Peter Lake on the four genres represented in Hamlet
If Hamlet is NOT a revenge tragedy, what is it? Peter Lake [1] shares his ideas on this topic and more in his 2020 book, Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies .[2] Lake claims Hamlet is not *merely* a revenge tragedy, but much more, bending and mixing genres. If Hamlet is not *merely* a revenge tragedy, what is it? In a (Senecan, or heroic/Homeric) revenge tragedy like The Spanish Tragedy (1587, Thomas Kyd), injustices occur, and a victim of wrongs decides to take revenge. Eventually there’s a lot of plotting of violence, and the revenge is worse than the original injustice. Not in Hamlet, Lake observes. Shakespeare had already written the successful Titus Andronicus (1594), a more traditional revenge tragedy, which ends like The Spanish Tragedy, with the main character killing the heirs of the villains and cooking them, and then making the villains eat it. Yuck. Nothing like that happens in Hamlet. Lake observes: By the tim...