Source: BBC News
By Fiona Macdonald
26 June 2018
A man talking to a skull. A monologue about suicide, at the porous border between sanity and madness. A girl drowning in a brook, grief-stricken for her father. If David Lynch had made Twin Peaks 400 years ago, he might have come up with something similar. But this was William Shakespeare. In 1596, his son Hamnet died at the age of 11 – and five years later, as the playwright was finishing his tragedy Hamlet, Shakespeare’s father suffered a serious illness. He was to die in September 1601.
“Something must have been at work in Shakespeare, something powerful enough to call forth this linguistic explosion,” writes Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. “As audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, passionate grief, provoked by the death of a loved one, lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy.” The death of his son and the impending death of his father “could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet”. What is revered as one of the greatest works in literature is likely to have sprung from a place of intense emotional suffering.
Hamlet is a play “about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfilment,” writes Greenblatt (Credit: Alamy)
The crucible in which Hamlet was forged might help explain why the tragedy continues to speak to audiences around the world four centuries on. It came eighth in BBC Culture’s Stories that Shaped the World poll, with voters praising its extraordinary insight into human nature. Hamlet is “the play that exemplifies Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the human psyche in so much of its nuanced extremity… our simultaneous blending of genius and self-sabotage, our capacity for love and hate, creativity and destruction,” claims the US poet, novelist and critic Elizabeth Rosner. According to the UK author and critic Adam Thorpe, it’s a story that has “influenced the way we think about our muddled selves. We enter Hamlet’s inner core and emerge rinsed of illusion.” Hamlet reveals how much stories can teach us about ourselves.
Categories: Literature, Psychology, The Muslim Times
It’s literature that we grew up on but it’s what we I remember connecting to as well. Not the Romeo and Juliet romance or the play about comedy but hamlet really got me thinking and connected to me. As we in class studies it but also the message between the lines sinks in.