Any help understanding Shakespeare's Hamlet?

April 21, 2007 6:39 PM

I would like to read a good text that helps you interpret Shakepeare's plays. Specifically, I'd like to get help tackling Hamlet. Any recommendations?

I'm not looking for CliffsNotes types stuff. I'd rather want something more college-level or just well written that helps one understand the play. Quick barnes/noble's search brings up CliffsNotes type stuff. I appreciate all help it as I have some time off and would like to get to this play that I missed in formal education.

posted by skepticallypleased to society & culture (27 comments total)

the idiot's guide to Shakespeare has been helpful when i'm studying plays, and i'm an English major. i find a lot of the commentary thoughtful, interesting, and intelligent.
posted by gursky at 6:47 PM on April 21, 2007

The Arden edition is the one actors use; it comes with enough notes, analysis, etc. to help you get to grips with the text while not overweighting it like the Variorum. (Talking about the individual plays here, not the Arden Complete Works.)

Dover Wilson's What Happens In Hamlet, while a bit outmoded in certain respects, has long been regarded as a seminal work, and is highly readable.
posted by Pallas Athena at 6:48 PM on April 21, 2007

I'm a fan of Shakespeare A to Z. I read parts of it along with Hamlet and found it very useful.
posted by Who_Am_I at 6:57 PM on April 21, 2007

Well, Hamlet is probably one of the most written about pieces of English literature in the world, so any single book will be extremely limited. That said, some good places to go:

The Introductions to all of the Arden Shakespeare's are excellent, as are the intros to the Oxford World's Classics editions. The Norton and Riverside Complete Works of Shakespeare also have nice introductions to each play. Marjorie Garber's book Shakespeare After All has essays on every play, and Garber is a phenomenal scholar and very accessible. Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory is also quite good, and his recent biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World has some good material on the play in a biographical context, although many people have taken Greenblatt to task over his rather imaginative theories in that book. I like it, though, and it has some good stuff in it, and his reading of Hamlet is nice. If you want the lunatic view, you could read Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and his follow-up, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, but Bloom long ago kind of dropped off the radar of reputable criticism and disappeared into crackpot land.
posted by papakwanz at 6:58 PM on April 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Just jump in and read it! That's the thing about Shakespeare -- he does, in fact, write in English. Hamlet isn't something to be "tackled", like the mess in the garage or chemistry class. It's meant to be enjoyed.

Hamlet criticism is a cottage industry. There's as many interpretations of the play as there are English departments.

All the help you'll need with historical background or language will be in the notes of any commonly available annotated edition.

Read it for yourself and decide what it means.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 7:01 PM on April 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

Azimov's Guide. Yes. Azimov's Guide to Shakespeare.

He doesn't claim any great original interp, but he brings together the various schools of thought and provides a lucid context. Add to all the secondary material he provides; historical references, geographic maps, mythological background, source material, etc, etc.

His chapter on Hamlet is particularly good.
posted by RavinDave at 7:07 PM on April 21, 2007

okay, okay ... it's Asimov. Cut me some slackage.
posted by RavinDave at 7:08 PM on April 21, 2007

The Folger Shakespeare Library's Edition of Hamlet is excellent. I remember these came out when I was a senior in high school. They have the original unedited plays on one page and definitions/notes on the other. This makes it much easier to understand a lot of the conventions and idioms that are no longer commonly used in English. I'd definitely check them out.
posted by Aanidaani at 7:10 PM on April 21, 2007

It doesn't sound like you're asking for a guide, right? Maybe any annotated version is what you're looking for - that way you can "just read it" as someone mentioned, and if some weird phrase or passage doesn't make sense, you can check the footnotes. Forgive me if I'm being too basic. Here's one. I haven't read that version.
posted by peep at 7:21 PM on April 21, 2007

Funny, I just sorted through a bunch of Shakespeare editions of The Tempest to find the one that best suited my taste, and after tossing aside most as too shallow, Cliffs Notes-style, it was Arden all the way. The footnotes are intelligent, frequent and go much deeper than simply defining odd words to include information about alternative interpretations and much more. It was a perfect companion for someone wanting to really dig into and enjoy the play, with wonderfully informative essays at the beginning and Shakespeare's source material at the end. I moved on to Twelfth Night but the local library didn't have an Arden of that one, and after comparing all the others, including Cambridge and Oxford, I went to Amazon and ordered an Arden version for a buck. I can't wait for it to get here,. (Seriously; my roommate laughs when I keep asking if it came in the mail yet.)

I'll also second the introduction to Garber's Shakespeare After All and the thoroughness of her discussions of each play. Greenblatt's Pulitzer-nominated Will in the World is fascinating and also well worth a read, although the discussions of the plays are less comprehensive and more episodic, tied to particular instances in Shakespeare's life that Greenblatt wants to highlight, but he does do Hamlet. Greenblatt helped me appreciate the possible twists and turns of Shakespeare's life, but the Arden editions and Garber are more thorough guides to the plays themselves.
posted by mediareport at 7:27 PM on April 21, 2007

I found this extremely helpful in college. His writing is very straight-forward and he really covers some in-depth ideas.

Also, seeing different productions in your community and/or renting movies provides a different level of insights to other interpretations.
posted by juliplease at 7:30 PM on April 21, 2007

The Folger Shakespeare Library's Edition of Hamlet is excellent.

I was particularly disappointed in the Folger editions, for what it's worth. They define individual words and a few phrases, but really don't compare to the Ardens in terms of depth. And BitterOldPunk's right in that you really should just jump in and read away; there were long stretches where I didn't refer to annotations at all, and then would go back to them at the end of each scene to see what more there was to learn. The Folger edition offered almost nothing at that point compared to the Arden.
posted by mediareport at 7:31 PM on April 21, 2007

OffTopic: You may find this recent post interesting, if you're reading Hamlet.
posted by theiconoclast31 at 7:32 PM on April 21, 2007

Watch it. It's a play.

