Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet (1601) is one of the most famous and enduring works in the dramatic repertoire, as well as being one of the most quoted. The melancholy Prince of Denmark is a role which most young actors have probably aspired to playing at some point, and it maintains a hold over the canon of Renaissance drama. Considering it a failure would seem an unusual critical position.
But looking at Hamlet as a failed revenge drama can be extremely enlightening. A deliberate failure – Shakespeare had already proved he could write a brilliant revenge tragedy with the witty and literate gorefest of Titus Andronicus – and one in which the playwright sets up the mechanism of the genre, only to frustrate the audience’s expectations.
Hamlet certainly contains all the trappings of revenge drama for genre criticism – a corrupt foreign court (“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”), a usurper (Claudius), a ghost come back to demand vengeance (Old Hamlet), a near-incestuous noblewoman (Gertrude), a few “mad scenes” (Hamlet and Ophelia), a skull (Yorrick), and liberal doses of poison in wine and on swords. In Shakespeare’s hands, however, these elements refuse to coalesce into their expected pattern.
When Old Hamlet’s ghost returns from the underworld in the first scene, contemporary audiences would have expected this to be the signal for Hamlet to start revenge proceedings against Claudius. (The obvious comparison is the Ghost of Andrugio, who appears at the beginning of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, to begin both that play and the entire revenge play genre.) Hamlet, however, cannot bring himself to take on the role of the revenger that easily, and procrastinates, worrying whether the ghost is a diabolic trick, and whether he should kill Claudius at prayer. During this delay, Hamlet accidentally stabs Polonius whilst he is hiding behind a curtain, perhaps believing that Polonius is Claudius.
With this almost random act of violence, the play becomes even more complex, as Laertes now also has the death of a father to avenge. The “competitive” speeches made by Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia’s grave, and the duel between the two men in the last scene, reflect a struggle within the play as to who will take the vacant role of “revenger”. In the chaotic end of the play, both men are revenged; Laertes upon Hamlet for Polonius death, and Hamlet upon Claudius for Old Hamlet’s death, but their actions involve much collateral loss of life, and only serve to leave Denmark rulerless when Fortinbras invades.
Thus Hamlet is a play which deliberately takes on the conventions of revenge drama, and complicates the, refusing to let characters be identified easily with their “types”, or “roles”.. The confusion of the audience, faced by the failure of the “generic machinery” to work the way they expected, brings them closer to the confusion and doubt of Hamlet, who is trying to deal with the failure of his whole world.
