Hieronimo is one of the principal characters in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy . He is the knight marshal of Spain and the father of Horatio. In the onset of the play he is a dedicated servant to the King of Spain. However, the difference in social status becomes apparent when his son is wrongfully murdered by Balthazar, the son of the viceroy of Portugal, and Lorenzo, the son of the Duke of Spain, which eventually causes tragic events to unfold. In order to revenge the death of his son, Hieronimo takes on additional roles, a playwright and an actor. He uses his position in the King's court to write and perform a play within a play . This performance mirrors the actual events surrounding Horatio's death, and within this show Hieronimo commits his own acts of revenge against the perpetrators. Many critics see Hieronimo as a dynamic character that by the end of the tragedy has become obsessed with taking revenge against the murderers of his son. Literature of 16th century England was greatly concerned with plots of deceit, confusion and madness as its central theme. The Spanish Tragedy is no different.
169-523: In Peter B. Murray's Thomas Kyd , he has his own summary and analysis of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy . The author mostly dwells on the analysis of Hieronimo's play within a play . Murray emphasizes that the play is about how in the end love will kill and how the characters in the play were acting the opposite parts of their true selves; their acting roles did not reflect their true character. Murray also points out that Hieronimo seems to be delaying
338-475: A flashback of events leading up to the murder. Within this flashback, an unreliable narrator tells a story to mislead the would-be murderer, who later discovers that he was misled after another character narrates the truth to him. As the story concludes, the " Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí and his Son " is narrated within it. This perennially popular work can be traced back to Arabic , Persian , and Indian storytelling traditions. Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein has
507-489: A "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville 's novel Moby-Dick ; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby-Dick —ideas originally intended to be used later in the novel—but as the writing progressed, these plot ideas eventually proved impossible to fit around
676-652: A 'performance' one" of Hamlet : an edition containing all of Shakespeare's material for the play for the pleasure of readers, so not representing the play as it would have been staged. From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of melancholy and insanity , leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama. Though it remained popular with mass audiences, late 17th-century Restoration critics saw Hamlet as primitive and disapproved of its lack of unity and decorum . This view changed drastically in
845-646: A 1600–01 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men , playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe , were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of "barely one hundred" for the Children of the chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece. A contemporary of Shakespeare's, Gabriel Harvey , wrote
1014-465: A character trait, rather than a plot device. This focus on character and internal struggle continued into the 20th century, when criticism branched in several directions, discussed in context and interpretation below. Modern editors have divided the play into five acts, and each act into scenes. The First Folio marks the first two acts only. The quartos do not have such divisions. The division into five acts follows Seneca , who in his plays, regularized
1183-408: A couplet that was added, possibly by religious zealots intent on giving the play extra moral gravity, are said only on the night that Oedipa sees the play. From what Pynchon relates, this is the only mention in the play of Thurn and Taxis' rivals' name—Trystero—and it is the seed for the conspiracy that unfurls. A significant portion of Walter Moers ' Labyrinth of Dreaming Books is an ekphrasis on
1352-464: A deeply nested frame story structure, that features the narration of Walton, who records the narration of Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the narration of his creation, who narrates the story of a cabin dwelling family he secretly observes. Another classic novel with a frame story is Wuthering Heights , the majority of which is recounted by the central family's housekeeper to a boarder. Similarly, Roald Dahl 's story The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
1521-510: A desire not to offend scholars at Oxford University . ( Robert Pullen , was the founder of Oxford University, and John Rainolds , was the President of Corpus Christi College .) "Any dating of Hamlet must be tentative", states the New Cambridge editor, Phillip Edwards . MacCary suggests 1599 or 1600; James Shapiro offers late 1600 or early 1601; Wells and Taylor suggest that the play
1690-490: A friend". On the other hand, Hamlet acts very spontaneously throughout the play and borders between the line of sanity and craziness. "His self-criticisms are seldom triggered by inner motivation, and it takes external objects to rouse him from the gloomy lassitude which is his normal state of being in the play" says Levin of Prince Hamlet's behavior. He often makes excuses for his inability to act. For example, in Hamlet's soliloquy at
1859-461: A hall of the castle to try to learn more. Hamlet feigns madness and subtly insults Polonius all the while. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, Hamlet greets his "friends" warmly but quickly discerns that they are there to spy on him for Claudius. Hamlet admits that he is upset at his situation but refuses to give the true reason, instead remarking " What a piece of work is a man ". Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that they have brought along
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#17330849939582028-570: A history compiled by several of the characters. The subtitle of The Hobbit ("There and Back Again") is depicted as part of a rejected title of this book within a book, and The Lord of the Rings is a part of the final title. An example of an interconnected inner story is "The Mad Trist" in Edgar Allan Poe 's Fall of the House of Usher , where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of
2197-506: A long-standing feud with neighbouring Norway , in which King Hamlet slew King Fortinbras of Norway in a battle some years ago. Although Denmark defeated Norway and the Norwegian throne fell to King Fortinbras's infirm brother, Denmark fears that an invasion led by the dead Norwegian king's son, Prince Fortinbras , is imminent. On a cold night on the ramparts of Elsinore , the Danish royal castle,
2366-476: A man who finds a manuscript telling the story of a documentary that may or may not have ever existed, contains multiple layers of plot. The book includes footnotes and letters that tell their own stories only vaguely related to the events in the main narrative of the book, and footnotes for fake books. Robert A. Heinlein 's later books ( The Number of the Beast , The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond
2535-550: A marginal note in his copy of the 1598 edition of Chaucer's works, which some scholars use as dating evidence. Harvey's note says that "the wiser sort" enjoy Hamlet , and implies that the Earl of Essex —executed in February 1601 for rebellion—was still alive. Other scholars consider this inconclusive. Edwards, for example, concludes that the "sense of time is so confused in Harvey's note that it
2704-508: A minor role (most likely Marcellus). Scholars disagree whether the reconstruction was pirated or authorised. It is suggested by Irace that Q1 is an abridged version intended especially for travelling productions, thus the question of length may be considered as separate from issues of poor textual quality. Editing Q1 thus poses problems in whether or not to "correct" differences from Q2 and F. Irace, in her introduction to Q1, wrote that "I have avoided as many other alterations as possible, because
2873-420: A more famous composer is told in a series of letters to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, which are interrupted halfway through and revealed to be in the possession of an investigative journalist named Luisa Rey and so on. Each of the first five tales are interrupted in the middle, with the sixth tale being told in full, before the preceding five tales are finished in reverse order. Each layer of the story either challenges
3042-533: A narrative counterpoint and add a touch of surrealism to the main narrative. They additionally raise the question of whether works of artistic genius justify or atone for the sins and crimes of their creators. Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002) and Flicker by Theodore Roszak (1991) also rely heavily on fictional films within their respective narratives. This dramatic device was probably first used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where
3211-468: A negative review of Hamlet , stating that "it is vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France or Italy... one would imagine this piece to be a work of a drunken savage". By the 19th century, Romantic critics valued Hamlet for its internal, individual conflict reflecting the strong contemporary emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in general. Then too, critics started to focus on Hamlet's delay as
