The Tragedy of Macbeth (commonly called Macbeth) is a tragedy by William Shakespeareabout a man who commits regicide so as to become king

and then commits further murders to maintain his power. The play clearly demonstrates the corrupting effect of ambition, but also deals with the relationship between cruelty and masculinity, tyranny and kingship, treachery, violence, guilt, prophecy, and disruption of the natural order. The play is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. The earliest account of a performance of what was probably Shakespeare's play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing such a play at the Globe Theatre. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book. The play was most likely written during the reign of James I, who had been James VI of Scotland before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603. James was a patron of Shakespeares acting company, and of all the plays Shakespeare wrote under Jamess reign, Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwrights close relationship with the sovereign. Macbeth is Shakespeares shortest and bloodiest tragedy, and tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. His reign is racked with guilt and paranoia, and he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly takes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into realms of arrogance, madness, and death. Shakespeare's source for the tragedy are the accounts of King Macbeth of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, the story of Macbeth as told by Shakespeare bears little relation to real events in Scottish history, as Macbeth was an admired and able monarch. In the backstage world of theatre, some believe that the play is cursed, and will not mention its title aloud, referring to it instead as "the Scottish play". Over the course of many centuries, the play has attracted some of the greatest actors in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It has been adapted to film, television, opera, novels, comic books, and other media. ==Characters==Listed below are the dramatis person for Macbeth:

Duncan King of Scotland

Ross, Lennox, Angus, Menteith, Caithness Scottish

Malcolm Duncan's eldest son Donalbain Duncan's youngest son

Thanes

Siward Earl of Northumberland, General of the English

Macbeth a general in the army of King Duncan;

forces

originally Thaneof Glamis, then Thane of Cawdor, and later King of Scotland

Young Siward Siward's son

Seyton Macbeth's servant and attendant Hecate Goddess of Witchcraft Three Witches make the prediction of Macbeth

Lady Macbeth Macbeth's wife and later Queen of

Scotland

Banquo Macbeth's friend and a general in the army of

becoming a King and Banquo's descendants being kings

King Duncan

Fleance Banquo's son

Three Murderers Porter (or Messenger) gatekeeper at Macbeth's home Scottish Doctor Lady Macbeth's doctor

Macduff Thane of Fife

o
Plot

Lady Macduff Macduff's wife The Gentlewoman Lady Macbeth's caretaker

Macduff's son

Painting by William Rimmer: scene fromMacbeth, depicting the witches' conjuring of an apparition in Act IV, Scene I

The play opens amidst thunder and lightning, and the Three Witches decide that their next meeting shall be with Macbeth. In the following scene, a wounded sergeant reports to King Duncan ofScotland that his generals Macbeth, who is the Thane of Glamis, and Banquo have just defeated the allied forces of Norway and Ireland, who were led by the traitorous Macdonwald and the Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth, the King's kinsman, is praised for his bravery and fighting prowess. In the following scene, Macbeth and Banquo discuss the weather and their victory (Macbeth's first line is "So foul and fair a day I have not seen"). [1] As they wander onto a heath, the Three Witches enter and have been waiting to greet them with prophecies. Though Banquo challenges them first, they address Macbeth, hailing him as "Thane of Glamis," "Thane of Cawdor," and that he shall "be King hereafter." Macbeth appears to be stunned to

silence. When Banquo asks of his own fortunes, the witches inform him that he will father a line of kings, though he himself will not be one. While the two men wonder at these pronouncements, the witches vanish, and another thane, Ross arrives and informs Macbeth of his newly bestowed title: Thane of Cawdor, as the previous Thane of Cawdor shall be put to death for his traitorous activities. The first prophecy is thus fulfilled, and Macbeth immediately begins to harbour ambitions of becoming king. Macbeth visits with King Duncan, and they plan to dine together at Inverness, Macbeths castle, that night. Macbeth writes ahead to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her about the witches' prophecies. Lady Macbeth suffers none of her husbands uncertainty, and wishes him to murder Duncan in order to obtain kingship. When Macbeth arrives at Inverness, she overrides all of her husbands objections by challenging his manhood, and successfully persuades him to kill the king that very night. He and Lady Macbeth plan to get Duncans two chamberlains drunk so they will black out; the next morning they will blame the murder on the chamberlains, who will be defenseless, as they will remember nothing. While Duncan is asleep, Macbeth stabs him, despite his doubts and a number of supernatural portents, including a hallucination of a bloody dagger. He is so shaken that Lady Macbeth has to take charge. In accordance with her plan, she frames Duncan's sleeping servants for the murder by placing bloody daggers on them. Early the next morning, Lennox, a Scottish nobleman, and Macduff, the loyal Thane of Fife, arrive. [2] A porter opens the gate and Macbeth leads them to the king's chamber, where Macduff discovers Duncan's corpse. Macbeth reveals that in a supposed fit of anger, he murdered the guards (in truth, he did this so as to stop them from claiming their innocence.) Macduff is immediately suspicious of Macbeth, but does not reveal his suspicions publicly. Duncans sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland, respectively, fearing that whoever killed Duncan desires their demise as well. The rightful heirs' flight makes them suspects and Macbeth assumes the throne as the new King of Scotland as a kinsman of the dead king. Banquo reveals this to the audience, and while skeptical of the new King Macbeth, remembers the witches' prophecy about how his own descendants would inherit the throne.

Thodore Chassriau (18191856),Macbeth seeing the Ghost of Banquo, 1854

Despite his success, Macbeth, also aware of this part of the prophecy, remains uneasy. Macbeth invites Banquo to a royal banquet, where he discovers that Banquo and his young son, Fleance, will be riding out that night. He hires two men to kill them; a third murderer appears in the park before the murder. The assassins succeed in killing Banquo, but Fleance escapes. Macbeth becomes furious: as long as Fleance is alive, he fears that his power remains insecure. At the banquet, Macbeth invites his lords and Lady Macbeth to a night of drinking and merriment. Banquo's ghost enters and sits in Macbeth's place. Macbeth raves fearfully, startling his guests, as the ghost is only visible to himself. The others panic at the sight of Macbeth raging at an empty chair, until a desperate Lady Macbeth tells them that her husband is merely afflicted with a familiar and harmless malady. The ghost departs and returns once more, causing the same riotous anger in Macbeth. This time, Lady Macbeth tells the lords to leave, and they do so. Macbeth, disturbed, visits the three witches once more and asks them to reveal the truth of their prophecies to him. To answer his questions, they summon horrible apparitions, each of which offers predictions and further prophecies to allay Macbeths fears. First, they conjure an armed head, which tells him to beware of Macduff [3]. Second, a bloody child tells him that no one born of a woman shall be able to harm him. Thirdly, a crowned child holding a tree states that Macbeth will be safe until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth is relieved and feels secure, because he knows that all men are born of women and forests cannot move. However, the witches conjure a procession of eight crowned kings, all similar in appearance to Banquo, and the last carrying a mirror that reflects even more kings. Macbeth demands to know the meaning of this final vision, but the witches perform a mad dance and then vanish. Lennox enters and tells Macbeth that Macduff has fled to England. Macbeth orders Macduff's castle be seized, and, most cruelly, sends murderers to slaughter Macduffs wife and children. Everyone in Macduff's castle is put to death, includingLady Macduff and their young son. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth becomes wracked with guilt from the crimes she and her husband have committed. At night, in the kings palace at Dunsinane, a doctor and a gentlewoman discuss Lady Macbeths strange habit of sleepwalking. Suddenly, Lady Macbeth enters in a trance with a candle in her hand. Bemoaning the murders of Duncan, Lady Macduff, and Banquo, she tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, all the while speaking of the terrible things she knows she pressed her husband to do. She leaves, and the doctor and gentlewoman marvel at her descent into madness. Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood on her hands is an ironic reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that [a] little water clears us of this deed (2.2.65).

Lady Macbeth sleepwalking by Henry Fuseli

In England, Macduff is informed by Ross that his "castle is surprised; [his] wife and babes / Savagely slaughter'd."[4] When this news of his familys execution reaches him, Macduff is stricken with grief and vows revenge. Prince Malcolm, Duncans son, has succeeded in raising an army in England, and Macduff joins him as he rides to Scotland to challenge Macbeths forces. The invasion has the support of the Scottish nobles, who are appalled and frightened by Macbeths tyrannical and murderous behavior. Malcolm leads an army, along with Macduff and Englishmen Siward (the Elder), the Earl of Northumberland, against Dunsinane Castle. While encamped in Birnam Wood, the soldiers are ordered to cut down and carry tree limbs to camouflage their numbers. Before Macbeths opponents arrive, he receives news that Lady Macbeth has killed herself, causing him to sink into a deep and pessimistic despair and deliver his "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy[5]. Though he reflects on the brevity and meaninglessness of life, he nevertheless awaits the English and fortifies Dunsinane. He is certain that the witches prophecies guarantee his invincibility, but is struck numb with fear when he learns that the English army is advancing on Dunsinane shielded with boughs cut from Birnam Wood. Birnam Wood is indeed coming to Dunsinane, fulfilling half of the witches prophecy. A battle culminates in the slaying of the young Siward and Macduff's confrontation with Macbeth, and the English forces overwhelm his army and castle. Macbeth boasts that he has no reason to fear Macduff, for he cannot be killed by any man born of woman. Macduff declares that he was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd" [6] (i.e., born by Caesarean section) and was not "of woman born" (an example of a literary quibble), fulfilling the

second prophecy. Macbeth realizes too late that he has misinterpreted the witches' words, and though he realizes that he is doomed, Macbeth continues to fight. Macduff kills and beheads him, thus fulfilling the first part of the prophecy. Macduff carries Macbeth's head onstage and Malcolm discusses how order has been restored. His last reference to Lady Macbeth, however, reveals "'tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life". [7] leading most to assume that she committed suicide, but the cause is undisclosed. Malcolm, now the King of Scotland, declares his benevolent intentions for the country and invites all to see him crowned at Scone. Although Malcolm, and not Fleance, is placed on the throne, the witches' prophecy concerning Banquo ("Thou shalt get kings") was known to the audience of Shakespeare's time to be true: James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) was supposedly a descendant of Banquo. [8]

