In the four centuries since Shakespeare's death in 1616, Hamlet has
almost always been regarded as Shakespeare's greatest play. This is not
surprising. As Barbara Everett has observed, Hamlet was not only "the
first great tragedy in Europe for two thousand years"; it was, and still
is, "the world's most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest,
perhaps even the funniest". The character of Hamlet utterly dominates
the play he so reluctantly inhabits to a degree that is rivalled only by
Prospero in The Tempest. Even when he isn't on stage, speaking nearly
40% of the play's text, the other characters are talking and worrying
about him. This is the most obvious reason why Hamlet criticism over the
years has been so Hamlet-centred: many critics, from Coleridge through
to A. C. Bradley and beyond, see the play and its other characters
almost entirely through Hamlet's eyes. In this book Graham Bradshaw sets
out to correct this. For in his view the play is no exception to - and
indeed can be seen as an extreme example of - Shakespeare's usual
dramatic method, which was never to press or even reveal his own view on
controversial issues like the divine right of kings or honour or ghosts
and purgatory, but to "frame" these issues by assembling characters who
think and feel differently about them. With Shakespeare it is hard, even
impossible, to know what he thinks about (say) revenge or incest or
suicide - and Hamlet's view is often strikingly different from the views
of those around him. If the doubts about whether the Ghost in Hamlet is
the messenger of divine justice or a devilish instrument of damnation
were ever finally resolved, the play would be diminished, or shrivel
into a museum piece.
