fine for some post-structuralist readings, deconstruction, feminism, and the like, even psychological theory. Even if we consider post-structural approaches, a knowledge of the historical context can yield new understandings. Therefore, wherever possible, dig a bit into the history to see what the references and other nuances are about.
Here are a few:
The Ghost. Ghosts during Shakespeare's time were not considered spirits of the dead as we believe them. Even though this ghost ambiguously describes himself as the elder Hamlet, the dead King, Hamlet's father, Shakespeare's audiences understood spirits to be any number of creatures which might assume the form of anything. This opens the play up to a far more delicate discussion of Hamlet's motives for revenge. Even Hamlet says "the devil hath power / T'assume a pleasing shape" (II.ii.588-589).
Ur-Hamlet. Like most of Shakespeare's plays, the Bard did not invent the storyline of Hamlet in 1603. In the play's earliest form, it was a tale sung by bards among the Vikings; in this form, it was likely a story of murder and revenge, focusing on heroic feats of arms and the like. By the time of Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th century, the character of Amleth is a son who must use cunning, though the murder is still open and known.
In the 1580s, a version of Hamlet appeared on English stages, an earlier play of which we know fairly little, an ur-Hamlet. The prefix ur- in front of words means "the original," or "the primal" of the word. It was in this version of the play that the ghost was introduced and where the original murder had to be made secret or hidden, or there would be nothing for the ghost to reveal. The only references we have to it, reviews, speak of it as filled with blood and yelling. The English dramatist Thomas Lodge wrote in 1596 that the ghost cried "like an oysterwife, 'Hamlet, revenge!'"
Shakespeare thickens the play further with more subtleties. All of this might help us understand the motives that the Bard felt were "not enough" to make a great play.
Historical Links. Denmark during the rough time of the play (800-1000 AD) was not the civilized little country that we know it to be today (the last time Denmark chose to enter a war, by the way, was in 1700). When Shakespeare wrote his play, Denmark was still an imperial nation--it ruled parts of Germany, Sweden, all of Norway, and even Iceland and Greenland. But even that Denmark is not the one of the play. Before 950, when it first began to succumb to Christianity and become something like a nation, Denmark was a bunch of freebooting pirates (Its first king, Sven I, "Fork-beard," even invaded England). Before Sven, there is so little accurate history of Denmark that even the legends are implausible sources. It is from this mess of legends that the original tale of Hamlet emerges.