William Shakespeare, "Hamlet". Essays

Hamlet is an echo-chamber which reverberates with questions. Whether they concern the uncertainties expressed by different characters within the play, or theories about the play expressed by critics, or the integrity of the play (of which we have only a conflated text), a daunting number of queries surrounds every aspect of Hamlet. This volume, which is the fruit of collaboration between specialists and research students in Elizabethan literature, examines certain of the play's enigmas : its status as a revenge tragedy with a difference, the existence of festivity and ceremony within tragedy, the ambiguous nature of the ghost, the strange images of horror and death, the functioning of melancholy, equally associated with depression and genius, as well as the essential unknowability of this most problematic of plays.