3380-721: A noble story, the boring character tells a very dull tale, and the rude miller tells a smutty tale. Homer 's Odyssey too makes use of this device; Odysseus ' adventures at sea are all narrated by Odysseus to the court of king Alcinous in Scheria . Other shorter tales, many of them false, account for much of the Odyssey . Many modern children's story collections are essentially anthology works connected by this device, such as Arnold Lobel 's Mouse Tales , Paula Fox 's The Little Swineherd , and Phillip and Hillary Sherlock's Ears and Tails and Common Sense . A well-known modern example of framing
3549-580: A nunnery", though it is unclear whether this, too, is a show of madness or genuine distress. His reaction convinces Claudius that Hamlet is not mad for love. Shortly thereafter, the court assembles to watch the play Hamlet has commissioned. After seeing the Player King murdered by his rival pouring poison in his ear, Claudius abruptly rises and runs from the room; for Hamlet, this is proof of his uncle's guilt. Gertrude summons Hamlet to her chamber to demand an explanation. Meanwhile, Claudius talks to himself about
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#17330849939583718-461: A play A story within a story , also referred to as an embedded narrative , is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories . A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet ; a film may show the characters watching
3887-433: A play get carried away with the roles that they are acting that they end up getting themselves killed just like their characters die in the script. Hieronimo even suggests that the play be spoken in different languages. "As a result, each character will be isolated from the others within a language that he alone speaks, as they have been isolated by false use of language all along". He has two meanings behind this thought. One
4056-486: A point to his audience through the onstage presence of Revenge that Andrea has been allowed to "return to earth with the embodiment of pagan justice to witness the enforcement of a just vengeance against his murderers". Ardolino concludes that through being an outside viewer of what is taking place in the Spanish court, Don Andrea learns to "equate Hieronimo's quest for a just revenge with the reasons for his return to earth". As
4225-560: A pun; when Claudius addresses him as "my cousin Hamlet, and my son", Hamlet says as an aside: "A little more than kin, and less than kind." An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys , appears in several places in the play. Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: "Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state" and "And I, of ladies most deject and wretched ". Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout
4394-409: A short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems , and songs . Stories within stories can be used simply to enhance entertainment for the reader or viewer, or can act as examples to teach lessons to other characters. The inner story often has a symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in
4563-455: A sprawling, loosely interconnected science fiction narrative, as do the albums of Janelle Monae . On Tom Waits 's concept album Alice (consisting of music he wrote for the musical of the same name), most of the songs are (very) loosely inspired by both Alice in Wonderland , and the book's real-life author, Lewis Carroll , and inspiration Alice Liddell . The song "Poor Edward", however,
4732-510: A stage adaptation. On the title page of Q2, its text is described as "newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was." That is probably a comparison to Q1. Much of Hamlet ' s language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare Castiglione 's 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier . This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. Osric and Polonius, especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius's speech
4901-413: A story dates back to a device known as a " frame story ", where a supplemental story is used to help tell the main story. Typically, the outer story or "frame" does not have much matter, and most of the work consists of one or more complete stories told by one or more storytellers. The earliest examples of "frame stories" and "stories within stories" were in ancient Egyptian and Indian literature , such as
5070-502: A surreal version of Madam Mao 's Red Detachment of Women , illuminating the ascendance of human values over the disillusionment of high politics in the meeting. In Bertolt Brecht 's The Caucasian Chalk Circle , a play is staged as a parable to villagers in the Soviet Union to justify the re-allocation of their farmland: the tale describes how a child is awarded to a servant-girl rather than its natural mother, an aristocrat, as
5239-455: A tale told through the music of Coheed and Cambria , tells a story for the first two albums but reveals that the story is being actively written by a character called the Writer in the third. During the album, the Writer delves into his own story and kills one of the characters, much to the dismay of the main character. The critically acclaimed Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Hieronimo - Misplaced Pages Continue
5408-480: A troupe of actors that they met while travelling to Elsinore. Hamlet, after welcoming the actors and dismissing his friends-turned-spies, asks them to deliver a soliloquy about the death of King Priam and Queen Hecuba at the climax of the Trojan War . Hamlet then asks the actors to stage The Murder of Gonzago , a play featuring a death in the style of his father's murder. Hamlet intends to study Claudius's reaction to
5577-401: A typical Elizabethan play would need two to three hours. It is speculated that because of the considerable length of Q2 and F1, there was an expectation that those texts would be abridged for performance, or that Q2 and F1 may have been aimed at a reading audience. That Q1 is so much shorter than Q2 has spurred speculation that Q1 is an early draft, or perhaps an adaptation, a bootleg copy, or
5746-542: A very distinct sense of right and wrong. Because he is the knight marshal to the King of Spain he has dedicated much of his life to the enforcement of the law. At first he wants the murderers of his son to be punished by due process unlike Hamlet's vision of bloody revenge. "I will go plain me to my lord the King, and cry aloud for justice through the court, "says Hieronimo. Thirdly, Hieronimo never considers suicide as an option like Hamlet does. According to Levin, "revenge, not suicide,
5915-455: A young boy. Both the book and the movie assert that the central story is from a book called "The Princess Bride" by a nonexistent author named S. Morgenstern . In the Welsh novel Aelwyd F'Ewythr Robert (1852), by Gwilym Hiraethog , a visitor to a farm in north Wales tells the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin to those gathered around the hearth. Sometimes a frame story exists in the same setting as
6084-543: Is James Merrill 's 1974 modernist poem " Lost in Translation ". In Rabih Alameddine 's novel The Hakawati , or The Storyteller , the protagonist describes coming home to the funeral of his father, one of a long line of traditional Arabic storytellers. Throughout the narrative, the author becomes hakawati (an Arabic word for a teller of traditional tales) himself, weaving the tale of the story of his own life and that of his family with folkloric versions of tales from Qur'an,
6253-450: Is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark , the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his attempts to exact revenge against his uncle, Claudius , who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother . Hamlet is considered among the "most powerful and influential tragedies in
6422-424: Is a "divinity that shapes our ends". Hamlet's enquiring mind has been open to all kinds of ideas, but in act five he has decided on a plan, and in a dialogue with Horatio he seems to answer his two earlier soliloquies on suicide: "We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness
6591-474: Is a "morally justified private revenger ...". He comes to this conclusion through the claim that Kyd indicates this by "the epilogue, which presents the apotheosis of Hieronimo and his accomplice, Bel-imperia , as well as Horatio and Isabella, in the pagan underworld". In addition to this, the development of Don Andrea and Revenge, and the final decision of the gods of the underworld to "consign Andrea's apportionment of final rewards and punishments" reveal that
6760-498: Is a graphic novel about a middle-school musical production, and the tentative romantic fumblings of its cast members. In Manuel Puig 's Kiss of the Spider Woman , ekphrases on various old movies, some real, and some fictional, make up a substantial portion of the narrative. In Paul Russell 's Boys of Life , descriptions of movies by director/antihero Carlos (loosely inspired by controversial director Pier Paolo Pasolini ) provide
6929-453: Is able to maintain control over his emotions and not allow them to cloud his motivations throughout the majority of the play. "He may momentarily be weary of life, but he is never plunged into melancholic apathy for long" like Hamlet is. In act IV.v 16–18 of The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo says, "This way or that way? Soft and fair, not so. For if I hang or kill myself, let's know who will revenge Horatio's murder then?" Also like Hamlet, Hieronimo
Hieronimo - Misplaced Pages Continue
