Overview

Each age tends to reinvent Hamlet in its own image. This is no less true of the Victorians as anyone else. Not for them the effete melancholic of the Romantic age, defeated by the immensity of the task laid upon him. The Victorians wanted a strong Hamlet, and that is exactly what they gave us. The attempt of the Germans to appropriate a British national icon is finally beaten off by George Henry Lewes and others. In this age of Empire, we also have a recognition of the universality of Shakespeare's hero and his relevance for all cultures and conditions. This period was the high point of the play's popularity. For the Victorians Hamlet was a riddle, but one that the Victorians believed they could solve. In the pages of the current Critical Responses to Hamlet, we see writers bringing to bear various scientific approaches to its mysteries: textual, historical, and, above all, medical and psychological. The interest in abnormal states of mind and behavior drew writers to the play. Hamlet was not only reinvented in the Victorian scholar's study, but in the theater as well. A new Hamlet trod the boards in the shape of Henry Irving. This, too, was the age of the female Hamlet, with Sarah Bernhardt and others many a time and oft attempting the role. At this time the French dared to claim this British national property as their own to the scorn of the British press. As extracts from contemporary newspapers and journals show, Hamlet was a lively and popular focus of interest. There is no better illustration of this than the extracts from the antipodean journal, The Argus, where we see correspondents from the far-flung gold-fields of Ballarat and elsewhere locked in critical debate on finer points of interpretation of Shakespeare's play. In this two-volume set we have the thoughts of the great Victorian novelists, George Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope, on the play. Perhaps only George Eliot and at this period could we have the appropriation of a potentially domestic, happily-married Hamlet seated at his fireside, with Ophelia as the angel of his house.

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