Hamlet is the most famous literary work in English and among the most famous in the world. It remains popular – many successful films have been made of it, for instance -- and new stage interpretations are as frequent as ever. It is full of familiar lines and phrases: ‘to the manner born’, ‘In my mind’s eye’, ‘more in sorrow than in anger’, ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, ‘all for nothing’, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’, ‘Good night, sweet prince’… One could go on. Though the full text takes between four and five hours to perform, it is dramatically exciting, as even an average production can demonstrate. It has been exhaustively studied in schools and universities, and more has been written about it than almost any other work of literature in the world. And yet despite such familiarity, such frequency of presentation and such depth and range of study, it remains what T S Eliot called ‘the “Mona Lisa” of literature’: which is to say, an enigma. It provokes numerous questions that cannot easily be answered. Is Hamlet mad or only pretending to be so? Does he really love Ophelia? If so, why is he so cruel to her and why does he hardly ever mention her? The most famous speech in the play, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’, is irrelevant to the plot and could be said to impede the action, so why is it included? Is Hamlet’s device of having a play performed before the King successful or not? Does the Queen ever realise that her second husband murdered her first? Above all, given that the Prince has every motive for revenge and many opportunities to carry it out, why does he delay?
None of these questions has ever been conclusively answered, so it is unlikely that in five classes we shall succeed in doing so. We shall none the less discuss them and ask ourselves whether it is the existence of such problems that makes the play perennially compelling. The structure of the course will be extremely simple. We shall work through the play at a rate of roughly one act per session and conclude with a discussion of the play as a whole. The text of Hamlet is notoriously unstable – there are at least three versions of it – and some reference will be made to the problems this fact gives rise to, as well as to the light one text can sometimes cast on another. But our main purpose will be to ask – as J Dover Wilson did in 1935 – ‘What happens in Hamlet?’