7098-545: Is about a rich bachelor who finds an essay written by someone who learned to "see" playing cards from the reverse side. The full text of this essay is included in the story, and itself includes a lengthy sub-story told as a true experience by one of the essay's protagonists, Imhrat Khan. Lewis Carroll 's Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), have several multiple poems that are mostly recited by several characters to
7267-495: Is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives, and composer Richard Rodney Bennett and playwright - librettist Beverley Cross 's The Mines of Sulphur features a ghostly troupe of actors who perform a play about murder that similarly mirrors the lives of their hosts, from whom they depart, leaving them with the plague as nemesis. John Adams ' Nixon in China (1985-7) features
7436-505: Is about the production of a fictitious musical, The Taming of the Shrew , based on the Shakespeare play of the same name , and features several scenes from it. Pericles draws in part on the 14th-century Confessio Amantis (itself a frame story), by John Gower , and Shakespeare has the ghost of Gower "assume man's infirmities" to introduce his work to the contemporary audience and comment on
7605-430: Is actually doing and do everything with caution. Hieronimo's intentions may make sense and seem right and just in his mind, but he is letting his need for revenge cloud what is really happening around him. He is letting the play define what revenge means to him, "a force sent from the underworld when the judges fail, a demonic urge that promises a perverse 'joy amidst ... discontent'". His characters in his play within
7774-546: Is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes." The First Quarto (1603) text of Hamlet contains 15,983 words, the Second Quarto (1604) contains 28,628 words, and the First Folio (1623) contains 27,602 words. Counting the number of lines varies between editions, partly because prose sections in the play may be formatted with varied lengths. Editions of Hamlet that are created by conflating
7943-580: Is also found in classic religious and philosophical texts. The structure of The Symposium and Phaedo , attributed to Plato , is of a story within a story within a story. In the Christian Bible , the gospels are accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus . However, they also include within them the parables that Jesus told. In more modern philosophical works, Jostein Gaarder 's books often feature this device. Examples are The Solitaire Mystery , where
8112-496: Is also the world's longest epic, has a nested structure. The experimental modernist works that incorporate multiple narratives into one story are quite often science-fiction or science fiction influenced. These include most of the various novels written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut . Vonnegut includes the recurring character Kilgore Trout in many of his novels. Trout acts as the mysterious science fiction writer who enhances
8281-445: Is always uppermost in his mind". Finally, the difference between Hieronimo and Hamlet that Levin views as the most important is unlike Hamlet, Hieronimo seems to be in nearly complete control of his emotions in the face of his enemies. "Hieronimo remains master of his emotions until his vengeance is complete ... he is never rash enough to alarm his intended victims, and he eventually deceives them so thoroughly that they embrace him as
8450-509: Is an act-break after which the action appears to continue uninterrupted. Q1 was discovered in 1823. Only two copies are extant. According to Jenkins, "The unauthorized nature of this quarto is matched by the corruption of its text." Yet Q1 has value: it contains stage directions (such as Ophelia entering with a lute and her hair down) that reveal actual stage practices in a way that Q2 and F1 do not; it contains an entire scene (usually labelled 4.6) that does not appear in either Q2 or F1; and it
8619-593: Is based on an entry, of 26 July 1602, in the Register of the Stationers' Company , indicating that Hamlet was "latelie Acted by the Lo: Chamberleyne his servantes ". In 1598, Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia , a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named. Hamlet is not among them, suggesting that it had not yet been written. As Hamlet
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#17330849939588788-468: Is blocked for him by the calculating efforts of his enemies, Hieronimo is forced to choose between alternatives neither one of which is wholly acceptable to him". Those two alternatives being to actively seek his own private justice or for him to retreat and to allow the Christian concept of "divine promise of eventual justice" to run its course. Although we know that Hieronimo chooses the former alternative, it
8957-426: Is brought up. "The King alone seems unaware that Horatio is dead; an extremely implausible situation." Hadfield mentions that when this scene took place Hieronimo was hoping that the king would give justice to whoever killed his son. It is clear at this point the state of mind that Hieronimo is in when he throws the halter toward the entrance of all of the nobles. He is obviously not in the right state of mind anymore and
9126-485: Is characteristically Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections. Some scholars have observed that revenge tragedies come from Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, where the revenge tragedies present contradictions of motives, since according to Catholic doctrine the duty to God and family precedes civil justice. Much of the play's Protestant tones derive from its setting in Denmark—both then and now
9295-444: Is in turn putting the "demands of foreign policy above those of its citizens". Similarly to what Murray thought, Hadfield also agrees that because the thought of revenge is so strong in the minds of the characters, the real issue is clouded and what does not need to be a tragic end becomes one. For critics, the actions of Hieronimo in the final scenes of the play have been somewhat controversial. According to author Frank R. Ardolino, at
9464-463: Is independent, and could either be skipped or stand separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. Often there is more than one level of internal stories, leading to deeply-nested fiction. Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device (also referring to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of a small shield on a larger shield). The literary device of stories within
9633-402: Is no subplot, but the play presents the affairs of the courtier Polonius, his daughter, Ophelia, and his son, Laertes—who variously deal with madness, love and the death of a father in ways that contrast with Hamlet's. The graveyard scene eases tension prior to the catastrophe, and, as Hamlet holds the skull, it is shown that Hamlet no longer fears damnation in the afterlife, and accepts that there
9802-485: Is not without hesitation. Vindicta mihi! Ay, heaven will be revenged of every ill, Nor will they suffer murder unrepaid: Then stay, Hieronimo, attend their will, For mortal men may not appoint their time. Hieronimo says these words prior to his act of vengeance. In the article, Laird explains Hieronimo's thought process. "The logical crux of Hieronimo's argument is an implicit hypothetical proposition: If vengeance belongs to God, then men who seek vengeance must defer to
9971-404: Is not. The contrast (appearance and reality) is also expressed in several "spying scenes": Act two begins with Polonius sending Reynaldo to spy on his son, Laertes. Claudius and Polonius spy on Ophelia as she meets with Hamlet. In act two, Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet. Similarly, the play-within-a-play is used by Hamlet to reveal his step-father's hidden nature. There
10140-611: Is precise and straightforward, as when he explains his inward emotion to his mother: "But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe". At times, he relies heavily on puns to express his true thoughts while simultaneously concealing them. Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet because he "showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings". She gives
10309-503: Is presented as a stage show by the fictional eponymous band, and one of its songs, "A Day in the Life" is in the form of a story within a dream. Similarly, the Fugees album The Score is presented as the soundtrack to a fictional movie, as are several other notable concept albums , while Wyclef Jean 's The Carnival is presented as testimony at a trial. The majority of Ayreon 's albums outline
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#173308499395810478-450: Is presented as a story told by a narrator about Edward Mordrake , and the song "Fish and Bird" is presented as a retold story that the narrator heard from a sailor. In his 1895 historical novel Pharaoh , Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories within the story, ranging in length from vignettes to full-blown stories, many of them drawn from ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate characters , and even inspire
10647-441: Is presented as a translation of a found manuscript by (fictional) Cide Hamete Benengeli . A commonly independently anthologised story is " The Grand Inquisitor " by Dostoevsky from his long psychological novel The Brothers Karamazov , which is told by one brother to another to explain, in part, his view on religion and morality. It also, in a succinct way, dramatizes many of Dostoevsky's interior conflicts. An example of
