Table of contents introduction 1

2.3. The tragedy of Hamlet

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet (/ˈhæmlɪt/), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.
Hamlet is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".^] It was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879. It has inspired many other writers—from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and Iris Murdoch—and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella".
The story of Shakespeare's Hamlet was derived from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by the 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet, though some scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet that exists today. He almost certainly wrote his version of the title role for his fellow actor, Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time. In the 400 years since its inception, the role has been performed by numerous highly acclaimed actors in each successive century.
Three different early versions of the play are extant: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603); the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604); and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines and entire scenes missing from the others. The play's structure and depth of characterisation have inspired much critical scrutiny. One such example is the centuries-old debate about Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle, which some see as merely a plot device to prolong the action but which others argue is a dramatisation of the complex philosophical and ethical issues that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge, and thwarted desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet's unconscious desires, while feminist critics have re-evaluated and attempted to rehabilitate the often-maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.

If there is a single element that unites all Shakespearean comedies, it is a wedding, or several weddings, at the end of the play. Although not all of the fourteen plays classified as comedies in the First Folio are particularly light-hearted or humorous, all end with at least one marriage.

The convention of ending a comedy with a wedding provides the audience with assurance that whatever conflicts arise in the play will not have lasting, negative consequences for the protagonists or society at large. Unlike the fatal conflicts of Shakespeare’s tragedies, conflicts in his comedies are reconciled before serious harm can come to anyone. Because the audience knows the discord is only temporary, we don’t take the foibles and misfortunes of the characters seriously, and we trust they will end the play happier than they began. Consider the difference between Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet, both of which feature a character who fakes her own death. In contrast to Much Ado, where the truth of Hero’s deception is revealed before anyone comes to harm, Juliet’s deception in Romeo and Juliet tragically leads to the real deaths of both herself and Romeo.
As this comparison suggests, the plots of Shakespeare’s comedies frequently resemble the plots of his tragedies, but they have happier outcomes Shakespeare’s comedies represented a significant departure from the classical comedy that had dominated the stage prior to his arrival in London. Whereas classical comedies were fairly straightforward, Shakespearean comedies introduced a number of elements that made for more complicated plots.
Classical comedies typically opened with an already established pair of lovers, and they told of how these lovers had to overcome some obstacle or another to confirm the legitimacy of their union. Shakespeare, however, did not write comedies with already established lovers, and instead placed the emphasis of the plot on the process of wooing itself. The Taming of the Shrew thus tells the story of Petruchio, who must labor to break through Katherine’s ill-tempered nature and win her affections. In other plays, such as Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare multiplies the number of lovers, which leads to preposterously intricate plots. In yet other comedies, such as Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare uses disguise as a significant plot device that adds further levels of complication, yielding a rich source of dramatic irony.
The audience, who knows more than the characters, can laugh at the amusing predicaments that characters get themselves into with their own foolishness. Comedy is in this case a unique and privileged type of cultural and psychic material capable of producing both pleasure and power; this locates comic play as both emancipator and as meaningless abstract negativity, or excess. comedy is presented as societal semblance, as a necessary illusion capable of dispelling illusions.
The double bind of this stance, however, does not negate its logic because a third position is located within every comic resolution. Theodore Adorno’s formulation of dramatic art as societal semblance therefore becomes important for a coherent understanding of the aesthetic as mimesis, as the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal conflicts that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored.
Dramatic comedy is therefore recognisable as social or political unconscious, disclosing itself as the default sphere for failed dreams of human emancipation. Re-enacted upon the stage these dreams can be kept alive in a volatile space that not only decentres the strong constitutive subject through a dismantling of notions of self as a cultural construction but produces meanings and values, which propose fictional solutions, for a society that is riven with fundamental antagonisms. According to Adorno, the only way to expose these, and thereby point towards their possible resolution, is to think against thought, in other words, to think in contradictions as “to proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions.
A contradiction in reality, is a contradiction against reality”. The point of thinking in contradictions is not simply negative, however. It has a fragile, transformative horizon, namely, a society that would no longer be torn apart by fundamental antagonisms. Again, functioning at the level of the Hegelian dialectic, comedy oscillates between two opposite poles of thought, mediating the space between what is accepted traditionally and what can be imagined as possible. Hegel’s concept of the Aufhebung, as outlined by Derrida, 18 depicts a dialectic of confrontation at work which simultaneously negates and conserves. This diametric formulation explores the oppressed position of the ‘under-dog’ and produces idealist propaganda, a duality that demands a diacritical reading of the comic genre.