Sources
Macbeth has been compared to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Both Antony and Macbeth as characters seek a new world, even at the cost of the old one. Both are fighting for a throne and have a 'nemesis' to face to achieve that throne. For Antony the nemesis is Octavius, for Macbeth it is Banquo. At one point Macbeth even compares himself to Antony, saying "under Banquo / My Genius is rebuk'd, as it is said / Mark Antony's was by Caesar." Lastly, both plays contain powerful and manipulative female figures: Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth. [9] Shakespeare borrowed the story from several tales in Holinshed's Chronicles, a popular history of the British Isles known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In Chronicles, a man named Donwald finds several of his family put to death by his king, King Duff, for dealing with witches. After being pressured by his wife, he and four of his servants kill the King in his own house. In Chronicles, Macbeth is portrayed as struggling to support the kingdom in the face of King Duncan's ineptitude. He and Banquo meet the three witches, who make exactly the same prophecies as in Shakespeare's version. Macbeth and Banquo then together plot the murder of Duncan, at Lady Macbeth's urging. Macbeth has a long, ten-year reign before eventually being overthrown by Macduff and Malcolm. The parallels between the two versions are clear. However, some scholars think that George Buchanan's Rerum Scoticarum Historia matches Shakespeare's version more closely. Buchanan's work was available in Latin in Shakespeare's day.
[10]

No other version of the story has Macbeth kill the king in Macbeth's own castle. Scholars have seen this change of Shakespeare's as adding to the darkness of Macbeth's crime as the worst violation of hospitality. Versions of the story that were common at the time had Duncan being killed in an ambush at Inverness, not in a castle. Shakespeare conflated the story of Donwald and King Duff in what was a significant change to the story. [11] Shakespeare made another revealing change. In Chronicles, Banquo is an accomplice in Macbeth's murder of King Duncan. He also plays an important part in ensuring that Macbeth, not Malcolm, takes the throne in the coup that follows.[12] In Shakespeare's day, Banquo was thought to be a direct ancestor of the Stuart King James I.[13][14] The Banquo portrayed in historical sources is significantly different from the Banquo created by Shakespeare. Critics have proposed several reasons for this change. First, to portray the king's ancestor as a murderer would have been risky. Other authors of the time who wrote about Banquo, such as Jean de Schelandre in his Stuartide, also changed history by portraying Banquo as a noble man, not a murderer, probably for the same reasons. [15] Second, Shakespeare may have altered Banquo's character simply because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder; there was, however, a need to give a dramatic contrast to Macbetha role which many scholars argue is filled by Banquo. [12]

Date and text

Facsimile of the first page of Macbethfrom the First Folio, published in 1623

Macbeth cannot be dated precisely owing to significant evidence of later revisions. Many scholars conjecture the likely date of composition to be between 1603 and 1606. [16][17] As the play seems to be celebrating King James's ancestors and the Stuart accession to the throne in 1603 (James believed himself to be descended from Banquo),[18] they argue that the play is unlikely to have been composed earlier than 1603; and suggest that the parade of eight kingswhich the witches show Macbeth in a vision in Act IVis a compliment to King James. Other editors conjecture a more specific date of 16056, the principal reasons being possible allusions to the Gunpowder Plot and its ensuing trials. The Porter's speech (Act II, scene III, lines 121), in particular, may contain allusions to the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in spring, 1606; "equivocator" (line 8) may refer to Garnet's defence of "equivocation" [see: Doctrine of mental reservation], and "farmer" (4) to one of Garnet's aliases. [19] However, "farmer" is a common word, and "equivocation" was also the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and of the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta, which was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.[20] Scholars also cite an entertainment seen by King James at Oxford in the summer of 1605 that featured three "sibyls" like the weird sisters; Kermode surmises that Shakespeare could have heard about this and alluded to it with the weird sisters. [21] However, A. R. Braunmuller in the New Cambridge edition finds the 16056 arguments inconclusive, and argues only for an earliest date of 1603.[22] The play is not considered to have been written any later than 1607, since, as Kermode notes, there are "fairly clear allusions to the play in 1607." [21] The earliest account of a performance of the play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing it at the Globe Theatre.[23] Macbeth was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 and the Folio is the only source for the text. The text that survives had been plainly altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615); Middleton is conjectured to have inserted an extra scene involving the witches and Hecate, for these scenes had proven highly popular with audiences. These revisions, which since the Clarendon edition of 1869 have been assumed to include all of Act III, scene v, and a portion of Act IV, scene I, are often indicated in modern texts. [24] On this basis, many scholars reject all three of the interludes with the goddess Hecate as inauthentic. Even with the Hecate material, the play is conspicuously short, and so the Folio text may derive from a prompt book that had been substantially cut for performance, or an adapter cut the text himself.

Themes and motifs

"Macbeth

The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see." Macbeth, Act I, Scene IV

]Ambition A main theme within Macbeth is the destruction that follows when ambition goes beyond moral constraints. Macbeth is a brave general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil, yet he is deeply ambitious and desires power. He murders King Duncan against his better judgement and then wallows in guilt and paranoia. Toward the play's end, he is in a kind of boastful madness. Lady Macbeth pursues her goals with greater determination, yet is less capable of dealing with the guilt from her immorality. One of Shakespeare's most forceful female characters, she spurs her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges him to be strong afterward, yet is herself eventually driven to death by the effect of Macbeth's murders on her conscience. In each case, ambition, spurred by the prophecies of the witches, is what drives the couple to commit their atrocities. An issue that the play raises is that once one decides to use violence to further one's quest for power, it is difficult to stop. Macbeth finds that there are always potential threats to the throne such as Banquo, Fleance, and Macduff and he is tempted to use violent means to dispose of them.

Masculinity
"Lady Macbeth Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry 'Hold, hold!'" Macbeth, Act I, Scene V

Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband by questioning his manhood, wishing herself to be unsexed, and does not contradict Macbeth when he says that a woman like her should give birth only to boys. In the same manner that Lady Macbeth goads her husband on to murder, Macbeth provokes the assassins he hires to murder Banquo by questioning their manhood. Such acts show that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth equate masculinity with naked aggression; whenever they discuss manhood, violence follows. Their understanding of manhood allows the political order depicted in the play to descend into chaos. However, in "Macbeth", women are prone to contain violence and evil intentions. The witches prophecies spark Macbeths ambitions and then encourage his violent behavior, while Lady Macbeth provides the drive and the will behind her husbands plotting. After reading the letter her husband has sent telling of the witches' prophecies about him, Lady Macbeth believes: Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act I, Scene IV Furthermore, the only divine being to appear is Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. Because "Macbeth" traces the root of chaos and evil to women, some critics to argue that it is Shakespeares most misogynistic play. The male characters are similarly brutal and prone to evil as the women, but the aggression of the female characters is more striking because it contradicts expectations of how women ought to behave. Lady Macbeths behavior certainly shows that women can be just as ambitious and ruthless as men. Whether it is the gender constraints of her society or because she is not fearless enough to kill, Lady Macbeth relies on manipulation of her husband rather than violence to achieve her ends. The play does put forth less destructive definition of manhood towards the end. When Macduff learns of the murders of his wife and child, Malcolm consoles him unsympathetically with encouragement to take the news in manly fashion and use it to fuel his hatred of Macbeth. Macduff tells the young heir apparent that he has a mistaken understanding of masculinity. To Malcolms suggestion, Dispute it like a man, Macduff replies, I shall do so. But I must also feel it as a man (4.3.221223). After hearing the news of his son's death at the hands of Macbeth, Siward receives this fact somewhat complacently. Malcolm responds: Hes worth more sorrow [than you have expressed] / And that Ill spend for him (5.11.1617). Malcolms comment shows that he has learned the lesson Macduff gave him on the feeling nature of true masculinity. It also suggests that, with Malcolms coronation, order will be restored to the Kingdom of Scotland.

Analysis

Macbeth is an anomaly among Shakespeare's tragedies in certain critical ways. It is short: more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello andKing Lear, and only slightly more than half as long as Hamlet. This brevity has suggested to many critics that the received version is based on a heavily cut source, perhaps a prompt-book for a particular performance. That brevity has also been connected to other unusual features: the fast pace of the first act, which has seemed to be "stripped for action"; the comparative flatness of the characters other than Macbeth; the oddness of Macbeth himself compared with other Shakespearean tragic heroes.