10816-683: Is really of little use in trying to date Hamlet ". This is because the same note also refers to Spenser and Watson as if they were still alive ("our flourishing metricians "), but also mentions " Owen's new epigrams", published in 1607. Three early editions of the text, each different, have survived, making attempts to establish a single "authentic" text problematic. This list does not include three additional early texts, John Smethwick 's Q3, Q4, and Q5 (1611–37), which are regarded as reprints of Q2 with some alterations. Early editors of Shakespeare's works , beginning with Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Lewis Theobald (1733), combined material from
10985-605: Is rich with rhetorical figures—as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's—while the language of Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius's high status is reinforced by using the royal first person plural ("we" or "us"), and anaphora mixed with metaphor to resonate with Greek political speeches. Of all the characters, Hamlet has the greatest rhetorical skill. He uses highly developed metaphors, stichomythia , and in nine memorable words deploys both anaphora and asyndeton : "to die: to sleep— / To sleep, perchance to dream". In contrast, when occasion demands, he
11154-554: Is silence". Fortinbras, who was ostensibly marching towards Poland with his army, arrives at the palace, along with an English ambassador bringing news of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's deaths. Horatio promises to recount the full story of what happened, and Fortinbras, seeing the entire Danish royal family dead, takes the crown for himself and orders a military funeral to honour Hamlet. Hamlet -like legends are so widely found (for example in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia) that
11323-420: Is so he himself will be able to explain what the play was about in hopes of furthering his need for revenge. The other is to cause drama to represent a revenge symbol with the fall of Babel . "By imagining Spain to be Babylon and by making the villains of his playlet be Turks , Hieronimo reinforces his earlier idea that heaven is at work in his revenge". Therefore, Hieronimo thinks that this allows him to play
11492-422: Is solely responsible, but a letter soon arrives indicating that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, foiling Claudius's plan. Claudius switches tactics, proposing a fencing match between Laertes and Hamlet to settle their differences. Laertes will be given a poison-tipped foil, and, if that fails, Claudius will offer Hamlet poisoned wine as a congratulation. Gertrude interrupts to report that Ophelia has drowned, though it
11661-523: Is the Roman legend of Brutus , recorded in two separate Latin works. Its hero, Lucius ("shining, light"), changes his name and persona to Brutus ("dull, stupid"), playing the role of a fool to avoid the fate of his father and brothers, and eventually slaying his family's killer, King Tarquinius . A 17th-century Nordic scholar, Torfaeus , compared the Icelandic hero Amlóði (Amlodi) and the hero Prince Ambales (from
11830-399: Is the fantasy genre work The Princess Bride (both the book and the movie ). In the movie, a grandfather is reading the story of "The Princess Bride" to his grandson. In the book, a more detailed frame story has a father editing a much longer (but fictive) work for his son, creating his own "Good Parts Version" (as the book called it) by leaving out all the parts that would bore or displease
11999-467: Is this simplicity that opens the doors for the audience to truly see the "furies that drive his characters". Hieronimo, like Prince Hamlet who has lost his father, has a deep love for a certain member of his immediate family-his son Horatio. However, according to Levin, Hieronimo holds a much clearer perspective on the situation at hand. Both characters are torn up with grief over the news of the unjust murder committed against their family member, but Hieronimo
12168-432: Is thrust without a choice into the role of the revenge hero, and "he channels his emotions into what becomes the duty of revenge". Levin also notes some important differences between the two protagonists. Unlike Hamlet, Hieronimo is not informed of the identity of the person who murdered his beloved son. Therefore, he must "discover the proper objects of vengeance before he can avenge". In addition to this, Hieronimo also has
12337-433: Is to invite certain death". Laird believes that Hieronimo's actions were not motivated by sheer anger or madness, but rather "a clear-headed deliberation". Once Hieronimo makes up his mind and determines his plans, he does not waver. Critic Michael Henry Levin draws many comparisons between Kyd's Hieronimo and Shakespeare's Hamlet . Firstly, he believes that Thomas Kyd's drama is much simpler than Shakespeare's, and that it
12506-423: Is unclear whether it was suicide or an accident caused by her madness. Horatio has received a letter from Hamlet, explaining that the prince escaped by negotiating with pirates who attempted to attack his England-bound ship, and the friends reunite offstage. Two gravediggers discuss Ophelia's apparent suicide while digging her grave. Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with one of the gravediggers, who unearths
12675-468: Is useful for comparison with the later editions. The major deficiency of Q1 is in the language: particularly noticeable in the opening lines of the famous " To be, or not to be " soliloquy: "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. / To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all: / No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes." However, the scene order is more coherent, without the problems of Q2 and F1 of Hamlet seeming to resolve something in one scene and enter
12844-565: The Ambales Saga ) to Shakespeare's Hamlet . Similarities include the prince's feigned madness, his accidental killing of the king's counsellor in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of his uncle. Many of the earlier legendary elements are interwoven in the 13th-century "Life of Amleth" (Latin: Vita Amlethi ) by Saxo Grammaticus , part of Gesta Danorum . Written in Latin, it reflects classical Roman concepts of virtue and heroism, and
13013-557: The Neil Gaiman series The Sandman feature an endless series of waking from one dream into another dream. In Charles Maturin 's novel Melmoth the Wanderer , the use of vast stories-within-stories creates a sense of dream-like quality in the reader. The 2023 Christian fictional novel Just Once by Karen Kingsbury features a series of three nested stories, all centering around the main characters of Hank and Irvel Myers: This structure
13182-456: The Ur-Hamlet has survived, and it is impossible to compare its language and style with the known works of any of its putative authors. In 1936 Andrew Cairncross suggested that, until more becomes known, it may be assumed that Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet . Eric Sams lists reasons for supporting Shakespeare's authorship. Harold Jenkins considers that there are no grounds for thinking that
13351-537: The Ur-Hamlet is an early work by Shakespeare, which he then rewrote. Professor Terri Bourus in 2016, one of three general editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, in her paper "Enter Shakespeare's Young Hamlet, 1589" suggests that Shakespeare was "interested in sixteenth-century French literature, from the very beginning of his career" and therefore "did not need Thomas Kyd to pre-digest Belleforest's histoire of Amleth and spoon-feed it to him". She considers that
13520-446: The dramatic tension and also makes more poignant the inevitable failure of the relationship between the mortal Hans and water sprite Ondine. The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams has a concurrent double plot with the convention of a play within a play. Felice and Clare are siblings and are both actor/producers touring "The Two-Character Play". They have supposedly been abandoned by their crew and have been left to put on
13689-567: The sentries Bernardo and Marcellus discuss a ghost resembling the late King Hamlet which they have recently seen, and bring Prince Hamlet's friend Horatio as a witness. After the ghost appears again, the three vow to tell Prince Hamlet what they have witnessed. The court gathers the next day, and King Claudius and Queen Gertrude discuss affairs of state with their elderly adviser Polonius . Claudius grants permission for Polonius's son Laertes to return to school in France, and he sends envoys to inform
13858-421: The 18th century, when critics regarded Hamlet as a hero—a pure, brilliant young man thrust into unfortunate circumstances. By the mid-18th century, however, the advent of Gothic literature brought psychological and mystical readings, returning madness and the ghost to the forefront. Not until the late 18th century did critics and performers begin to view Hamlet as confusing and inconsistent. Before then, he
14027-504: The Arden Shakespeare question the idea of "source hunting", pointing out that it presupposes that authors always require ideas from other works for their own, and suggests that no author can have an original idea or be an originator. When Shakespeare wrote, there were many stories about sons avenging the murder of their fathers, and many about clever avenging sons pretending to be foolish in order to outsmart their foes. This would include
