Editing Hamlet (section)

==Analysis and criticism==
{{Main|Critical approaches to Hamlet}}

===Critical history===
From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of [[Melancholia|melancholy]] and [[insanity]], leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in [[Jacobean era|Jacobean]] and [[Caroline era|Caroline]] drama.{{sfn|Wofford|1994}}{{sfn|Kirsch|1969}} Though it remained popular with mass audiences, late 17th-century [[English Restoration|Restoration]] critics saw ''Hamlet'' as primitive and disapproved of its lack of [[Classical unities|unity]] and [[decorum]].{{sfn|Vickers|1995a|p=447}}{{sfn|Vickers|1995b|p=92}} This view changed drastically in the 18th century, when critics regarded Hamlet as a hero—a pure, brilliant young man thrust into unfortunate circumstances.{{sfn|Wofford|1994|pp=184–185}}

By the mid-18th century, however, the advent of [[Gothic fiction|Gothic literature]] brought [[Psychology|psychological]] and [[Mysticism|mystical]] readings, returning madness and the ghost to the forefront.{{sfn|Vickers|1995c|p=5}} Not until the late 18th century did critics and performers begin to view Hamlet as confusing and inconsistent. Before then, he was either mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no in-betweens.{{sfn|Wofford|1994|p=185}} These developments represented a fundamental change in literary criticism, which came to focus more on character and less on plot.{{sfn|Wofford|1994|p=186}}  In the 18th century, one negative French review of Hamlet would be widely discussed for centuries, in particular in publications throughout the 19th and 20th century.<ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from Boston Evening Transcript|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/boston-evening-transcript/139377896/|access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=10 October 1877 |page=6 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from The Birmingham Post|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-birmingham-post/139377955/|access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=25 April 1898 |page=5 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from Evening Standard|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/evening-standard/139377986/|access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=25 May 1948 |page=6 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from Wisconsin State Journal |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/wisconsin-state-journal/139377784/ |access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=29 May 1988 |page=86 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from Tucson Citizen|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/tucson-citizen/139377775/ |access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=8 October 1988 |page=9 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from The Kansas City Times|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-kansas-city-times/139346346/ |access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=8 May 1987 |page=25 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from The Day|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-day/139377873/ |access-date=16 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=3 December 1986 |page=31 }}</ref> In 1768, [[Voltaire]] wrote a negative review of ''Hamlet'', stating that "it is vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France or Italy... one would imagine this piece to be a work of a drunken savage",<ref>{{Cite news |title=Article clipped from The Kansas City Times
|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-kansas-city-times/139346346/ |access-date=23 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]|date=8 May 1987 |page=25 }}</ref> while acknowledging that it contains "some sublime strokes worthy of the greatest genius".<ref>{{Cite web |others=Translated by D. Nichol Smith |title=Voltaire, Excerpt from the Preface to Sémiramis (1748) |url=https://sites.broadviewpress.com/lessons/DramaAnthology/VoltaireReactionToHamlet/VoltaireReactionToHamlet_print.html |access-date=2025-04-16 |website=Sites.BroadviewPress.com}}</ref>

By the 19th century, [[Romanticism|Romantic]] critics valued ''Hamlet'' for its internal, individual conflict reflecting the strong contemporary emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in general.{{sfn|Rosenberg|1992|p=179}} Then too, critics started to focus on Hamlet's delay as a character trait, rather than a plot device.{{sfn|Wofford|1994|p=186}} This focus on character and internal struggle continued into the 20th century, when criticism branched in several directions, discussed in [[#Context and interpretation|context and interpretation]] below.

===Dramatic structure===
Modern editors have divided the play into five acts, and each act into scenes. The First Folio marks the first two acts only. The quartos do not have such divisions. The division into five acts follows [[Seneca the Younger|Seneca]], who in his plays, regularized the way ancient Greek tragedies contain five episodes, which are separated by four choral odes. In ''Hamlet'' the development of the plot or the action are determined by the unfolding of Hamlet's character. The soliloquies do not interrupt the plot, instead they are highlights of each block of action. The plot is the developing revelation of Hamlet's view of what is "rotten in the state of Denmark." The action of the play is driven forward in dialogue; but in the soliloquies time and action stop, the meaning of action is questioned, fog of illusion is broached, and truths are exposed.

The contrast between appearance and reality is a significant theme. Hamlet is presented with an image, and then interprets its deeper or darker meaning. Examples begin with Hamlet questioning the reality of the ghost. It continues with Hamlet's taking on an "antic disposition" in order to appear mad, though he is not. The contrast (appearance and reality) is also expressed in several "spying scenes": Act two begins with Polonius sending Reynaldo to spy on his son, Laertes. Claudius and Polonius spy on Ophelia as she meets with Hamlet. In act two, Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet. Similarly, the play-within-a-play is used by Hamlet to reveal his step-father's hidden nature.