As a tragedy of character
At least since the days of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, analysis of the play has centred on the question of Macbeth's ambition, commonly seen as so dominant a trait that it defines the character. Johnson asserted that Macbeth, though esteemed for his military bravery, is wholly reviled. This opinion recurs in critical literature, and, according to Caroline Spurgeon, is supported by Shakespeare himself, who apparently intended to degrade his hero by vesting him with clothes unsuited to him and to make Macbeth look ridiculous by several nimismshe applies: His garments seem either too big or too small for him as his ambition is too big and his character too small for his new and unrightful role as king. When he feels as if "dressed in borrowed clothes", after his new title as Thane of Cawdor, prophesied by the witches, has been confirmed by Ross (I, 3, ll. 108109), Banquo comments: "New honours come upon him, / Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould, / But with the aid of use" (I, 3, ll. 145146). And, at the end, when the tyrant is at bay at Dunsinane, Caithness sees him as a man trying in vain to fasten a large garment on him with too small a belt: "He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause / Within the belt of rule" (V, 2, ll. 1415), while Angus, in a similar nimism, sums up what everybody thinks ever since Macbeth's accession to power: "now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / upon a dwarfish thief" (V, 2, ll. 1820). [25] Like Richard III, but without that character's perversely appealing exuberance, Macbeth wades through blood until his inevitable fall. As Kenneth Muir writes, "Macbeth has not a predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown." Some critics, such as E. E. Stoll, explain this characterisation as a holdover from Senecan or medieval tradition. Shakespeare's audience, in this view, expected villains to be wholly bad, and Senecan style, far from prohibiting a villainous protagonist, all but demanded it. Yet for other critics, it has not been so easy to resolve the question of Macbeth's motivation. Robert Bridges, for instance, perceived a paradox: a character able to express such convincing horror before Duncan's murder would likely be incapable of committing the crime. For many critics, Macbeth's motivations in the first act appear vague and insufficient. John Dover Wilson hypothesised that Shakespeare's original text had an extra scene or scenes where husband and wife discussed their plans. This interpretation is not fully provable; however, the motivating role of ambition for Macbeth is universally recognised. The evil actions motivated by his ambition seem to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil, as Macbeth himself recognises: "I am in blood/Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

As a tragedy of moral order

The disastrous consequences of Macbeth's ambition are not limited to him. Almost from the moment of the murder, the play depicts Scotland as a land shaken by inversions of the natural order. Shakespeare may have intended a reference to the great chain of being, although the play's images of disorder are mostly not specific enough to support detailed intellectual readings. He may also have intended an elaborate compliment to James's belief in the divine right of kings, although this hypothesis, outlined at greatest length by Henry N. Paul, is not universally accepted. As in Julius Caesar, though, perturbations in the political sphere are echoed and even amplified by events in the material world. Among the most often depicted of the inversions of the natural order is sleep. Macbeth's announcement that he has "murdered sleep" is figuratively mirrored in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking. Macbeth's generally accepted indebtedness to medieval tragedy is often seen as significant in the play's treatment of moral order. Glynne Wickham connects the play, through the Porter, to a mystery play on the harrowing of hell. Howard Felperin argues that the play has a more complex attitude toward "orthodox Christian tragedy" than is often admitted; he sees a kinship between the play and the tyrant plays within the medieval liturgical drama. The theme of androgyny is often seen as a special aspect of the theme of disorder. Inversion of normative gender roles is most famously associated with the witches and with Lady Macbeth as she appears in the first act. Whatever Shakespeare's degree of sympathy with such inversions, the play ends with a thorough return to normative gender values. Some feminist psychoanalytic critics, such as Janet Adelman, have connected the play's treatment of gender roles to its larger theme of inverted natural order. In this light, Macbeth is punished for his violation of the moral order by being removed from the cycles of nature (which are figured as female); nature itself (as embodied in the movement of Birnam Wood) is part of the restoration of moral order.

As a poetic tragedy
Critics in the early twentieth century reacted against what they saw as an excessive dependence on the study of character in criticism of the play. This dependence, though most closely associated with Andrew Cecil Bradley, is clear as early as the time of Mary Cowden Clarke, who offered precise, if fanciful, accounts of the predramatic lives of Shakespeare's female leads. She suggested, for instance, that the child Lady Macbeth refers to in the first act died during a foolish military action.

Witchcraft and evil

Macbeth and Banquo with the Witchesby Henry Fuseli

In the play, the Three Witches represent darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents and witnesses. [26] Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During Shakespeare's day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, "the most notorious traytor and rebell that can

be." [27] They were not only political traitors, but spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs from them comes from their ability to straddle the play's borders between reality and the supernatural. They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real world.[28] The witches' lines in the first act: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air" are often said to set the tone for the rest of the play by establishing a sense of confusion. Indeed, the play is filled with situations where evil is depicted as good, while good is rendered evil. The line "Double, double toil and trouble," communicates the witches' intent clearly: they seek only trouble for the mortals around them. [29] While the witches do not tell Macbeth directly to kill King Duncan, they use a subtle form of temptation when they tell Macbeth that he is destined to be king. By placing this thought in his mind, they effectively guide him on the path to his own destruction. This follows the pattern of temptation used at the time of Shakespeare. First, they argued, a thought is put in a man's mind, then the person may either indulge in the thought or reject it. Macbeth indulges in it, while Banquo rejects. [29] According to J. A. Bryant Jr., Macbeth also makes use of Biblical parallels, notably between King Duncan's murder and the murder of Christ: No matter how one looks at it, whether as history or as tragedy, Macbeth is distinctively Christian. One may simply count the Biblical allusions as Richmond Noble has done; one may go further and study the parallels between Shakespeare's story and the Old Testament stories of Saul and Jezebel as Miss Jane H. Jack has done; or one may examine with W. C. Curry the progressive degeneration of Macbeth from the point of view of medieval theology. [30][31]

Superstition and "the Scottish play"

Main article: The Scottish play While many today would say that any misfortune surrounding a production is mere coincidence, actors and other theatre people often consider it bad luck to mention Macbeth by name while inside a theatre, and sometimes refer to it indirectly, for example as "the Scottish play",[32] or "MacBee", or when referring to the character and not the play, "Mr. and Mrs. M", or "The Scottish King". This is because Shakespeare is said to have used the spells of real witches in his text, purportedly angering the witches and causing them to curse the play. [33] Thus, to say the name of the play inside a theatre is believed to doom the production to failure, and perhaps cause physical injury or death to cast members. There are stories of accidents, misfortunes and even deaths taking place during runs of Macbeth.[32] One particular incident that lent itself to the superstition was the Astor Place Riot. The cause of the riots was based on a conflict over two performances of Macbeth, and is usually ascribed to the curse. [34] Several methods exist to dispel the curse, depending on the actor. One, attributed to Michael York, is to immediately leave the building the stage is in with the person who uttered the name, walk around it three times, spit over their left shoulders, say an obscenity then wait to be invited back into the building. [35] A related practice is to spin around three times as fast as possible on the spot, sometimes accompanied by spitting over their shoulder, and uttering an obscenity. Another popular "ritual" is to leave the room, knock three times, be invited in, and then quote a line from Hamlet. Yet another is to recite lines from The Merchant of Venice, thought to be a lucky play. [36]

Performance history
Shakespeare's day
Apart from the one mentioned in the Forman document, there are no performances known with certainty in Shakespeare's era. Because of its Scottish theme, the play is sometimes said to have been written for, and perhaps debuted for, King James; however, no external evidence supports this hypothesis. The play's brevity and certain aspects of its staging (for instance, the large proportion of night-time scenes and the unusually large number of off-stage sounds) have been taken as suggesting that the text now extant was revised for production indoors, perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre, which the King's Men acquired in 1608. [37]

Restoration and 18th century

In the Restoration, Sir William Davenant produced a spectacular "operatic" adaptation of Macbeth, "with all the singing and dancing in it" and special effects like "flyings for the witches" (John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1708). Davenant's revision also enhanced the role of Lady Macduff, making her a thematic foil to Lady Macbeth. [38] In an 19 April 1667, entry in his Diary, Samuel Pepys called Davenant's MacBeth "one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw."[38] The Davenant version held the stage until the middle of the next century. The famous Macbeths of the early 18th century, such as James Quin, employed this version. David Garrick returned much closer to the Shakespearean original in a 1744 production. [39] He restored much of Shakespeare's language, which Davenant had simplified, and restored most of the characters to their original roles. However, he retained the witches' songs and added a moralizing speech for Macbeth to the conclusion. Garrick's Macbeth was celebrated; Thomas Davies claims that when the Duke of Parmaasked Garrick to demonstrate his acting ability, he acted the scene of Banquo's ghost. Garrick's Lady Macbeth was Hannah Pritchard, and he did not act the role after her death in 1768. Charles Macklin, not otherwise recalled as a great Macbeth, is remembered for performances at Covent Garden in 1773 at which riots broke out, related to Macklin's rivalries with Garrick and William Smith. Macklin performed in Scottish dress, reversing an earlier tendency to dress Macbeth as an English brigadier; he also removed Garrick's death speech and further trimmed Lady Macduff's role. The performance received generally respectful reviews, although George Steevens remarked on the inappropriateness of Macklin (then in his eighties) for the role. After Garrick, the most celebrated Macbeth of the 18th century was John Philip Kemble; he performed the role most famously with his sister,Sarah Siddons, whose Lady Macbeth was widely regarded as unsurpassable. Kemble continued the trends toward realistic costume and to Shakespeare's language that had marked Macklin's production; Walter Scott reports that he experimented continually with the Scottish dress of the play. Response to Kemble's interpretation was divided; however, Siddons was unanimously praised. Her performance of the "sleepwalking" scene in the fifth act was

especially noted; Leigh Hunt called it "sublime." The Kemble-Siddons performances were the first widely influential productions in which Lady Macbeth's villainy was presented as deeper and more powerful than Macbeth's. It was also the first in which Banquo's ghost did not appear on stage. Kemble's Macbeth struck some critics as too mannered and polite for Shakespeare's text. His successor as the leading actor of London,Edmund Kean, was more often criticised for emotional excess, particularly in the fifth act. Kean's Macbeth was not universally admired; William Hazlitt, for instance, complained that Kean's Macbeth was too like his Richard III. As he did in other roles, Kean exploited his athleticism as a key component of Macbeth's mental collapse. He reversed Kemble's emphasis on Macbeth as noble, instead presenting him as a ruthless politician who collapses under the weight of guilt and fear. Kean, however, did nothing to halt the trend toward extravagance in scene and costume.