14196-576: The Egyptian " Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor " and Indian epics like the Ramayana , Seven Wise Masters , Hitopadesha and Vikrama and Vethala . In Vishnu Sarma 's Panchatantra , an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales are told with one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four layers deep, and then unexpectedly snapping shut in irregular rhythms to sustain attention. In
14365-748: The English language", with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others". It is widely considered one of the greatest plays of all time. Three different early versions of the play are extant: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603); the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604); and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines and passages missing from the others. Many works have been pointed to as possible sources for Shakespeare's play, from ancient Greek tragedies to Elizabethan dramas . The editors of
14534-652: The High Castle , each character comes into interaction with a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy , which was written by the Man in the High Castle. As Dick's novel details a world in which the Axis Powers of World War II had succeeded in dominating the known world , the novel within the novel details an alternative to this history in which the Allies overcome the Axis and bring stability to
14703-503: The King of Norway about Fortinbras. Claudius also questions Hamlet regarding his continuing to grieve for his father, and forbids him to return to his university in Wittenberg . After the court exits, Hamlet despairs of his father's death and his mother's hasty remarriage. Learning of the ghost from Horatio, Hamlet resolves to see it himself. As Polonius's son Laertes prepares to depart for France, Polonius offers him advice that culminates in
14872-479: The Old Testament, Ovid, and One Thousand and One Nights. Both the tales he tells of his family (going back to his grandfather) and the embedded folk tales, themselves embed other tales, often 2 or more layers deep. In Sue Townsend 's Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years , Adrian writes the book Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland , in which the character Jake Westmorland writes a book called Sparg of Kronk , where
15041-551: The Sky (which adopts the conceit that it is a book from the future by an author called Gen Jaramet-Sauner), and J. R. Rasmussen's "Research" in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II . Steven Barnes 's novelization of " Far Beyond the Stars " partners with Greg Cox 's The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (Volume Two) to tell us that the story "Far Beyond the Stars"—and, by extension, all of Star Trek itself—is
15210-533: The Sunset ) propose the idea that every real universe is a fiction in another universe. This hypothesis enables many writers who are characters in the books to interact with their own creations. Margaret Atwood 's novel The Blind Assassin is interspersed with excerpts from a novel written by one of the main characters; the novel-within-a-novel itself contains a science fiction story written by one of that novel's characters. In Philip K. Dick 's novel The Man in
15379-577: The action of the play. In Francis Beaumont 's Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 1608) a supposed common citizen from the audience, actually a "planted" actor, condemns the play that has just started and "persuades" the players to present something about a shopkeeper. The citizen's "apprentice" then acts, pretending to extemporise, in the rest of the play. This is a satirical tilt at Beaumont's playwright contemporaries and their current fashion for offering plays about London life. The opera Pagliacci
15548-436: The brawl is broken up. Back at Elsinore, Hamlet explains to Horatio that he had discovered Claudius's letter among Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's belongings and replaced it with a forged copy indicating that his former friends should be killed instead. A foppish courtier, Osric , interrupts the conversation to deliver the fencing challenge to Hamlet. Hamlet, despite Horatio's pleas, accepts it. Hamlet does well at first, leading
15717-409: The character Sparg writes a book with no language. In Anthony Horowitz 's Magpie Murders , a significant proportion of the book features a fictional but authentically formatted mystery novel by Alan Conway, titled 'Magpie Murders'. The secondary novel ends before its conclusion returning the narrative to the original, and primary, story where the protagonist and reviewer of the book attempts to find
15886-465: The characters that Melville went on to create and develop . Instead of discarding the ideas altogether, Melville wove them into a coherent short story and had the character Ishmael demonstrate his eloquence and intelligence by telling the story to his impressed friends. One of the most complicated structures of a story within a story was used by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel The Gift . There, as inner stories, function both poems and short stories by
16055-409: The characters—the motives and the reliability of the storyteller are automatically in question. Stories within a story may disclose the background of characters or events, tell of myths and legends that influence the plot, or even seem to be extraneous diversions from the plot. In some cases, the story within a story is involved in the action of the plot of the outer story. In others, the inner story
16224-477: The conclusion of Hieronimo's play of vengeance, there are two possible moral perspectives for the audience to take. "We can condemn him according to the New Testament prohibition of private revenge; on the other hand we can exonerate him from the viewpoint of a pagan code of justice which sanctions just revenge". Ardolino believes that Thomas Kyd intended for his audience to take the second viewpoint; that Hieronimo
16393-480: The content and process of the text and novelist was discussed rather than the lives of the patients. In this way subconscious defenses could be circumvented. Farmer took the real life case-studies and melded these with adventures of his characters in the series. The Quantum Leap novel Knights of the Morningstar also features a character who writes a book by that name. In Matthew Stover 's novel Shatterpoint ,
16562-451: The conversation from behind a tapestry , calls for help as Gertrude, believing Hamlet wants to kill her, calls out for help herself. Hamlet, believing it is Claudius, stabs wildly, killing Polonius, but he pulls aside the curtain and sees his mistake. In a rage, Hamlet brutally insults his mother for her apparent ignorance of Claudius's villainy, but the ghost enters and reprimands Hamlet for his inaction and harsh words. Unable to see or hear
16731-419: The core "hero-as-fool" theme is possibly Indo-European in origin. Several ancient written precursors to Hamlet can be identified. The first is the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki . In this, the murdered king has two sons— Hroar and Helgi —who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's. The second
16900-458: The creation of 1950s writer Benny Russell. The book Cloud Atlas (later adapted into a film by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer ) consisted of six interlinked stories nested inside each other in a Russian doll fashion. The first story (that of Adam Ewing in the 1850s befriending an escaped slave) is interrupted halfway through and revealed to be part of a journal being read by composer Robert Frobisher in 1930s Belgium. His own story of working for
17069-420: The death of his son has really taken a toll on his mental health. Hadfield raises a good point when he says that "There is a mismatch between the needs of the state and the desires of the individuals within it, a situation that has tragic results when Hieronimo stages his deadly play to complete the cycle of revenge". Because the king is ignorant of the point that Hieronimo is so obviously trying to get across, he
17238-568: The differences...are especially intriguing...I have recorded a selection of Q2/F readings in the collation." The idea that Q1 is not riddled with error but is instead eminently fit for the stage has led to at least 28 different Q1 productions since 1881. Other productions have used the Q2 and Folio texts, but used Q1's running order, in particular moving the to be or not to be soliloquy earlier. Developing this, some editors such as Jonathan Bate have argued that Q2 may represent "a 'reading' text as opposed to
17407-400: The dilemma that Hieronimo finds himself in opens "an abrupt and dramatically effective contrast between the Christian ideal of patience and humility and the classical-pagan concept of honor". After the initial discovering of Horatio's murderers, Hieronimo, as the knight marshal, first turns to the King and the instituted system of justice for help. However, "when that preferred and sanctioned way
17576-413: The end of act II.ii, he compares himself to the actor and how he himself pales in comparison to that player. In lines 577–580, Hamlet says, "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so his own conceit ..." He ultimately only takes action because his Uncle Claudius leaves him no choice. Play within
17745-707: The epic Mahabharata , the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Vyasa 's Jaya , which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana 's Bharata , which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's Mahabharata . Both The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Metamorphoses by Ovid extend the depths of framing to several degrees. Another early example is the One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabian Nights ), where
