The actor John Gielgud believed that of all Shakespeare's characters Hamlet is probably the one most like Shakespeare himself–since, of all Shakespeare's characters, only Hamlet can be imagined to have written all the Shakespearean plays. How good an understanding of Hamlet's character does Gielgud's belief reflect?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
I agree with John Gielgud. There is one moment in particular that strongly suggests we are hearing Shakespeare’s voice through Hamlet’s words. Act III sc. ii has Hamlet instructing the players, “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.” Hamlet goes on to warn them not to “saw the air” with their hands (don’t overdo it, in other words), but also not to “be too tame,” either. This doesn’t sound like a Prince focused on springing a trap on a usurping king, but it does sound like a writer/director who wants his lines delivered properly. He even warns the acting company to prevent their comedians to ad-lib or laugh too much, even though the lines Hamlet penned contain no comic roles or humorous lines.
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The main reason 19th century writers saw Hamlet in Shakespeare was that they saw Hamlet in themselves. Keats and Coleridge wanted to link themselves with Shakespeare, and if Hamlet was melancholic, well, so were they sometimes, and so was Shakespeare, probably, at some point in his life. The biggest proponent of Hamlet-as-Shakespeare is Freud, and if that doesn't set off alarm bells I don’t know what to tell you.
Other answers are correct in noting that Oxfordians are the people most likely to claim a connection between Hamlet and Shakespeare. Oxford's father died and his mother remarried, and he was captured by pirates, which is “compelling" evidence for that affinity, if you believe it. Gielgud was cagey about his true loyalties, but he did lend his name to several Oxfordian groups, if not his support. In that case, his theory of Hamlet as Shakespeare takes on a different shade.
If Shakespeare saw himself in Hamlet, surely he would have played Hamlet on the stage. But all we know of his acting is that he played some “kingly parts," which makes the ghost of Hamlet Sr. a more likely role.
But what could Hamlet and Shakespeare possibly have in common? His father died peacefully of old age and Will inherited his estate — after Hamlet was written, if you subscribe to the commonly accepted timeline placing its composition around 1599. Hamlet is a terrible poet; see the laughable ditty he writes for Ophelia. He likes the theatre, sure, but he has no patience for it, constantly interrupting and interfering (Michael Creamer provides the one passage I do believe could be Shakespeare's own opinions shining through, but any passage in any play could be Shakespeare's own opinions shining through and we couldn't know.)
The character of Hamlet was too self-absorbed, too paralyzed by his own fears, and too schmaltzy in his poetry to have written Shakespeare.
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