Nineteenth century
The Macbeth of the next predominant London actor, William Charles Macready, provoked responses at least as mixed as those given Kean. Macready debuted in the role in 1820 at Covent Garden. As Hazlitt noted, Macready's reading of the character was purely psychological; the witches lost all supernatural power, and Macbeth's downfall arose purely from the conflicts in Macbeth's character. Macready's most famous Lady Macbeth was Helena Faucit, who debuted dismally in the role while still in her mid-20s, but who later achieved acclaim in the role for an interpretation that, unlike Siddons', accorded with contemporary notions of female decorum. After Macready "retired" to America, he continued to perform in the role; in 1849, he was involved in a rivalry with American actor Edwin Forrest, whose partisans hissed Macready at Astor Place, leading to what is commonly called the Astor Place Riot.

Charles Kean and his wife as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, in costumes aiming to be historically accurate (1858)

The two most prominent Macbeths of mid-century, Samuel Phelps and Charles Kean, were both received with critical ambivalence and popular success. Both are famous less for their interpretation of character than for certain aspects of staging. At Sadler's Wells Theatre, Phelps brought back nearly all of Shakespeare's original text. He brought back the first half of the Porter scene, which had been ignored by directors since Davenant; the second remained cut because of its ribaldry. He abandoned the added music, and reduced the witches to their role in the folio. Just as significantly, he returned to the folio treatment of Macbeth's death. [40] Not all of these decisions succeeded in the Victorian context, and Phelps experimented with various combinations of Shakespeare and Davenant in his more than a dozen productions between 1844 and 1861. His most successful Lady Macbeth was Isabella Glyn, whose commanding presence reminded some critics of Siddons. The outstanding feature of Kean's productions at the Princess's Theatre after 1850 was their accuracy of costume. Kean achieved his greatest success in modern melodrama, and he was widely viewed as not prepossessing enough for the greatest Elizabethan roles. Audiences did not mind, however; one 1853 production ran for twenty weeks. Presumably part of the draw was Kean's famous attention to historical accuracy; in his productions, as Allardyce Nicoll notes, "even the botany was historically correct." Henry Irving's first attempt at the role, at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1875, was a failure. Under the production of Sidney Frances Bateman, and starring alongside Kate Josephine Bateman, Irving may have been affected by the recent death of his manager Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman. Although the production lasted eighty performances, his Macbeth was judged inferior to his Hamlet. His next essay, opposite Ellen Terry at the Lyceum in 1888, fared better, playing for 150 performances. [41] At the urging of Herman Klein, Irving engaged Arthur Sullivan to write a suite of incidental music for the piece. [42] Friends such as Bram Stoker defended his "psychological" reading, based on the supposition that Macbeth had dreamed of killing Duncan before the start of the play. His detractors, among them Henry James, deplored his arbitrary word changes such as "would have" for "should have" in the speech at Lady Macbeth's death, and also his "neurasthenic" and "finicky" approach to the character. [43]

Twentieth century to present

Barry Vincent Jackson staged an influential modern-dress production with the Birmingham Repertory in 1928; the production reached London, playing at the Royal Court Theatre. It received mixed reviews; Eric Maturin was judged an inadequate Macbeth, though Mary Merrall's vampish Lady was reviewed favourably. Though The Times judged it a "miserable failure," the production did much to overturn the tendency to scenic and antiquarian excess that had peaked with Charles Kean.

The Federal Theatre Project Negro Unit's production of Macbeth, 1935

Among the most publicised productions of the 20th century was mounted by the Federal Theater Project at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem from 14 April to 20 June 1936. Orson Welles, in his first stage production, directed Jack Carter and Edna Thomas, with Canada Lee playing Banquo, in an all African American production. It became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set the play in post-colonial Haiti. His direction emphasised spectacle and suspense: his dozens of "African" drums recalled Davenant's chorus of witches. Welles later directed and played the starring role in a 1948 film adaptation of the play Macbeth. Laurence Olivier played Malcolm in the 1929 production and Macbeth in 1937 at the Old Vic Theatrein a production that saw the Vic's artistic director Lilian Baylis pass away the night before it opened. Olivier's makeup was so thick and stylised for that production that Vivien Leigh was quoted as saying "You hear Macbeth's first line, then Larry's makeup comes on, then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on". [44] Olivier later starred in what is among the most famous 20th-century productions, by Glen Byam Shaw at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Vivien Leigh played Lady Macbeth. The supporting cast, which Harold Hobson denigrated, included many actors who went on to successful Shakespearean careers: Ian Holm played Donalbain, Keith Michell was Macduff, and Patrick Wymark the Porter. Olivier was the key to success. The intensity of his performance, particularly in the conversation with the murderers and in confronting Banquo's ghost, seemed to many reviewers to recall Edmund Kean. Plans for a film version faltered after the box-office failure of Olivier's Richard III. Kenneth Tynan asserted flatly of this performance that "no one has ever succeeded as Macbeth"until Olivier. Olivier's co-star in his 1937 Old Vic Theatre production, Judith Anderson, had an equally triumphant association with the play. She played Lady Macbeth on Broadway opposite Maurice Evans in a production directed by Margaret Webster that ran for 131 performances in 1941, the longest run of the play in Broadway history. Anderson and Evans performed the play on television twice, in 1954 and 1962, with Maurice Evans winning an Emmy

Award the 1962 production and Anderson winning the award for both presentations. A film adaptation in 1971 titled The Tragedy of Macbeth was directed by Roman Polanski and executive-produced by Hugh Hefner. A Japanese film adaptation, Throne of Blood (Kumonosu j, 1957), features Toshir Mifune in the lead role and is set in feudal Japan. It was wellreceived and, despite having almost none of the play's script, critic Harold Bloom called it "the most successful film version of Macbeth."[45] One of the most notable 20th-century productions is that of Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. Nunn had directed Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren in the play two years earlier, but that production had largely failed to impress. In 1976, Nunn produced the play with a minimalist set at The Other Place; this small, nearly round stage focused attention on the psychological dynamics of the characters. Both Ian McKellen in the title role and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth received exceptionally favourable reviews. Dench won the 1977 SWET Best Actress award for her performance and in 2004, members of the RSC voted her performance the greatest by an actress in the history of the company. Nunn's production transferred to London in 1977 and was later filmed for television. It was to overshadow Peter Hall's 1978 production with Albert Finney as Macbeth and Dorothy Tutin as Lady Macbeth. An infamous version was staged at the Old Vic in 1980. Peter O'Toole and Frances Tomelty took the leads in a production (by Bryan Forbes) that was publicly disowned by Timothy West, artistic director of the theatre, before opening night, despite being a sellout because of its notoriety." [46] As critic Jack Tinker noted in the Daily Mail: "The performance is not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous."[47] On the stage, Lady Macbeth is considered one of the more "commanding and challenging" roles in Shakespeare's work. [48] Other actresses who have played the role include Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Janet Suzman, Glenda Jackson, and Jane Lapotaire. In 2001 the film Scotland, PA was released. The action is moved to 1970s Pennsylvania and revolves around Joe Macbeth and his wife Pat taking control of a hamburger cafe from Norm Duncan. The film was directed by Billy Morrissette and stars James LeGros, Maura Tierney andChristopher Walken. A performance was staged in the real Macbeth's home of Moray, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, to take place at Elgin Cathedral. Professional actors, dancers, musicians, school children, and a community cast from the Moray area all took part in what was an important event in the Highland Year of Culture (2007). In the same year there was general consent among critics that Rupert Goold's production for the Chichester Festival 2007, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, rivalled Trevor Nunn's acclaimed 1976 RSC production. And when it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London,Charles Spencer reviewing for the Daily Telegraph pronounced it the best Macbeth he had ever seen. [49] At the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2007 the production won both the Best Actor award for Stewart, and the Best Director award for Goold. [50] The same production opened in the US at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, moving to Broadway (Lyceum Theatre) after a sold-out run. In 2010 a film version of their production Macbeth was produced for television. Goold again directed and Stewart and Fleetwood starred. It aired as part of PBS' Great Performances series on 6 October 2010 and on BBC Four on 12 December 2010. In 2003, the British theatre company Punchdrunk used The Beaufoy Building in London, an old Victorian school to stage "Sleep No More", the story of Macbeth in the style of a Hitchcock thriller, using reworked music from the soundtrack of classic Hitchcock films. [51] Punchdrunk re-mounted the production, in a newly expanded version, at an abandoned school in Brookline, Massachusetts in October 2009 in association with the American Repertory Theatre,[52]and again in 2011 in New York City in the McKittrick Hotel, as Sleep No More (2011 theatrical production).[53] In 2004, Indian director Vishal Bharadwaj directed his own adaptation to Macbeth, titled Maqbool. Set in the contemporary Mumbai underworld, the movie starred Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah and Piyush Mishra in prominent roles.