17914-411: The example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery", which, she claims, is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality. However Harold Jenkins does not agree, having studied the few examples that are used to support that idea, and finds that there is no support for the assumption that "nunnery"
18083-514: The exposure of a murderer (although not a king). The play I Hate Hamlet and the movie A Midwinter's Tale are about a production of Hamlet , which in turn includes a production of The Murder of Gonzago , as does the Hamlet -based film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead , which even features a third-level puppet theatre version within their play. Similarly, in Anton Chekhov 's The Seagull there are specific allusions to Hamlet : in
18252-562: The fashioning of individual characters. Jan Potocki 's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1797–1805) has an interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth. The provenance of the story is sometimes explained internally, as in The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien , which depicts the Red Book of Westmarch (a story-internal version of the book itself) as
18421-473: The figure of Polonius caricatured Burghley. A. L. Rowse speculated that Polonius's tedious verbosity might have resembled Burghley's. Lilian Winstanley thought the name Corambis (in the First Quarto) did suggest Cecil and Burghley. Harold Jenkins considers the idea of Polonius as a caricature of Burghley to be conjecture, perhaps based on the similar role they each played at court, and perhaps also based on
18590-409: The final chapter. As this progresses characters and messages within the fictional 'Magpie Murders' manifest themselves within the primary narrative and the final chapter's content reveals the reason for its original absence. Dreams are a common way of including stories inside stories, and can sometimes go several levels deep. Both the book The Arabian Nightmare and the curse of "eternal waking" from
18759-513: The first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play. Shakespeare adopted the play-within-a-play device for many of his other plays as well, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost . Almost
18928-401: The general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade . In many of Scheherazade's narrations, there are also stories narrated , and even in some of these, there are some other stories. An example of this is " The Three Apples ", a murder mystery narrated by Scheherazade. Within the story, after the murderer reveals himself, he narrates
19097-658: The ghost herself, Gertrude takes Hamlet's conversation with it as further evidence of madness. After begging the queen to stop sleeping with Claudius, Hamlet leaves, dragging Polonius's corpse away. Hamlet jokes with Claudius about where he has hidden Polonius's body, and the king, fearing for his life, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to accompany Hamlet to England with a sealed letter to the English king requesting that Hamlet be executed immediately. Unhinged by grief at Polonius's death, Ophelia wanders Elsinore. Laertes arrives back from France, enraged by his father's death and his sister's madness. Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet
19266-529: The ghost vanishes. The prince confides to Horatio and the sentries that from now on he plans to "put an antic disposition on", or act as though he has gone mad. Hamlet forces them to swear to keep his plans for revenge secret; however, he remains uncertain of the ghost's reliability. Ophelia rushes to her father, telling him that Hamlet arrived at her door the prior night half-undressed and behaving erratically. Polonius blames love for Hamlet's madness and resolves to inform Claudius and Gertrude. As he enters to do so,
19435-460: The grief-stricken father who seeks to take justice against his son's murderers, "Hieronimo becomes a surrogate for Andrea, and when he accomplishes his vengeance and satisfies pagan justice as well, Andrea's search for a just revenge is also completed". In short, Don Andrea's desire for revenge against Prince Balthazar is finally fulfilled through Hieronimo's actions. Critic David Laird also tends to agree with Ardolino's point of view. According to him
19604-547: The hero's melancholy . According to one theory, Shakespeare's main source may be an earlier play—now lost—known today as the Ur-Hamlet . Possibly written by Thomas Kyd or by Shakespeare, the Ur-Hamlet would have existed by 1589, and would have incorporated a ghost. Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men , may have purchased that play and performed a version for some time, which Shakespeare reworked. However, no copy of
19773-455: The hypothesized Ur-Hamlet is Shakespeare's Q1 text, and that this derived directly from Belleforest's French version. The precise combination of Shakespeare's use of the Ur-Hamlet , Belleforest, Saxo, or Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as sources for Hamlet is not known. However, elements of Belleforest's version which are not in Saxo's story do appear in Shakespeare's play. Most scholars reject
19942-408: The idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare , who died in 1596 at age eleven. Conventional wisdom holds that Hamlet is too obviously connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the time. However, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the coincidence of the names and Shakespeare's grief for the loss of his son may lie at the heart of
20111-439: The impossibility of repenting, since he still has possession of his ill-gotten goods: his brother's crown and wife. He sinks to his knees. Hamlet, on his way to visit his mother, sneaks up behind him but does not kill him, reasoning that killing Claudius while he is praying will send him straight to heaven while his father's ghost is stuck in purgatory. In the queen's bedchamber, Hamlet and Gertrude fight bitterly. Polonius, spying on
20280-697: The king and queen are welcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , two student acquaintances of Hamlet, to Elsinore. The royal couple has requested that the two students investigate the cause of Hamlet's mood and behaviour. Additional news requires that Polonius wait to be heard: messengers from Norway inform Claudius that the king of Norway has rebuked Prince Fortinbras for attempting to re-fight his father's battles. The forces that Fortinbras had conscripted to march against Denmark will instead be sent against Poland , though they will pass through Danish territory to get there. Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude his theory regarding Hamlet's behaviour, and then speaks to Hamlet in
20449-409: The main character Fyodor Cherdyntsev as well as the whole Chapter IV, a critical biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (also written by Fyodor). This novel is considered one of the first metanovels in literature. With the rise of literary modernism , writers experimented with ways in which multiple narratives might nest imperfectly within each other. A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives
20618-480: The main story. On the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles , each episode was framed as though it were being told by Indy when he was older (usually acted by George Hall , but once by Harrison Ford ). The same device of an adult narrator representing the older version of a young protagonist is used in the films Stand by Me and A Christmas Story , and the television show The Wonder Years and How I Met Your Mother . In The Amory Wars ,
20787-573: The match by two hits to none, and Gertrude raises a toast to him using the poisoned glass of wine Claudius had set aside for Hamlet. Claudius tries to stop her but is too late: she drinks, and Laertes realizes the plot will be revealed. Laertes slashes Hamlet with his poisoned blade. In the ensuing scuffle, they switch weapons, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with his own poisoned sword. Gertrude collapses and, claiming she has been poisoned, dies. In his dying moments, Laertes reconciles with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's plan. Hamlet rushes at Claudius and kills him. As
20956-427: The maxim "to thine own self be true." Polonius's daughter, Ophelia , admits her interest in Hamlet, but Laertes warns her against seeking the prince's attention, and Polonius orders her to reject his advances. That night on the rampart, the ghost appears to Hamlet, tells the prince that he was murdered by Claudius (by pouring poison into his ear as he slept), and demands that Hamlet avenge the murder. Hamlet agrees, and
21125-479: The morals of the novels through plot descriptions of his stories. Books such as Breakfast of Champions and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater are sprinkled with these plot descriptions. Stanisław Lem 's Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius from The Cyberiad has several levels of storytelling. All levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl. House of Leaves is the tale of
21294-409: The murder of Hamlet's father in the main action, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasize this. Hamlet wishes to provoke the murderer, his uncle, and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play The Mouse-trap (a title that Agatha Christie later took for the long-running play The Mousetrap ). Christie's work
