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INTRODUCTION

HAMLET'S QUESTIONS

The e: "Who's there?" "Nay, answeras many questions of its audience and interpreters as we may ask of it Shakespeare won't tell us who he is or where he stands Instead, he makes us--and our culture--reveal ourselves That is the source of his endurance and one of the reasons why Hareatest, or at least his most characteristic, play

The Prince of Denative of all dramatic characters He is Shakespeare's ultimate man of words The actor who plays hiher proportion of its play's words (nearly 40 percent) than any other in Shakespeare Hamlet's favorite intellectual , a skull tossed frorave--into the occasion for speculation: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?," "Where be your gibes now, your gas, your flashes of merri or reading the play, we arequestions: What should we believe? How should we act? What happens after death? In whose version of the truth should we have faith?

Horatio, the co the voice of the audience, says that he "in part" believes stories about ghosts and portents His qualifier is a ord for the whole play Huodlike creature, full of on of animals" But, to take the other part, we are also "quintessence of dust"--the politician, the lawyer, the heroic man of action (Alexander the Great), and the humble clown (Yorick) all end up in the same place

Like the wood in A Midsuic as opposed to co seeaged to spy on Hamlet, with the result that he has "at each ear a hearer" Hardly anyone in the play see a double epithet: "the sensible and true avouch / Of ross and scope of race and blush of e props also co portraits of two brothers, a pair of rapiers (one of which is sharpened and anointed for the kill), two skulls Entrances seem to repeat themselves: the appearances of the Ghost; Hamlet overheard in meditation, first with a book, later with his reflections on being and not being; the king and Gertrude in their respective private rooms after the trauma of the Mousetrap play; Ophelia's two mad scenes

The story of a son seeking vengeance for his father's death is doubled after Hae of my cause I see / The portraiture of his," reure of Young Fortinbras out to avenge the defeat of Old Fortinbras A further commentary is provided by the Player's speech about Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, furiously seeking atone Priaative exahter moves a wife and mother, Hecuba, to distraction If Hahimself to the inhu his mother: that is his dilemma "bounded in a nutshell"

Hamlet is a student, a model for the perpetual students and idealists who populate later literature, especially in Gerhly intellectual drareat questions of epistey, ethics, and metaphysics "Humanism," the dominant educational theory of the sixteenth century, proposed that wisdo The student developed the arts of language through his rhetorical training, while collecting the wisdom of the ancients in the form of citations and sententiae

copied into a commonplace book Polonius' maxi in the cliche "to thine own self be true," are classic exah the study of "common thement were supposed to prevail over will and passion The Stoicism of Seneca provided a ainst the fickleness of fortune and the vicissitudes of court politics

Haood student He is a master of balanced rhetoric, the ainst the order of nature and state:

as 'tith a defeated joy,

With one auspicious and one dropping eye,

With e,

In equal scale weighing delight and dole