The Tempest

This article is about the Shakespeare play. For other uses, see The Tempest (disambiguation).
The shipwreck in Act I, Scene 1, in a 1797 engraving based on a painting by George Romney

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 161011. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place, using illusion and skilful manipulation. The eponymous tempest brings to the island Prospero's usurping brother Antonio and the complicit Alonso, King of Naples. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's low nature, the redemption of Alonso, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son,Ferdinand. There is no obvious single source for the plot of The Tempest, but researchers have seen parallels in Erasmus's Naufragium, Peter Martyr's De orbo novo, and an eyewitness report by William Strachey of the real-life shipwreck of theSea Venture on the islands of Bermuda. In addition, one

of Gonzalo'sspeeches is derived from Montaigne's essay Of the Canibales; and much of Prospero's renunciative speech is taken word for word from a speech byMedea in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses. The masque in Act 4 may have been a later addition, possibly in honour of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613. The play was first published in the First Folio of 1623. The story draws the tradition of the romance genre, and it was influenced by tragicomedy and the courtly masque and perhaps by thecommedia dell'arte. It differs from Shakespeare's other plays in its observation of a stricter, more organised neoclassical style. Critics see The Tempest as explicitly concerned with its own nature as a play, frequently drawing links between Prospero's "art" and theatrical illusion; and early critics saw Prospero as a representation of Shakespeare, and his renunciation of magic, as signalling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. The play portrays Prospero as a rational, not an occultist, magician by providing a contrast to him in Sycorax: her magic is frequently described as destructive and terrible, where Prospero's is said to be wondrous and beautiful. Beginning in about 1950, with the publication ofPsychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni, The Tempest was viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory exemplified in adaptations like Aim Csaire's Une Tempte set in Haitiand there is even a scholarly journal on post-colonial criticism named afterCaliban. Miranda is typically viewed as having completely internalised the patriarchal order of things, thinking of herself as subordinate to her father. Another view, is that because Miranda has spent 12 years of her life growing up on the island with only Prospero and Caliban as her companions, she is subordinate to her father not because of the social construct of the submission of women at the time (for she is exempt from the cultural conventions of her home, spending much of her life isolated from other women; she does not know what it is to be a woman of the Renaissance), but rather because Prospero raised her and she knows no other life other than life with her father and Caliban on the island. The Tempest did not attract a significant amount of attention before the closing of the theatres in 1642, and only attained popularity after theRestoration, and then only in adapted versions, such as that of Dryden and D'Avenant. In the mid-19th century, theatre productions began to reinstate the original Shakespearean text, and in the 20th century, critics and scholars undertook a significant re-appraisal of the play's value, to the extent that it is now considered to be one of Shakespeare's greatest works. It has been adapted numerous times in a variety of styles and formats: in music, at least 46 operas by composers such as Fromental Halvy, Zdenk Fibich, Lee Hoiby, and Thomas Ads; orchestral works by Tchaikovsky, Arthur Sullivan and Arthur Honegger; and songs by such diverse artists as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Michael Nymanand Pete Seeger; in literature, Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem With a Guitar, To Jane and W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror; novels byAim Csaire and The Diviners by Margaret Laurence; in paintings by William Hogarth, Henry Fuseli, and John Everett

Millais; and on screen, ranging through a hand-tinted version of Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1905 stage performance, the science fiction film Forbidden Planet in 1956, toPeter Greenaway's 1991 Prospero's Books featuring John Gielgud as Prospero.

[edit]Characters

Prospero is the usurped Duke of Milan, a magician and the play's

Gonzalo is a counsellor who gave aid to Prospero and Miranda Adrian and Francisco are lords Trinculo is a jester Stephano is a drunken butler Boatswain Master of the ship

protagonist

Miranda is Prospero's daughter Ariel is an airy spirit Caliban, enslaved by Prospero, is the son of the witch Sycorax Alonso is the King of Naples Sebastian is Alonso's brother Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, is Prospero's brother

Iris, Ceres and Juno are spirits and goddesses

Ferdinand is Alonso's son

Synopsis The magician Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, have been stranded for twelve years on an island after Prospero's jealous brother Antonio (helped by Alonso, the King of Naples) deposed him and set him adrift with the then-3-year-old Miranda. Gonzalo, the King's counsellor, had secretly supplied their boat with plenty of food, water, clothes and the most-prized books from Prospero's library. Possessing magic powers due to his great learning, Prospero is reluctantly served by a spirit, Ariel, whom Prospero had rescued from a tree in which he had been trapped by the witch Sycorax. Prospero maintains Ariel's loyalty by repeatedly promising to release the "airy spirit" from servitude. Sycorax had been banished to the island, and had died before Prospero's arrival. Her son, Caliban, a deformed monster and the only non-spiritual inhabitant before the arrival of Prospero, was initially adopted and raised by him. He taught Prospero how to survive on the island, while Prospero and Miranda taught Caliban religion and their own language. Following Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda, he had been compelled by Prospero to serve as the magician's slave. In slavery, Caliban has come to view Prospero as a usurper and has grown to resent him and his daughter. Prospero and Miranda in turn view Caliban with contempt and disgust. The play opens as Prospero, having divined that his brother, Antonio, is on a ship passing close by the island, has raised a tempest which causes the ship to run aground. Also on the ship are Antonio's friend and fellow conspirator, King Alonso of Naples, Alonso's brother and son (Sebastian and

10

Ferdinand), and Alonso's advisor, Gonzalo. All these passengers are returning from the wedding of Alonso's daughter Claribel with the King of Tunis. Prospero contrives to separate the shipwreck survivors into several groups by his spells, and so Alonso and Ferdinand are separated believing the other to be dead. Three plots then alternate through the play. In one, Caliban falls in with Stephano and Trinculo, two drunkards, whom he believes to have come from the moon. They attempt to raise a rebellion against Prospero, which ultimately fails. In another, Prospero works to establish a romantic relationship between Ferdinand and Miranda; the two fall immediately in love, but Prospero worries that "too light winning [may] make the prize light", and compels Ferdinand to become his servant, pretending that he regards him as a spy. In the third subplot, Antonio and Sebastian conspire to kill Alonso and Gonzalo so that Sebastian can become King. They are thwarted by Ariel, at Prospero's command. Ariel appears to the "three men of sin" (Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian) as a harpy, reprimanding them for their betrayal of Prospero. Prospero manipulates the course of his enemies' path through the island, drawing them closer and closer to him. In the conclusion, all the main characters are brought together before Prospero, who forgives Alonso. He also forgives Antonio and Sebastian, but warns them against further betrayal. Ariel is charged to prepare the proper sailing weather to guide Alonso and his entourage (including Prospero and Miranda) back to the Royal fleet and then to Naples, where Ferdinand and Miranda will be married. After discharging this task, Ariel will finally be free. Prospero pardons Caliban, who is sent to prepare Prospero's cell, to which Alonso and his party are invited for a final night before their departure. Prospero indicates that he intends to entertain them with the story of his life on the island. Prospero has resolved to break and bury his magic staff, and "drown" his book of magic, and in his epilogue, shorn of his magic powers, he invites the audience to set him free from the island with their applause. Date and sources
Date

The Tempest is thought by most scholars to have been written in 161011, and is generally accepted as the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone, although some have questioned either or both assertions. [1] Scholars also note that it is impossible to determine if the play was written before, after, or at the same time as The Winter's Tale, whose dating has been equally problematic.[2] Edward Blount entered The Tempest into theStationers' Register on 8 November 1623. It was one of 16 Shakespearean plays that Blount registered on that date.[3]
Contemporary sources.There is no obvious single source for the plot of The Tempest; it seems to have been created out of
an amalgamation of sources.[4] Since source scholarship began in the 18th century, researchers have suggested

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passages from Erasmus's Naufragium (1523), (translated into English 1606)[5] and Richard Eden's 1555 translation of Peter Martyr's De orbo novo (1530).[6] In addition, William Strachey's A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, an eyewitness report of the real-life shipwreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 on the island of Bermuda while sailing towards Virginia, is considered by most critics to be one of Shakespeare's primary sources because of certain verbal, plot and thematic similarities.[7]Although not published until 1625, Strachey's report, one of several describing the incident, is dated 15 July 1610, and critics say that Shakespeare must have seen it in manuscript sometime during that year. E.K. Chambers identified the True Reportory as Shakespeare's "main authority" for The Tempest,[8] and the modern Arden editors say Shakespeare "surely drew" on Strachey and Montaigne for specific passages in the play.[7] There has, however, been some scepticism about the alleged influence of Strachey in the play. Kenneth Muir argued that although "[t]here is little doubt that Shakespeare had read ... William Strachey's True Reportory" and other accounts, "[t]he extent of the verbal echoes of [the Bermuda] pamphlets has, I think, been exaggerated. There is hardly a shipwreck in history or fiction which does not mention splitting, in which the ship is not lightened of its cargo, in which the passengers do not give themselves up for lost, in which north winds are not sharp, and in which no one gets to shore by clinging to wreckage," and goes on to say that "Strachey's account of the shipwreck is blended with memories of Saint Paul's in which too not a hair perished and with Erasmus' colloq

uy."[9]

