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Hamlet: Revenge Hero in Spite of Himself

By Elizabeth Williamson, Dramaturg

We all know the rules of the thriller: our hero, up against the bad guys, but never sure which side everyone else is on, must, by the end of the evening, uncover the villain and right the balance between good and evil in the world.  We know, sitting down for the latest James Bond film, exactly what to expect.  So did the Elizabethans, when they got to the theatre for the latest revenge tragedy. 

A revenge tragedy is a drama whose hero is driven by the need for revenge for an injury (usually the death of a close relative), and it was one of the most popular forms of Elizabethan tragedy. Seneca’s tragedies, which were the main classical tragedies known in Renaissance England, were translated and regularly produced in London, and led directly to the development of the Elizabethan

revenge tragedy; Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, & The Revenger’s Tragedy by Tourneur (or Middleton – the attribution is uncertain –), with their ghosts, witches, tyrants, and the importance of revenge as driving motive, are all highly influenced by Seneca. They were incredibly popular, and the audience was comfortably aware that if they attended one, they would be given an evening of intrigue, revenge and a bloody denouement (as in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, etc.)

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1590) was the most popular play of the genre before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, and was clearly a major influence on the later play.  The Spanish Tragedy opens with a Ghost and the incarnated “Revenge”, and its hero is driven to melancholy by the murder of his son. Between spells of madness, he discovers who the murderers are and plans a revenge by staging a play in which he casts the murderers, and during the play’s action he kills them and then himself. An earlier play called Hamlet, which was probably performed in 1589,  and which many scholars have attributed to Kyd, probably followed the standard revenge plot pretty closely; indeed, it seems to have been a byword for heavily dramatic revenge tragedy (Thomas Nashe satirically referred to “whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches.”)

In writing his Hamlet (probably around 1599-1600), Shakespeare was most likely referring to this earlier version of the play; he also was undeniably familiar with The Spanish Tragedy (Hamlet’s madness and his use of a play-within-the-play to catch the villain both recall Kyd.) But while Shakespeare took on all of these conventions from earlier revenge tragedies, and took most of the story as it had existed in the source materials, he made one major change.  His Hamlet, confronted by the purported Ghost of his Father, does not immediately jump to the killing.  

As Caryl Churchill writes (in the introduction to her translation of Seneca’s Thyestes), Shakespeare subverted the expectations of revenge drama in Hamlet: “It’s impossible for us when we see Hamlet to feel the surprise it must have been to its first audiences when the hero of the revenge play couldn’t bring himself to do the killing.  It’s as if we’d gone for an evening out and found James Bond not doing the killing.”  Rather, Shakespeare uses the conventions of the revenge tragedy to conduct a much wider examination into questions of mortality, humanity, and the nature of art.  Not to fear, he still delivers all the elements the popular revenge tragedy demands in the end – but he takes us on an illuminating and surprising route to get there.