Two things separate a confident Hamlet essay from a merely competent one: knowing the world the play came from, and knowing the arguments people have had about it ever since. This guide to Hamlet context and critical interpretations gives you both, and, just as importantly, shows you how to use them as part of your argument rather than as decoration attached to the end of a paragraph.

Part of our Hamlet Revision Guide series.

Table of Contents

1. Part One: Context that actually helps your argument
   • When and where the play was written
   • Where the story came from
   • Revenge tragedy and the Elizabethan attitude to revenge
   • The Reformation, ghosts and purgatory
   • Political anxiety: succession and kingship
   • Melancholy and Renaissance ideas about the mind
   • The theatre itself
   • Humanism and the Renaissance mind
   • A note on biography and how not to use context
2. Part Two: Critical interpretations
   • Character-centred criticism: Johnson, Coleridge and Bradley
   • Psychoanalytic criticism: Freud and Jones
   • Formalist criticism: T. S. Eliot
   • Historicist readings: Greenblatt
   • Feminist criticism: Heilbrun and Showalter
   • Existential and philosophical readings: Kott, Bloom and Mack
   • Performance and reception
3. Quick-reference: critical lenses cheat sheet
4. How to use critics in your essay
5. Essay questions where context and criticism shine
6. Your next step