21463-402: The murderer. He envisions himself to be "God's agent for the punishment of a whole nation" consequently letting him think that there is no need for him to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. In " The Spanish Tragedy , The Alencon Marriage Plans, and John Stubbs's Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf", by Andrew Hadfield, the plausibility of how the King had no idea that Horatio was murdered
21632-427: The needs of a wider public. Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare's plays have divided them into five acts. None of the early texts of Hamlet , however, were arranged this way, and the play's division into acts and scenes derives from a 1676 quarto. Modern editors generally follow this traditional division but consider it unsatisfactory; for example, after Hamlet drags Polonius's body out of Gertrude's bedchamber, there
21801-489: The next drowning in indecision. New Cambridge editor Kathleen Irace has noted that "Q1's more linear plot design is certainly easier [...] to follow [...] but the simplicity of the Q1 plot arrangement eliminates the alternating plot elements that correspond to Hamlet's shifts in mood." Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, by an actor who played
21970-439: The opening scene and the play proper". Don Andrea and Hieronimo are eternally connected through their want of vengeance against Lorenzo and Balthazar. "Once we [Andrea and we as a collective theater audience] recognize that this is why he has been back to earth, then we can understand why the prince is doomed to die and how his death satisfies Hieronimo's personal vengeance and fulfills pagan justice". According to Ardolino, Kyd makes
22139-411: The outer story. There is often some parallel between the two stories, and the fiction of the inner story is used to reveal the truth in the outer story. Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story, but also in the real world. When a story is told within another instead of being told as part of the plot, it allows the author to play on the reader's perceptions of
22308-429: The pagan view on revenge should be taken. Basically, because there is so much representation of paganism in the play, it is only natural to conclude this. Over time, critic's views have changed on this issue. Initially, many thought that the role of Don Andrea was nothing more than another example of bloody revenge. However, "modern critics of the past two decades have concluded that there are important connections between
22477-459: The performance of all or part of the play, as in Noises Off , A Chorus of Disapproval or Lilies . Similarly, the musical Man of La Mancha presents the story of Don Quixote as an impromptu play staged in prison by Quixote ' s author, Miguel de Cervantes . Hamlet The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , often shortened to Hamlet ( / ˈ h æ m l ɪ t / ),
22646-448: The play broadly mirror those of the novel and give the character Oedipa Maas a greater context to consider her predicament; the play concerns a feud between two rival mail distribution companies, which appears to be ongoing to the present day, and in which, if this is the case, Oedipa has found herself involved. As in Hamlet , the director makes changes to the original script; in this instance,
22815-416: The play by themselves. The characters in the play are also brother and sister and are also named Clare and Felice. The Mysteries , a modern reworking of the medieval mystery plays , remains faithful to its roots by having the modern actors play the sincere, naïve tradesmen and women as they take part in the original performances. Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include
22984-488: The play is driven forward in dialogue; but in the soliloquies time and action stop, the meaning of action is questioned, fog of illusion is broached, and truths are exposed. The contrast between appearance and reality is a significant theme. Hamlet is presented with an image, and then interprets its deeper or darker meaning. Examples begin with Hamlet questioning the reality of the ghost. It continues with Hamlet's taking on an "antic disposition" in order to appear mad, though he
23153-529: The play is presented before an audience of two of the characters, who comment upon the action. From references in other contemporary works, Kyd is also assumed to have been the writer of an early, lost version of Hamlet (the so-called Ur-Hamlet ), with a play-within-a-play interlude. William Shakespeare 's Hamlet retains this device by having Hamlet ask some strolling players to perform The Murder of Gonzago . The action and characters in The Murder mirror
23322-480: The play, and thereby determine the truth of the ghost's story of Claudius's guilt. Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's love letters to the prince while he and Claudius secretly watch in order to evaluate Hamlet's reaction. Hamlet is walking alone in the hall as the King and Polonius await Ophelia's entrance. Hamlet muses on thoughts of life versus death . When Ophelia enters and tries to return Hamlet's things, Hamlet accuses her of immodesty and cries "get thee to
23491-504: The play. Colin Burrow has argued that most of us should read a text that is made up by conflating all three versions ... it's about as likely that Shakespeare wrote: "To be or not to be, ay, there's the point" [in Q1], as that he wrote the works of Francis Bacon . I suspect most people just won't want to read a three-text play ... [multi-text editions are] a version of the play that is out of touch with
23660-541: The play. One explanation may be that Hamlet was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot. Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation. Hamlet's soliloquies have captured the attention of scholars. Hamlet interrupts himself, vocalising either disgust or agreement with himself and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly and instead blunts
23829-461: The poison takes effect, Hamlet, hearing that Fortinbras is marching through the area, names the Norwegian prince as his successor. Horatio, distraught at the thought of being the last survivor and living whilst Hamlet does not, says he will commit suicide by drinking the dregs of Gertrude's poisoned wine, but Hamlet begs him to live on and tell his story. Hamlet dies in Horatio's arms, proclaiming "the rest
23998-457: The present day. Some contemporary scholarship, however, discounts this approach, instead considering "an authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal. ... there are texts of this play but no text ". The 2006 publication by Arden Shakespeare of different Hamlet texts in different volumes is perhaps evidence of this shifting focus and emphasis. Other editors have continued to argue the need for well-edited editions taking material from all versions of
24167-423: The protagonist Mace Windu narrates the story within his journal, while the main story is being told from the third-person limited point of view. Several Star Trek tales are stories or events within stories, such as Gene Roddenberry 's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , J. A. Lawrence 's Mudd's Angels , John M. Ford 's The Final Reflection , Margaret Wander Bonanno 's Strangers from
24336-456: The protagonist receives a small book from a baker, in which the baker tells the story of a sailor who tells the story of another sailor, and Sophie's World about a girl who is actually a character in a book that is being read by Hilde, a girl in another dimension. Later on in the book Sophie questions this idea, and realizes that Hilde too could be a character in a story that in turn is being read by another. Mahabharata , an Indian epic that
24505-505: The revenge cycle throughout his play. "At several points in the play it might appear that Hieronimo delays revenge, Hamlet -style, but there is no invitation to deep psychological analysis of the delay". He is trying to prolong it as much as possible to get his point across and make sure that the audience truly knows whom each character is supposed to represent in real life. He feels compelled to destroy every one in his path by showing how they killed his son that he forgets to think about what he
24674-465: The similarity between Burghley addressing his Ten Precepts to his son, and Polonius offering "precepts" to his son, Laertes. Jenkins suggests that any personal satire may be found in the name "Polonius", which might point to a Polish or Polonian connection. G. R. Hibbard hypothesised that differences in names (Corambis/Polonius:Montano/Raynoldo) between the First Quarto and other editions might reflect
24843-402: The skull of a jester from Hamlet's childhood, Yorick . Hamlet picks up the skull, saying "Alas, poor Yorick" as he contemplates mortality. Ophelia's funeral procession approaches, led by Laertes. Hamlet and Horatio initially hide, but when Hamlet realizes that Ophelia is the one being buried, he reveals himself, proclaiming his love for her. Laertes and Hamlet fight by Ophelia's graveside, but
25012-420: The stories of their predecessors in a manner that validates a belief stated in the sixth tale that "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present and by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future." The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon has several characters seeing a play called The Courier's Tragedy by the fictitious Jacobean playwright Richard Wharfinger. The events of
