The Rotten State: Hamlet and Julius Caesar

Abstract

As the sixteenth century drew to a close, the end of the Tudor dynasty became inevitable. The Tudors had come to power in 1485, with the accession of Henry VII after the death of Richard III, and had been in control throughout the century, a period of massive religious upheaval, an age in which the map of the world had altered irrevocably with the eyes of European nations directed across the Atlantic Ocean. The death of Elizabeth in 1603 meant that the last of the Tudors would finally leave the stage, to be replaced by the son of her erstwhile rival, Mary Stuart. From the perspective of the twentieth century, the close of the sixteenth appears as a time of disillusionment and as a time of waiting. The high point of the Elizabethan age was long since over; the nation’s economic crisis was intensified by the war in Ireland; the queen was old and tired, loosing her grip on a changing society. There is a sense of ending about many of the texts that date from this time. In so far as we read Shakespeare as an icon of his age, it is therefore significant that in the years on the cusp between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries he wrote two very different kinds of tragedy that take up the themes of inheritance, rebellion, the pursuit of justice, and corruption in high places: Julius Caesar and Hamlet.