Abstract
Why should Shakespeare re-write the tragedy of Brutus and call it The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? The more we compare the two plays the more likely it seems that he felt dissatisfied with his first mature tragedy, and that he went over the same ground again because he recognised, too late, that he had not made the most of it. Advancing from Brutus to Hamlet he must have pondered many of the fundamental questions of tragedy — not least, I think, the tragic hero’s relations with the audience.
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Notes
M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background (1910) PP• 233–7•
Julius Caesar, ed. T. S. Dorsch (New Arden ed., 1955) p. xxxix.
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (1g57–75) v, p. 9o. (Hereafter cited as Bullough, Sources.)
Ibid., pp. 92, 107, 116.
See Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (1965) i, 325. J. Dover Wilson (ed.), Julius Caesar (1949) P. 176, has argued that Cassius was suspected of taking bribes (Iv. 3. Io-Iz) but not of extorting money, ‘a very different thing. Nowhere does Shakespeare say that the money Brutus asks to share had been got “by vile means” ‘. But this is mere hair-splitting, for Brutus knows that the money Cassius might have lent him was acquired corruptly (line 15), i.e. by vile means.
Compare pp. 33–4. A. C. Sprague (Shakespeare and the Actors (1660–1905) (Cambridge, Mass., 1945, p. 321) mentions one Brutus who shrank from touching Caesar’s hand, and adds that on the stage the conspirators did not often ‘stoop and wash’ in Caesais blood.
See Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (1963) p. 65.
Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence (1972) p. 51, believed that ‘Shakespeare intended the duplicate revelation to stand’; Dorsch (Julius Caesar, p. Io6) took the opposite view.
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© 2002 E.A.J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (2002). Hamlet as Observer and Consciousness. In: Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503038_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503038_5
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