25181-647: The story of the ancient Roman, Lucius Junius Brutus , which Shakespeare apparently knew, as well as the story of Amleth , which was preserved in Latin by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum , and printed in Paris in 1514. The Amleth story was subsequently adapted and then published in French in 1570 by the 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest . It has a number of plot elements and major characters in common with Shakespeare's Hamlet , and lacks others that are found in Shakespeare. Belleforest's story
25350-453: The story within a story influences the reality of the story he has been telling, so that what happens in "The Mad Trist" begins happening in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Also, in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes , there are many stories within the story that influence the hero's actions (there are others that even the author himself admits are purely digressive). Most of the first part
25519-522: The subject of an epic puppet theater presentation. Another example is found in Samuel Delany 's Trouble on Triton , which features a theater company that produces elaborate staged spectacles for randomly selected single-person audiences. Plays produced by the "Caws of Art" theater company also feature in Russell Hoban's modern fable, The Mouse and His Child . Raina Telgemeier 's best-selling Drama
25688-508: The texts of the Second Quarto and the Folio are said to have approximately 3,900 lines; the number of lines varies between those editions based on formatting the prose sections, counting methods, and how the editors have joined the texts together. Hamlet is by far the longest play that Shakespeare wrote, and one of the longest plays in the Western canon . It might require more than four hours to stage;
25857-546: The thrust of his thought with wordplay. It is not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, that Hamlet is able to articulate his feelings freely. Written at a time of religious upheaval and in the wake of the English Reformation , the play is alternately Catholic (or piously medieval) and Protestant (or consciously modern). The ghost describes himself as being in purgatory and as dying without last rites . This and Ophelia's burial ceremony, which
26026-598: The titular character. The most notable examples are " You Are Old, Father William ", " 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster ", " Jabberwocky ", and " The Walrus and the Carpenter ". Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio 's Decameron are also classic frame stories. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , the characters tell tales suited to their personalities and tell them in ways that highlight their personalities. The noble knight tells
26195-643: The tragedy. He notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford neighbour after whom Hamnet was named, was often written as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable. Scholars have often speculated that Hamlet ' s Polonius might have been inspired by William Cecil (Lord Burghley)—Lord High Treasurer and chief counsellor to Queen Elizabeth I . E. K. Chambers suggested Polonius's advice to Laertes may have echoed Burghley's to his son Robert Cecil . John Dover Wilson thought it almost certain that
26364-464: The two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1. Each text contains material that the other lacks, with many minor differences in wording: scarcely 200 lines are identical in the two. Editors have combined them in an effort to create one "inclusive" text that reflects an imagined "ideal" of Shakespeare's original. Theobald's version became standard for a long time, and his "full text" approach continues to influence editorial practice to
26533-429: The veracity of the previous layer, or is challenged by the succeeding layer. Presuming each layer to be a true telling within the overall story, a chain of events is created linking Adam Ewing's embrace of the abolitionist movement in the 1850s to the religious redemption of a post-apocalyptic tribal man over a century after the fall of modern civilization. The characters in each nested layer take inspiration or lessons from
26702-414: The way ancient Greek tragedies contain five episodes, which are separated by four choral odes. In Hamlet the development of the plot or the action are determined by the unfolding of Hamlet's character. The soliloquies do not interrupt the plot, instead they are highlights of each block of action. The plot is the developing revelation of Hamlet's view of what is "rotten in the state of Denmark." The action of
26871-420: The whole of The Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play, presented to convince Christopher Sly , a drunken tinker, that he is a nobleman watching a private performance, but the device has no relevance to the plot (unless Katharina's subservience to her "lord" in the last scene is intended to strengthen the deception against the tinker ) and is often dropped in modern productions. The musical Kiss Me, Kate
27040-403: The will of God". Ultimately, Laird concludes that Hieronimo is unable to escape the responsibility of what happened to his son, Horatio. He fears that if revenge is not brought upon Balthazar and Lorenzo they will continue to commit similar crimes in order to secure themselves and their positions. "Hieronimo implies that while men are kept from seeking justice by a fear of death, not to seek justice
27209-462: The woman most likely to care for it well. This kind of play-within-a-play, which appears at the beginning of the main play and acts as a "frame" for it, is called an " induction ". Brecht's one-act play The Elephant Calf (1926) is a play-within-a-play performed in the foyer of the theatre during his Man Equals Man . In Jean Giraudoux 's play Ondine , all of act two is a series of scenes within scenes, sometimes two levels deep. This increases
27378-592: The world – a victory which itself is quite different from real history. In Red Orc's Rage by Philip J. Farmer a doubly recursive method is used to intertwine its fictional layers. This novel is part of a science-fiction series, the World of Tiers . Farmer collaborated in the writing of this novel with an American psychiatrist, Dr. A. James Giannini. Dr. Giannini had previously used the World of Tiers series in treating patients in group therapy. During these therapeutic sessions,
27547-401: Was either mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no in-betweens. These developments represented a fundamental change in literary criticism, which came to focus more on character and less on plot. In the 18th century, one negative French review of Hamlet would be widely discussed for centuries, in particular in publications throughout the 19th and 20th century. In 1768, Voltaire wrote
27716-486: Was first published in English in 1608, after Hamlet had been written, though it is possible that Shakespeare had encountered it in the French-language version. Prince Hamlet of Denmark is the son of the recently deceased King Hamlet , and nephew of King Claudius , his father's brother and successor. Claudius hastily married King Hamlet's widow, Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, and took the throne for himself. Denmark has
27885-581: Was parodied in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound , in which two theater critics are drawn into the murder mystery they are watching. The audience is similarly absorbed into the action in Woody Allen's play God , which is about two failed playwrights in Ancient Greece. The phrase The Conscience of the King also became the title of a Star Trek episode featuring a production of Hamlet which leads to
28054-411: Was used that way in slang, or that Hamlet intended such a meaning. The context of the scene suggests that a nunnery would not be a brothel, but instead a place of renunciation and a "sanctuary from marriage and from the world's contamination". Thompson and Taylor consider the brothel idea incorrect considering that "Hamlet is trying to deter Ophelia from breeding ". Hamlet's first words in the play are
28223-734: Was very popular, Bernard Lott, the series editor of New Swan , believes it "unlikely that he [Meres] would have overlooked ... so significant a piece". The phrase "little eyases" in the First Folio (F1) may allude to the Children of the Chapel , whose popularity in London forced the Globe company into provincial touring. This became known as the War of the Theatres , and supports a 1601 dating. Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts
28392-487: Was widely available in Shakespeare's day. Significant parallels include the prince feigning madness, his mother's hasty marriage to the usurper, the prince killing a hidden spy, and the prince substituting the execution of two retainers for his own. A reasonably faithful version of Saxo's story was translated into French in 1570 by François de Belleforest , in his Histoires tragiques . Belleforest embellished Saxo's text substantially, almost doubling its length, and introduced
28561-641: Was written in 1600 and revised later; the New Cambridge editor settles on mid-1601; the New Swan Shakespeare Advanced Series editor agrees with 1601; Thompson and Taylor, tentatively ("according to whether one is the more persuaded by Jenkins or by Honigmann") suggest a terminus ad quem of either Spring 1601 or sometime in 1600. The earliest date estimate relies on Hamlet ' s frequent allusions to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , itself dated to mid-1599. The latest date estimate
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