Hamlet's Great Song
Hamlet's Great Song
This chapter turns to Shakespeare's Hamlet, a place by design, but as Cambridge scholar E.M.W. Tillyard pointed out: the finest English epic poem in a sequence of five-act history plays rather than the familiar epic form since Homer. The chapter explores the development of Shakespeare in the background of the Renaissance and how that influenced Hamlet. For one, although Christian interpretation of the universe was fairly firm and dominant, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries other strong views existed and competed with one another. Shakespeare, after all, was greatly interested in experimenting with new ways of viewing the world and in seeing how they worked out in action. The chapter compares Hamlet with the figure of Aeneas, and further studies the conflict between the classical and Christian traditions, and how they remain central to Western civilizations.
Keywords: Shakespeare, Hamlet, E.M.W. Tillyard, English epic poem, Renaissance, Aeneas, Christian traditions
Yale Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
