The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of

Shakespeare’s work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an
Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as well as being a hero, and a perfect
Renaissance prince. These judgements serve perhaps only to show how many
interpretations of one character may be put forward.

‘To be or not to be’ is the centre of Hamlet’s questioning. Reasons not to go on

living outnumber reasons for living. But he goes on living, until he completes his revenge for
his father’s murder, and becomes ‘most royal’, the true ‘Prince of Denmark’ (which is the
play’s subtitle), in many ways the perfection of Renaissance man. Hamlet’s progress is a
‘struggle of becoming’ – of coming to terms with life, and learning to accept it, with all its
drawbacks and challenges. He discusses the problems he faces directly with the audience, in
a series of seven soliloquies – of which ‘To be or not to be’ is the fourth and central one.
These seven steps, from the zero-point of a desire not to live, to complete awareness and
acceptance (as he says, ‘the readiness is all’), give a structure to the play, making the
progress all the more tragic, as Hamlet reaches his aim, the perfection of his life, only to die.

. . . we defy augury: there is a 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 owes of aught he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?
(Hamlet)

The play can thus be seen as a universal image of life and of the necessity of
individual choice and action. No matter how tortured or successful a life will be, the end is
death, and, to quote Hamlet’s final words, ‘the rest is silence’. Shakespeare’s plays became
‘darker’ or, according to some critical views, are ‘problem’ plays, in the years immediately
before and after Queen Elizabeth’s death and the accession of James VI of Scotland as King
James I of the United Kingdom in 1603.

But when viewed in theatrical terms – of character and action, discussion and
debate – the ‘problem’ areas can be seen as examinations of serious social and moral
concerns. The balance between justice and authority in Measure for Measure is set against
a society filled with sexual corruption and amorality.

The extremes of Puritanism and Catholicism meet in the characters of Angelo

and Isabella. The justice figure of the Duke is, for most of the play, disguised as a priest. A
false priest, giving false advice to an innocent man who is condemned to death, in a play
which is basically a comedy, is an indication of the complexity of Shakespeare’s
experimentation with form and content at this stage of his career. When the false
priest/humanist Duke says ‘Be absolute for death’, it is almost exactly the reverse of
Hamlet’s decision ‘to be’ – and is rendered the more ambiguous by the Catholic friar’s
costume. The reply of the condemned Claudio must catch the sympathy of the audience,
making them side with young love against hypocritical justice: Ay, but to die, and go we
know not where; . . . ’tis too horrible. Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the
geography of the human soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other
writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays covers all the ‘form and
pressure’ of mankind in the modern world. They move from politics to family, from social to
personal, from public to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of
behaviour. That would come to English society many years after Shakespeare’s death, and
after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King
and replaced his rule with the Commonwealth. Some critics argue that Shakespeare
supported the monarchy and set himself against any revolutionary tendencies. Certainly he
is on the side of order and harmony, and his writing reflects a monarchic context rather than
the more republican context which replaced the monarchy after 1649. It would be fanciful
to see Shakespeare as foretelling the decline of the Stuart monarchy. He was not a political
commentator. Rather, he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a
unique ability to portray his observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form, in the
richest and most exciting language ever used in the English theatre. His works are still
quoted endlessly, performed in every language and culture in the world, rewritten and
reinterpreted by every new generation.

However, as with the early comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the audience
is left with a sense of magic, of transience, of awareness of the potential of humanity and
the expressive potential of the theatre as a form. The idea of transience, of the brevity of
human life, is important in Renaissance writing. Before the Reformation, there was an
emphasis on eternity and eternal life which implied security and optimism. Now the life of
man is seen as ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, and there are many images which underline this
theme.

THE SONNETS If Shakespeare had not become the best-known dramatist in

English he would still be remembered as a poet. His longer poems, such as Venus and
Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are classically inspired narratives. Venus and
Adonis, in sesta rima, was one of Shakespeare’s most immediately popular works, being
reprinted at least fifteen times before 1640. His sonnets, probably written in the mid-1590s,
use the Elizabethan form – rhyming a b a b c d c d e f e f g g – rather than the Petrarchan
form which had been popular earlier. They are poems of love and of time; of love outlasting
time, and poetry outlasting all. Critics have tried to identify the mysterious young man and
dark lady to whom the sonnets are addressed, but it is more realistic to see the poems not
as having particular addressees but rather as examining the masculine/feminine elements in
all humanity and in all love relationships. Power, as in the plays, is another major concern of
the sonnets. The power of the beloved to command is a microcosm of all power. The
suffering of a lover is a symbol of all suffering. For some critics, the Elizabethan sonnet
sequence is largely to be regarded as ‘a long poem in fourteen-line stanzas’. Such collections
as Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been much analysed in
terms of their formal organisation, especially in relation to numerology. In this reading,
Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are based on a triangle: 17 times 3, times 3, plus 1. No definitive
explanation for the order in which the sonnets are numbered has ever been put forward
convincingly. This only serves to add to the pleasantly enigmatic nature of the collection.
Indeed, ambiguity is at the heart of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Whether the ‘I’ loves or is loved
by a man or a woman: Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do
suggest me still; The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill . .
. (Sonnet 144) Whether, in the 1590s, he considers himself a success or a failure, together
with the constant preoccupation with time and transience, all serve to underline the lack of
certainty in the poems. ‘I’ very often presents himself as rejected, some kind of outcast:

When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast
state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my
fate . . . (Sonnet 29) There is a truth of emotion and of constancy in the affections of the
poetic ‘I’. Homoerotic the attraction to his male love certainly is: . . . my state Like to the
lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet
love remember’d such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(Sonnet 29) The more modern word ‘homosexual’ does not really apply, as Sonnet 20 makes
clear in its final, sexually punning lines: But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

Shakespeare has been staged, adapted, studied and adopted throughout the
centuries. It is a mark of his universality that his plays have survived all the appropriations,
attacks, uses and interpretations made of them. They are used institutionally in education to
show what is best in high-cultural ideology; they have been read as nihilistically modern,
incorrigibly reactionary, and as ‘a cultural creation which has no intrinsic authority and
whose validity is wide open to dispute’. It is true that Shakespeare has been made into
something he was not in his own lifetime, a cultural institution and an emblem, whose
quality and artistry are not in doubt. So he will no doubt survive radical and systematic
counter–interpretation just as he has survived institutional appropriation from Victorian
times to the present. He can be, as critics have described him, ‘our contemporary’,
‘alternative’, ‘radical’, ‘historicist’, ‘subversive’, ‘traditional’ and ‘conservative’. But his plays
continue to speak to audiences and readers, as ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of
things unknown’, and he explores the known and the unknown in human experience.
Reinterpretation, on a wide scale of opinions from radical to hegemonic, will always be a
vital part of Shakespearean study. As long as the critics never take on more importance than
the texts, Shakespeare’s plays and poems will survive as ‘eternal lines to time’.