Both the Victorian antiquarian Joseph Hunter (1839) and Karl Elze (1874) challenged the 161011 dating, and this challenge was revived by Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky in 2007 and 2009,[10] who also argue that sources earlier than Strachey's letter account for Shakespeare's imagery and wording. In their 2009 article, the authors maintain that Richard Edens text is the key source, and the Oxfordian scholarWilliam Leahy described this paper as a devastating critique.
[11]

Mainstream scholars such as Alden T. Vaughan, Gabriel Egan, Michael Neill, and independent researcher Tom Reedy

remain unconvinced.[12][13][14][15] Another Sea Venture survivor, Sylvester Jourdain, also published an account, A Discovery of The Barmudasdated 13 October 1610, and Edmond Malone argued for the 161011 date on the account by Jourdain and the Virginia Council of London's A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia dated 8 November 1610.[16] [edit]Other sources Modern researchers have recently added Ariosto's 1516 Orlando Furioso as a possible source for the play, as it contains many of the storm references also found in Naufragium.[17] The Tempest may take its overall structure from traditional Italian commedia dell'arte, which sometimes featured a magus and his daughter, their supernatural attendants, and a number of rustics. The commediaoften featured a clown known as Arlecchino (or his predecessor, Zanni) and his partner Brighella, who bear a striking resemblance to Stephano and Trinculo; a lecherous Neapolitan hunchback named Pulcinella, who corresponds to Caliban; and the clever and beautiful Isabella, whose wealthy and manipulative father, Pantalone, constantly seeks a suitor for her, thus mirroring the relationship between Miranda and Prospero.[18]

12

It is traditionally argued that one of Gonzalo's speeches is derived from Montaigne's essay Of the Canibales, translated into English in a version published by John Florio in 1603. Montaigne praises the society of the Caribbean natives: "It is a nation ... that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparrell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them."[19] However, the ultimate source of Montaigne's passage is an account of Gonzalo Oviedopublished in English for the first time in Richard Eden's 1555 Decades of the New Worlde, with which Shakespeare was evidently familiar.[20] In addition, much of Prospero's renunciative speech[21] is taken word for word from a speech by Medea in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses.[22] [edit]Text The Tempest presents relatively few textual problems in comparison with many of Shakespeare's other plays. The text in its current form has a simple history: it was first published in the First Folio in December 1623. In that volume, The Tempest is the first play in the section of Comedies, and therefore the opening play of the collection. This printing includes more stage directions than any of Shakespeare's other plays, although these directions seem to have been written more for a reader than for an actor. This leads scholars to infer that the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, added the directions to the folio to aid the reader, and that they were not necessarily what Shakespeare originally intended. Scholars have also wondered about the masque in Act 4, which seems to have been added as an afterthought, possibly in honour of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V in 1613. However, other scholars see this as unlikely, arguing that to take the masque out of the play creates more problems than it solves.[23]

Themes and motifs

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; Andlike the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. ...

13

Prospero [24]

]The

theatre

The Tempest is explicitly concerned with its own nature as a play, frequently drawing links between Prospero's Art and theatrical illusion; the shipwreck was a spectacle that Arielperformed, while Antonio and Sebastian are cast in a troop to act.
[25]

Prospero may even refer to the Globe Theatre when he describes the whole world as an illusion: "the great globe ... shall

dissolve ... like this insubstantial pageant".[26] Ariel frequently disguises himself as figures fromClassical mythology, for example a nymph, a harpy and Ceres, acting as the latter in a masqueand anti-masque that Prospero creates.[27] Early critics, such as Thomas Campbell in 1838, saw this constant allusion to the theatre as an indication that Prospero was meant to represent Shakespeare; the character's renunciation of magic thus signalling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. This theory persists among later critics, and remains solidly within the critical canon.[28] [edit]Magic Magic was a controversial subject in Shakespeare's day. In Italy in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his occult studies. Outside the Catholic world, in Protestant England where Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, magic was also taboo; not all "magic", however, was considered evil.[29] Several thinkers took a more rational approach to the study of the supernatural, with the determination to discover the workings of unusual phenomena. The German Henricus Cornelius Agrippa was one such thinker, who published in De Occulta Philosophia(1531, 1533) his observations of "divine" magic. Agrippa's work influenced Dr. John Dee, an Englishman and student of supernatural phenomena. Both Agrippa and Dee describe a kind of magic similar to Prospero's: one that is based on 16th-century science, rationality, and divinity, rather than the occult. When King James took the throne, Dee found himself under attack for his beliefs, but was able to defend himself successfully by explaining the divine nature of his profession. However, he died in disgrace in 1608.[30] Shakespeare is also careful to make the distinction that Prospero is a rational, and not an occultist, magician. He does this by providing a contrast to him in Sycorax. Sycorax is said to have worshipped the devil and been full of "earthy and abhored commands". She was unable to control Ariel, who was "too delicate" for such dark tasks. Prospero's rational goodness enables him to control Ariel where Sycorax can only trap him in a tree. Sycorax's magic is frequently described as destructive and terrible, where Prospero's is said to be wondrous and beautiful. Prospero seeks to set things right in his world through his magic, and once that is done, he renounces it, setting Ariel free.[30] [Criticism and interpretation Genre The story draws heavily on the tradition of the romance, a fictitious narrative set far away from ordinary life. Romances were typically based around themes such as the supernatural, wandering, exploration and discovery. They were often set in coastal regions, and typically featured exotic, fantastical locations and themes of transgression and redemption, loss and retrieval, exile and reunion. As a result, while The Tempestwas originally listed as a comedy in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, subsequent editors have chosen to give it the more specific label ofShakespearean romance. Like the

14

other romances, the play was influenced by the then-new genre of tragicomedy, introduced by John Fletcherin the first decade of the 17th century and developed in the Beaumont and Fletcher collaborations, as well as by the explosion of development of the courtly masque form by such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones at the same time.[31] ]Dramatic structure The Tempest differs from Shakespeare's other plays in its observation of a stricter, more organised neoclassical style. The clearest indication of this is Shakespeare's respect for the three unities in the play: the Unities of Time, Place, and Action. Shakespeare's other plays rarely respected the three unities, taking place in separate locations miles apart and over several days or even years.[32] The play's events unfold in real time before the audience, Prospero even declaring in the last act that everything has happened in, more or less, three hours.[33][34] All action is unified into one basic plot: Prospero's struggle to regain his dukedom; it is also confined to one place, a fictional island, which many scholars agree is meant to be located in the Mediterranean Sea.[35] Another reading suggests that it takes place in the New World, as some parts read like records of English and Spanish conquest in the Americas.[36] Still others argue that the Island can represent any land that has been colonised.[37] ]Postcolonial In Shakespeare's day, most of the planet was still being "discovered", and stories were coming back from distant islands, with myths about the Cannibals of the Caribbean, faraway Edens, and distant tropical Utopias. With the character Caliban (whose name is almost an anagram of Cannibal and also resembles "Cariban", the term then used for natives in the West Indies), Shakespeare may be offering an in-depth discussion into the morality of colonialism. Different views of this are found in the play, with examples including Gonzalo's Utopia, Prospero's enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban's subsequent resentment. Caliban is also shown as one of the most natural characters in the play, being very much in touch with the natural world (and modern audiences have come to view him as far nobler than his two Old World friends, Stephano and Trinculo, although the original intent of the author may have been different). There is evidence that Shakespeare drew on Montaigne's essay Of Cannibalswhich discusses the values of societies insulated from European influenceswhile writing The Tempest.[38] Beginning in about 1950, with the publication of Psychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni, The Tempest was viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory. This new way of looking at the text explored the effect of the coloniser (Prospero) on the colonised (Ariel and Caliban). Though Ariel is often overlooked in these debates in favour of the more intriguing Caliban, he is nonetheless an essential component of them.[39] The French writer Aim Csaire, in his play Une Tempte sets The Tempest in Haiti, portraying Ariel as a mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonisers. Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion or negotiation.[40] Although scholars have suggested that his dialogue with Caliban in Act two, Scene one, contains hints of a future alliance between the two when Prospero leaves, Ariel is generally viewed by scholars as the good servant, in comparison with the conniving Calibana view which Shakespeare's audience may well have shared.[41] Ariel is used by

15

some postcolonial writers as a symbol of their efforts to overcome the effects of colonisation on their culture. For example, Michelle Cliff, a Jamaican author, has said that she tries to combine Caliban and Ariel within herself to create a way of writing that represents her culture better. Such use of Ariel in postcolonial thought is far from uncommon; the spirit is even the namesake of a scholarly journal covering post-colonial criticism.[39]
]Feminist

