Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

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...

If you ask actors about the influences, differences, and similarities between Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet , some may respond that one could never prove the nit-picking speculations of academics, and that both are revenge plays with plenty of material for actors to bring to life, and for audiences to be drawn in. Shakespeare was an entertainer, and he wanted to make a good living, so if he borrowed elements from Kyd, as long as the shows are a success with audiences and at the box office, everyone is happy. [Images: The Spanish Tragedy via Wikipedia ; Hamlet Q2, via Folger Shakespeare Library .] Of course, in a way, they're right. Actors still bring very old plays to life for audiences who are moved, again and again, by something not only in the scripts, but in the actors and the audiences themselves. When things come together well in a live performance, why dig and speculate about historical questions that might never be answered? And y...

Shakespeare's Hamlet was something fresh in English revenge tragedies. The most popular of them, The Spanish Tragedy, either conveyed the assumption that God was on England's side, against Spain and Rome, or according to some, the play's violence was so over-the-top that it may have been intended to cause its audience to question the impulse for revenge against national enemies. Hamlet turned this on its head and used the end of a royal house in Denmark as an analogy for England's hope for a heroic ending to the House of Tudor. Think of the film, Avatar, which worked as an analogy for resource wars led by the US against smaller (and increasingly Muslim) nations, and against indigenous peoples over centuries. Planet Earth wants to mine "unobtanium" at the cost of many alien lives; earthlings are, mostly, the bad guys, while the aliens live in better harmony with their planet. But the film Avatar struck a nerve and was a record-breaking box-office hit. Obvi...