There is no subplot, but the play presents the affairs of the courtier Polonius, his daughter, Ophelia, and his son, Laertes—who variously deal with madness, love and the death of a father in ways that contrast with Hamlet's. The graveyard scene eases tension prior to the catastrophe, and, as Hamlet holds the skull, it is shown that Hamlet no longer fears damnation in the afterlife, and accepts that there is a "divinity that shapes our ends".{{refn |''Hamlet'' 5.1.1–205}}

Hamlet's enquiring mind has been open to all kinds of ideas, but in act five he has decided on a plan, and in a dialogue with Horatio he seems to answer his two earlier soliloquies on suicide: "We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes."{{refn|''Hamlet''. 5.2.215–220.}}{{sfn|MacCary|1998|pp=65–72, 84, 96}}

===Length===
The First Quarto (1603) text of ''Hamlet'' contains 15,983 words, the Second Quarto (1604) contains 28,628 words, and the First Folio (1623) contains 27,602 words. Counting the number of lines varies between editions, partly because prose sections in the play may be formatted with varied lengths.{{sfn|Thompson|Taylor|2006a|pp=80-81}} Editions of ''Hamlet'' that are created by conflating the texts of the Second Quarto and the Folio are said to have approximately 3,900 lines;{{sfn|Barnet|1998|p=lxiv}} the number of lines varies between those editions based on formatting the prose sections, counting methods, and how the editors have joined the texts together.{{sfn|Thompson|Taylor|2006a|pp=92-93}} ''Hamlet'' is by far the longest play that Shakespeare wrote, and one of the longest plays in the [[Western canon]]. It might require more than four hours to stage;{{sfn|Evans|1974}} a typical Elizabethan play would need two to three hours.{{sfn|Hirrel|2010}} It is speculated that because of the considerable length of Q2 and F1, there was an expectation that those texts would be abridged for performance, or that Q2 and F1 may have been aimed at a reading audience.{{sfn|Thompson|Taylor|2006a|p=84}}

That Q1 is so much shorter than Q2 has spurred speculation that Q1 is an early draft, or perhaps an adaptation, a bootleg copy, or a stage adaptation. On the title page of Q2, its text is described as "newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was." That is probably a comparison to Q1.{{sfn|Thompson|Taylor|2006a|pp=80-81}}

===Language===
[[File:Delacroix-1834-I2-QueenConsolesHamlet.JPG|thumb|Hamlet's statement that his dark clothes are the outer sign of his inner grief demonstrates strong rhetorical skill (artist: [[Eugène Delacroix]] 1834).]]

Much of ''Hamlet''{{'}}s language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by [[Baldassare Castiglione]]'s 1528 etiquette guide, ''The Courtier''. This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. Osric and Polonius, especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius's speech is rich with rhetorical figures—as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's—while the language of Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius's high status is reinforced by using the [[Majestic plural|royal first person plural]] ("we" or "us"), and [[Anaphora (rhetoric)|anaphora]] mixed with [[metaphor]] to resonate with Greek political speeches.{{sfn|MacCary|1998|pp=84–85}}

Of all the characters, Hamlet has the greatest rhetorical skill. He uses highly developed metaphors, [[stichomythia]], and in nine memorable words deploys both anaphora and [[asyndeton]]: "to die: to sleep—&nbsp;/ To sleep, perchance to dream".{{refn|''Hamlet'' 3.1.63–64.}} In contrast, when occasion demands, he is precise and straightforward, as when he explains his inward emotion to his mother: "But I have that within which passes show,&nbsp;/ These but the trappings and the suits of woe".{{refn|''Hamlet'' 1.2.85–86.}} At times, he relies heavily on [[pun]]s to express his true thoughts while simultaneously concealing them.{{sfn|MacCary|1998|pp=89–90}} Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in ''Hamlet'' because he "showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings". She gives the example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery",{{refn|''Hamlet'' 3.1.87–160.}} which, she claims, is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality.{{sfn|Kiernan|2007|p=34}} However Harold Jenkins does not agree, having studied the few examples that are used to support that idea, and finds that there is no support for the assumption that "nunnery" was used that way in slang, or that Hamlet intended such a meaning. The context of the scene suggests that a nunnery would not be a brothel, but instead a place of renunciation and a "sanctuary from marriage and from the world's contamination".{{sfn|Jenkins|1982|pp=493–495}} Thompson and Taylor consider the brothel idea incorrect considering that "Hamlet is trying to deter Ophelia from ''breeding''".{{sfn|Thompson|Taylor|2006a|p=290}}

Hamlet's first words in the play are a pun; when Claudius addresses him as "my cousin Hamlet, and my son", Hamlet says as an aside: "A little more than kin, and less than kind."{{refn|''Hamlet'' 1.2.63–65.}}

An unusual rhetorical device, [[hendiadys]], appears in several places in the play. Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: "Th'''expectancy and rose'' of the fair state"{{refn|''Hamlet'' 3.1.151.}} and "And I, of ladies most ''deject and wretched''".{{refn|''Hamlet'' 3.1.154.}} Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the play. One explanation may be that ''Hamlet'' was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot. Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation.{{sfn|MacCary|1998|pp=87–88}}

Hamlet's [[Soliloquy|soliloquies]] have captured the attention of scholars. Hamlet interrupts himself, vocalising either disgust or agreement with himself and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly and instead blunts the thrust of his thought with wordplay. It is not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, that Hamlet is able to articulate his feelings freely.{{sfn|MacCary|1998|pp=91–93}}