The Tempest has only one female character, Miranda. Other women, such as Caliban's motherSycorax, Miranda's mother and Alonso's daughter Claribel, are only mentioned. Because of the small role women play in the story in comparison to other Shakespeare plays, The Tempest has not attracted much feminist criticism. Miranda is typically viewed as being completely deprived of freedom by her father. Her only duty in his eyes is to remain chaste. Ann Thompson argues that Miranda, in a manner typical of women in a colonial atmosphere, has completely internalised the patriarchal order of things, thinking of herself as subordinate to her father.[42] The less-prominent women mentioned in the play are subordinated as well, as they are only described through the men of the play. Most of what is said about Sycorax, for example, is said by Prospero. Further, Stephen Orgel notes that Prospero has never met Sycorax all he learned about her he learned from Ariel. According to Orgel, Prospero's suspicion of women makes him an unreliable source of information. Orgel suggests that he is sceptical of female virtue in general, citing his ambiguous remark about his wife's fidelity.[43] However, certain goddesses such as Juno, Ceres, Iris, and sea nymphs are in one scene of the play. [edit]Afterlife [edit]Shakespeare's day A record exists of a performance of The Tempest on 1 November 1611 by the King's Men beforeJames I and the English royal court at Whitehall Palace on Hallowmas night. Harold Bloom wrote inShakespeare: Invention of the Human that this record "is known to be a forgery" but confirmed 1611 as the accepted year of publication. The play was one of the eight Shakespearean plays acted at court during the winter of 161213 as part of the festivities surrounding the marriage of Princess Elizabeth with Frederick V, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine.[44] There is no further public performance recorded prior to theRestoration; but in his preface to the 1667 Dryden/Davenant version, Sir William Davenant states that The Tempest had been performed at theBlackfriars Theatre. Careful consideration of stage directions within the play supports this, strongly suggesting that the play was written withBlackfriars Theatre rather than the Globe Theatre in mind.[45] [edit]Restoration and 18th century Adaptations of the play, not Shakespeare's original, dominated the performance history of The Tempest from the English Restoration until the mid-19th century.[46] All theatres were closed down by the puritan government during the Commonwealth. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two patent companiesthe King's Company and the Duke's Companywere established, and the existing theatrical repertoire divided between them. Sir William Davenant's Duke's Company had the rights to perform The Tempest.[47] In 1667 Davenant and John Dryden made heavy

16

cuts and adapted it as The Tempest or, The Enchanted Island. They tried to appeal to upper-class audiences by emphasising royalist political and social ideals: monarchy is the natural form of government; patriarchal authority decisive in education and marriage; and patrilineality preeminent in inheritance and ownership of property.[46] They also added characters and plotlines: Miranda has a sister, named Dorinda; and Caliban a sister, also named Sycorax. As a parallel to Shakespeare's Miranda/Ferdinand plot, Prospero has a foster-son, Hippolito, who has never set eyes on a woman.
[48]

Hippolito was a popular breeches role, a man played by a woman, popular with Restoration theatre management for the

opportunity to reveal actresses' legs.[49] Scholar Michael Dobson has described Enchanted Island as "the most frequently revived play of the entire Restoration" and as establishing the importance of enhanced and additional roles for women.[50] In 1674, Thomas Shadwell re-adapted Dryden and Davenant's Enchanted Island as an opera (although in Restoration theatre "opera" did not have its modern meaning, instead referring to a play with added songs, closer in style to a modern musical comedy).[51] Restoration playgoers appear to have regarded the Dryden/Davenant/Shadwell version as Shakespeare's: Samuel Pepys, for example, described it as "an old play of Shakespeares"[46] in his diary. The opera was extremely popular, and "full of so good variety, that I cannot be more pleased almost in a comedy"[46]according to Pepys.
[52]

The Prospero in this version is very different from Shakespeare's: Eckhard Auberlen describes him as "... reduced to the

status of a Polonius-like overbusy father, intent on protecting the chastity of his two sexually naive daughters while planning advantageous dynastic marriages for them."[53] Enchanted Island was successful enough to provoke a parody, The Mock Tempest, written by Thomas Duffett for the King's Company in 1675. It opened with what appeared to be a tempest, but turns out to be a riot in a brothel.[54] In the early 18th century, the Dryden/Davenant/Shadwell version dominated the stage. Ariel waswith two exceptions played by a woman, and invariably by a graceful dancer and superb singer. Caliban was a comedian's role, played by actors "known for their awkward figures". In 1756, David Garrick staged another operatic version, a "three-act extravaganza" with music by John Christopher Smith.[55] The Tempest was one of the staples of the repertoire of Romantic Era theatres. John Philip Kemble produced an acting version which was closer to Shakespeare's original, but nevertheless retained Dorinda and Hippolito.[55] Kemble was muchmocked for his insistence on archaic pronunciation of Shakespeare's texts, including "aitches" for "aches". It was said that spectators "packed the pit, just to enjoy hissing Kemble's delivery of 'I'll rack thee with old cramps, / Fill all they bones with aches'."[56] The actor-managers of the Romantic Era established the fashion for opulence in sets and costumes which would dominate Shakespeare performances until the late 19th century: Kemble's Dorinda and Miranda, for example, were played "in white ornamented with spotted furs".[57] In 1757, a year after the debut of his operatic version, David Garrick produced a heavily cut performance of Shakespeare's script at Drury Lane, and it was revived, profitably, throughout the century.

19th century
It was not until William Charles Macready's influential production in 1838 that Shakespeare's text established its primacy over the adapted and operatic versions which had been popular for most of the previous two centuries. The performance

17

was particularly admired for George Bennett's performance as Caliban; it was described by Patrick MacDonnellin his An Essay on the Play of The Tempest published in 1840as "maintaining in his mind, a strong resistance to that tyranny, which held him in the thraldom of slavery".[58] The Victorian Era marked the height of the movement which would later be described as "pictorial": based on lavish sets and visual spectacle, heavily cut texts making room for lengthy scene-changes, and elaborate stage effects.[59] In Charles Kean's 1857 production of The Tempest, Ariel was several times seen to descend in a ball of fire.[60] The hundred and forty stagehands supposedly employed on this production were described by the Literary Gazette as "unseen ... but alas never unheard". Hans Christian Andersen also saw this production and described Ariel as "isolated by the electric ray", referring to the effect of a carbon arc lampdirected at the actress playing the role.[61] The next generation of producers, which includedWilliam Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, returned to a leaner and more text-based style.[62] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became Caliban, not Prospero, who was perceived as the star act of The Tempest, and was the role which the actor-managers chose for themselves. Frank Benson researched the role by viewing monkeys and baboons at the zoo; on stage, he hung upside-down from a tree and gibbered.[63] [edit]20th century and beyond Continuing the late-19th-century tradition, in 1904 Herbert Beerbohm Tree wore fur and seaweed to play Caliban, with waistlength hair andapelike bearing, suggestive of a primitive part-animal part-human stage of evolution.[63] This "missing link" portrayal of Caliban became the norm in productions until Roger Livesey, in 1934, was the first actor to play the role with black makeup. In 1945 Canada Lee played the role at theTheatre Guild in New York, establishing a tradition of black actors taking the role, including Earle Hyman in 1960 and James Earl Jones in 1962.[64] In 1916, Percy MacKaye presented a community masque, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, at the Lewisohn Stadium in New York. Amidst a huge cast of dancers and masquers, the pageant centres on the rebellious nature of Caliban but ends with his plea for more knowledge ("I yearn to build, to be thine Artist / And 'stablish this thine Earth among the stars- / Beautiful!") followed by Shakespeare, as a character, reciting Prospero's "Our revels now are ended" speech.[65] John Gielgud played Prospero numerous times, and called it his favourite role.[66] Douglas Brode describes him as "universally heralded as ... [the 20th] century's greatest stage Prospero".[67] His first appearance in the role was in 1930: he wore a turban, later confessing that he intended to look like Dante.[64] He played the role in three more stage productions, lastly at the Royal National Theatre in 1974.[68] Peter Brook directed an experimental production at the Round House in 1968, in which the text was "almost wholly abandoned" in favour ofmime. According to Margaret Croydon's review, Sycorax was "portrayed by an enormous woman able to expand her face and body to still larger proportions a fantastic emblem of the grotesque ... [who] suddenly ... gives a horrendous yell, and Caliban, with black sweater over his head, emerges from between her legs: Evil is born."[69] In spite of the existing tradition of a black actor playing Caliban opposite a white Prospero, colonial interpretations of the play did not find their way onto the stage until the 1970s.[70] Performances in England directed by Jonathan Miller and by Clifford