Lots of movie versions of it are easily available.
posted by Flunkie at 7:35 PM on April 21, 2007

I disagree. A number of the interpretations rely on historical & contextual ideas that, unless you have a pretty good sense of western european & english history, you're probably not going to put together on your own. JSTOR returns some 30k results. Skimming through maybe 10 that strike you as interesting will give a huge background in the variety of interpretations (the articles themselves are probably 90% bullshit - phds picking a single word or two & milking a thesis out of it).
posted by devilsbrigade at 7:51 PM on April 21, 2007

Watch it. It's a play.

Lots of movie versions of it are easily available.

Sorry, that gave me a bit of a chuckle. No offense intended, of course.

But really, if you can see it put on, that is great; read it, though, as well.
posted by synecdoche at 7:53 PM on April 21, 2007

I mentioned it in the previous thread, but I'd recommend David Ball's Backwards and Forwards, which addresses Hamlet specifically.
posted by dobbs at 8:06 PM on April 21, 2007

David Ball's Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays uses Hamlet as it's primary example throughout the book. I think it's one of the most useful books for someone who works in any aspect of producing plays (and it's fun to read and really short too :-)
posted by winston at 8:14 PM on April 21, 2007

One central question in Hamlet is: Is Hamlet crazy? The ghost of his dead father appears and tells him to commit murder. Is that crazy? Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Kennedy Center recently held a mock trial of Hamlet. It is an interesting look at Hamlet's mental health during the play.
posted by Flood at 8:39 PM on April 21, 2007

Is Hamlet crazy?

"I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."
--Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
posted by ColdChef at 5:52 AM on April 22, 2007

Go to a Barnes and Noble and read the Cliff's notes. Why do I recommend this? Because Cliff's notes will give you a great overview of the plot and various interpretations of the play in a no nonsense, straightforward way.

I've read "Will in the World", and what you will get from that about Hamlet is that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died shortly before the writing of Hamlet. Also, there was a play that was very popular at the time making the rounds named "The Mousetrap" that had basically the same plot as Hamlet without any of the artistic merit.

What you will get from "Shakespear after all" is a post-modernist interpretation of the play that will make no sense to you until you read the Cliff's notes, and maybe not even after that. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting, but I don't think you will get what you want. Also, just read the short, ten page chapter in Barnes and Noble if you're interested in Hamlet in particular, don't bother buying the book.

Here's the Norton critical edition I read in college. This is a book that is only comprised of critical discussions of Hamlet. It's a little old by now, and from what I remember there was some good commentary and some batshitinsane.

The important thing to know about Hamlet's background is that the play was not always popular. It was Shakespeare's least successful show, and wasn't recognized as a standout until the twentieth century, when existential issues became central questions. For many intellectuals then, this overlooked play seemed revelatory and impossibly ahead of it's time.

For me, and I'm sure you'll come to your own opinion when you watch the play and read about it, Hamlet is about our need to justify and rationalize our actions, what happens when we can't, and whether or not there can ever be any good justifications in the first place. Hamlet is someone who can't make a decision, because he doesn't have any information he can trust. Later, he's transformed when he views what he can only take to be an act of God pointing the way to revenge, thus making a decision for him. This ends in tragedy, calling everything into question. Neiztche talks about the same issues when he discusses a future in which people will have to make decisions based on a "will to power", which basically means their own judgement rather than relying on religious, rational, political, or social preconceived justifications. Whenever we examine the basis for our decisions and ultimately find them baseless, we generally feel despair. That this baselessness is inherent to the human condition is tragic.
posted by xammerboy at 7:49 AM on April 22, 2007

Seconding the Bedford Companion and the Norton Critical Edition. Would advise against going into JSTOR or the like and reading a bunch of scholarly essays; if you don't have the background they will be largely meaningless to you.

Seeing it is also useful, but avoid like the plague the Ethan Hawke version. It blows.

Also, avoid at all costs the "No Fear!" Shakespeare editions (I think that's what they are called... maybe it's "Shakespeare without fear" or something). They present the play side-by-side with a modern English "translation" which is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of.

I don't know where xammerboy is getting this idea that Hamlet was Shakespeare's least successful play. Compared to Timon of Athens? Coriolanus? King John? I don't think so. Hamlet wasn't his most *popular* play, but it wasn't anywhere near his least.
posted by papakwanz at 10:51 AM on April 22, 2007

SparkNotes on Hamlet -- They have them for all sorts of other Shakespeare plays too.
posted by banished at 12:40 PM on April 22, 2007

Woops, sorry, missed the cliffnotes comment. I am an idiot.
posted by banished at 12:41 PM on April 22, 2007

Bookrags on Hamlet has the "study guide" stuff you're avoiding, but also if you go down the page, there are several critical essays that might be more in-line with what you're looking for.
posted by lubujackson at 1:15 PM on April 22, 2007

Hamlet wasn't his most *popular* play, but it wasn't anywhere near his least.

There is a BBC Shakespeare series that is excellent all around, though all the actors are from the 70's.
posted by xammerboy at 7:43 PM on April 22, 2007

Wow -- thanks for the wisdom here. I'll try Arden. Sure, while I get that its a play and can be appreciated upon its own, what I'd miss is a back-forth conversation about it. I suppose that one gains something by letting a work just sit upon you or you take what you get from it, but I know I'd be missing something. I'm still influenced by that guy in the movie Metropolitan who likes criticisms over the actual work I guess. :) Plus, for something like Shakespeare I feel you need perspective/comparison or will you miss the greatness in the work.
posted by skepticallypleased at 9:48 PM on April 22, 2007