Hamlet as Poet

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Hamlet's imagination and his accomplishments as a poet. It begins with the love poetry that Hamlet writes for Ophelia. The chapter then turns to consider the before, during, and after of Hamlet's attempt to adapt The Murder of Gonzago with a view to catching Claudius's conscience and unkennelling his guilt. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Hamlet responds to the lead player's speech in the person of Aeneas; to the advice offered by Hamlet to the players; to the central role of the imagination both in seeing ghosts and in creating works of poetic fiction; to the action of the play-within-the-play and the dumb show that precedes it; and to the language and assumptions through which Hamlet convinces himself that The Mousetrap has been a forensic success. As will become clear, William Shakespeare allows Hamlet to delineate his beliefs about the nature of poetic endeavour at unusual length. Crucially, one is also allowed to judge the ways in which Hamlet applies these beliefs in practice; in so doing, a series of disjunctions emerge between the theoretical and practical discourses of humanist poetics.