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"Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time!"* So said the English poet and playwright Ben Jonson in 1623. It is hard for me to improve on this statement in justifying why I have selected the play Hamlet for my book of the millennium. There is no question that William Shakespeare is one of the most influential authors of the last thousand years.
Shakespeare's writing straddled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Hamlet was probably written around 1601). By the late 1580s, London's stages had become famous throughout Europe. Shakespeare was a leading member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a theater company which occupied the Globe Theater from 1599 and was renamed the King's Men on the accession of James I of England (James VI of Scotland) in 1603 when Elizabeth I died. Shakespeare's work when looked at as a whole reflects the country's shift from the optimism of the relatively stable late Elizabethan era to the pessimism and uncertainty that the new king brought with him.
Even though people have not necessarily seen a Shakespeare play, they can identify lines and passages as being from his plays:- "To be or not to be; that is the question" (Hamlet); "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse." (Richard III); "Once more unto the breach dear friends ..." (Henry V). But did you also know that some words we take for granted today were first seen in Shakespeare - fair play, catch cold, eventful, lonely, just to name a few. Musical interpretations of Shakespeare are numerous, ranging from operas such as Verdi's Otello, Elgar's rambunctious symphonic study Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet overture and ballet score (Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev) and Duke Ellington's album Such Sweet Thunder.
No writer's work has been as universally appreciated or as variously and often contentiously interpreted as that of Shakespeare. If his plays elude easy characterization, it may be precisely because they were written at an unsettled time by a writer whose genius turned ambiguity to advantage. Teasing, mysterious and endlessly fascinating, they have held undiminished interest over the ages. Almost 500 years later, treatments of Shakespeare and his works are universally acclaimed c.f. Shakespeare in Love, the 1999 Oscar winner for best movie. On a more personal (and prosaic) note, seeing the Kenneth Branagh movie version of Henry V in 1989 inspired me to write an article using that play as a management primer for librarians.
I have selected Hamlet to represent Shakespeare because this particular play could well be judged to have generated the most controversy, discussion and inspiration over the years. In the twentieth century alone, there is hardly a great writer who has not used some part of Hamlet for inspiration. T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock says "I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be." Boris Pasternak's poem Hamlet uses the character as a persona through whom the poet speaks of his sense of fate. Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead focuses on two minor characters in the play - the list could go on and on.
Hamlet states that the purpose of playing is "to hold a mirror up to nature" and that the mirror will show "the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." Shakespeare seems to be presaging through Hamlet what we have come to know - that Shakespeare's themes and treatments still reach out and touch us, continuing to find realization in our imaginations.
To return to Ben Jonson:
"Thou are a monument without a tomb
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read, and praise to give."*
* "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us."
Gillian M. McCombs
Central University Librarian