18

Williams explicitly portrayed Prospero as coloniser. Miller's production was described, by David Hirst, as depicting "the tragic and inevitable disintegration of a more primitive culture as the result of European invasion and colonisation."[71] Miller developed this approach in his 1988 production at the Old Vic in London, starring Max von Sydow as Prospero. This used a mixed cast made up of white actors as the humans and black actors playing the spirits and creatures of the island. According to Michael Billington, "von Sydow's Prospero became a white overlord manipulating a mutinous black Caliban and a collaborative Ariel keenly mimicking the gestures of the island's invaders. The colonial metaphor was pushed through to its logical conclusion so that finally Ariel gathered up the pieces of Prospero's abandoned staff and, watched by awe-struck tribesmen, fitted them back together to hold his wand of office aloft before an immobilised Caliban. The Tempest suddenly acquired a new political dimension unforeseen by Shakespeare."[72] Psychoanalytic interpretations have proved more difficult to depict on stage.[73] Gerald Freedman's production at the American Shakespeare Theatre in 1979 and Ron Daniels' Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1982 both attempted to depict Ariel and Caliban as opposing aspects of Prospero's psyche. However neither was regarded as wholly successful: Shakespeare Quarterly, reviewing Freedman's production, commented that "Mr. Freedman did nothing on stage to make such a notion clear to any audience that had not heard of it before."[74] In 1988, John Wood played Prospero for the RSC, emphasising the character's human complexity. The Financial Times reviewer described him as "a demented stage manager on a theatrical island suspended between smouldering rage at his usurpation and unbridled glee at his alternative ethereal power".[75] Japanese theatre styles have been applied to The Tempest. In 1988 and again in 1992 Yukio Ninagawa brought his version of The Tempest to the UK. It was staged as a rehearsal of a Noh drama, with a traditional Noh theatre at the back of the stage, but also using elements which were at odds with Noh conventions. In 1992, Minoru Fujita presented a Bunraku (Japanese puppet) version in Osaka and at the Tokyo Globe.[76] Sam Mendes directed a 1993 RSC production in which Simon Russell Beale's Ariel was openly resentful of the control exercised by Alec McCowen's Prospero. Controversially, in the early performances of the run, Ariel spat at Prospero, once granted his freedom.[77] An entirely different effect was achieved by George C. Wolfe in the outdoor New York Shakespeare Festival production of 1995, where the casting ofAunjanue Ellis as Ariel opposite Patrick Stewart's Prospero charged the production with erotic tensions. Productions in the late 20th-century have gradually increased the focus placed on sexual (and sometimes homosexual) tensions between the characters, including Prospero/Miranda, Prospero/Ariel, Miranda/Caliban, Miranda/Ferdinand and even Caliban/Trinculo.[78] The Tempest was performed at the Globe Theatre in 2000 with Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, playing the role as neither male nor female, but with "authority, humanity and humour ... a watchful parent to both Miranda and Ariel."[79] While the audience respected Prospero, Jasper Britton's Caliban "was their man" (in Peter Thomson's words), in spite of the fact that he spat fish at the groundlings, and singled some of them out for humiliating encounters.[80] By the end of 2005, BBC Radio had aired 21 productions of The Tempest, more than any other play by Shakespeare.[81] [edit]Music

19

The Tempest has proved more popular as a subject for composers than most of Shakespeare's plays. Scholar Julie Sanders ascribes this to the "perceived 'musicality' or lyricism" of the play.[82] Two settings of songs from The Tempest which may have been used in performances during Shakespeare's lifetime have survived. These are "Full Fathom Five" and "Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I" in the 1659 publication Cheerful Ayres or Ballads, in which they are attributed toRobert Johnson, who regularly composed for the King's Men.[83] It has been common throughout the history of the play for the producers to commission contemporary settings of these two songs, and also of "Come Unto These Yellow Sands".[84] "Full Fathom Five" and "The Cloud-Capp'd Towers" are two of the Three Shakespeare Songs set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. These were written for a cappella SATB choir in 1951 for the British Federation of Music Festivals, and they remain a popular part of British choral repertoire today.[85] Michael Nyman's Ariel Songs are taken from his score for the film Prospero's Books. The Tempest has also influenced songs written in the folk and hippie traditions: for example, versions of "Full Fathom Five" were recorded byMarianne Faithfull for Come My Way in 1965 and by Pete Seeger for Dangerous Songs!? in 1966.[86] The Decemberists' song "The Island: Come and See/The Landlord's Daughter/You'll Not Feel The Drowning" is thought by many to be based on the story of Caliban and Miranda. The Tempest was a direct thematic inspiration for the progressive power metal concept album Aqua (2010) by Angra.[87] Among those who wrote incidental music to The Tempest were:

[88]

Arthur Sullivan: His graduation piece, completed in 1861, was a set of incidental music to "The Tempest". Revised and expanded, it was performed at The Crystal Palace in 1862, a year after his return to London, and was

an immediate sensation.[89]

Ernest Chausson: in 1888 he wrote incidental music for La tempte, a French translation by Maurice Bouchor.

This is believed to be the first orchestral work that made use of the celesta.[90]

Jean Sibelius: his 1926 incidental music was written for a lavish production at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen.

An epilogue was added for a 1927 performance in Helsinki.[91] He represented individual characters through instrumentation choices: particularly admired was his use of harps and percussion to represent Prospero, said to capture the "resonant ambiguity of the character".[92]

Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Arthur Bliss, Engelbert Humperdinck, Hector Berlioz, Willem Pijper and Henry

Purcell.

At least forty-six operas or semi-operas based on The Tempest exist.[93] In addition to the Dryden/Davenant and Garrick versions mentioned in the "Restoration and 18th century" section above, Frederic Reynolds produced an operatic version in 1821, with music by Sir Henry Bishop. Other pre-20th-century operas based on The Tempest include Fromental Halvy's La Tempesta (1850) and Zdenk Fibich's Boue (1894).

20

In the 20th century, Kurt Atterberg's Stormen premiered in 1948 and Frank Martin's Der Sturm in 1955. Michael Tippett's 1971 opera The Knot Garden, contains various allusions to The Tempest. In Act 3, a psychoanalyst, Mangus, pretends to be Prospero and uses situations from Shakespeare's play in his therapy sessions.[94] John Eaton, in 1985, produced a fusion of live jazz with pre-recorded electronic music, with a libretto by Andrew Porter. Michael Nyman's 1991 opera Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs was first performed as an opera-ballet by Karine Saporta. This opera is unique in that the three vocalists, a soprano, contralto, and tenor, are voices rather than individual characters, with the tenor just as likely as the soprano to sing Miranda, or all three sing as one character.[95] The soprano who sings the part of Ariel in Thomas Ads' 21st-century opera is stretched at the lower end of the register, highlighting theandrogyny of the role.[96] Orchestral works for concert presentation include Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's fantasy The Tempest (1873), Fibich's symphonic poem Boue(1880), John Knowles Paine's symphonic poem The Tempest (1876), Benjamin Dale's overture (1902), Arthur Honegger's orchestral prelude (1923), and Egon Wellesz's Prosperos Beschwrungen (five works 193436). Ballet sequences have been used in many performances of the play since Restoration times.[97] Ludwig van Beethoven's 1802 Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, was given the subtitle "The Tempest" some time after Beethoven's death because, when asked about the meaning of the sonata, Beethoven was alleged to have said "Read The Tempest". But this story comes from his associate Anton Schindler, who is often not trustworthy.[98] [edit]Literature and art Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the earliest poets to be influenced by The Tempest. His "With a Guitar, To Jane" identifies Ariel with the poet and his songs with poetry. The poem uses simple diction to convey Ariel's closeness to nature and "imitates the straightforward beauty of Shakespeare's original songs."[99] Following the publication of Darwin's ideas on evolution, writers began to question mankind's place in the world and its relationship with God. One writer who explored these ideas was Robert Browning, whose poem "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864) sets Shakespeare's character pondering theological and philosophical questions.[100] The French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote a closet drama, Caliban: Suite de La Tempte (Caliban: Sequel to The Tempest), in 1878. This features a female Ariel who follows Prospero back to Milan, and a Caliban who leads a coup against Prospero, after the success of which he actively imitates his former master's virtues.[101] W. H. Auden's "long poem" The Sea and the Mirror takes the form of a reflection by each of the supporting characters of The Tempest on their experiences. The poem takes a Freudian viewpoint, seeing Caliban (whose lengthy contribution is a prose poem) as Prospero's libido.[102] In 1968 Franco-Caribbean writer Aim Csaire published Une Tempte, a radical adaptation of the play for a black audience, in which Caliban is a black rebel and Ariel is mixed-race. The figure of Caliban influenced numerous works of African literature in the 1970s, including pieces byTaban Lo Liyong in Uganda, Lemuel Johnson in Sierra Leone, Ngg wa Thiong'o in Kenya, and David Wallace of Zambia's Do You Love Me, Master?.[103] A similar phenomenon occurred in late 20th-century Canada, where several writers produced works inspired by Miranda, includingThe Diviners by Margaret

21

Laurence, Prospero's Daughter by Constance Beresford-Howe and The Measure of Miranda by Sarah Murphy.[104]Other writers have feminised Ariel (as in Marina Warner's novel Indigo) or Caliban (as in Suniti Namjoshi's sequence of poems Snaphots of Caliban).[105] From the mid-18th century, Shakespeare's plays, including The Tempest, began to appear as the subject of paintings.[106] In around 1735, William Hogarth produced his painting A Scene from The Tempest: "a baroque, sentimental fantasy costumed in the style of Van Dyck and Rembrandt".[106]The painting is based upon Shakespeare's text, containing no representation of the stage, nor of the (Davenant-Dryden centred) stage tradition of the time.[107] Henry Fuseli, in a painting commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1789) modelled his Prospero on Leonardo da Vinci.[108] These two 18th-century depictions of the play indicate that Prospero was regarded as its moral centre: viewers of Hogarth's and Fuseli's paintings would have accepted Prospero's wisdom and authority.[109] John Everett Millais's Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1851) is among the PreRaphaelitepaintings based on the play. In the late 19th century, artists tended to depict Caliban as a Darwinian"missing-link", with fish-like or ape-like features, as evidenced in Noel Paton's Caliban.[101] Charles Knight produced the Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare in eight volumes (183843). The work attempted to translate the contents of the plays into pictorial form. This extended not just to the action, but also to images and metaphors: Gonzalo's line about "mountaineers dewlapped like bulls" is illustrated with a picture of a Swiss peasant with a goitre.[110] In 1908, Edmund Dulac produced an edition of Shakespeare's Comedy of The Tempest with a scholarly plot summary and commentary by Arthur Quiller-Couch, lavishly bound and illustrated with 40 watercolour illustrations. The illustrations highlight the fairy-tale quality of the play, avoiding its dark side. Of the 40, only 12 are direct depictions of the action of the play: the others are based on action before the play begins, or on images such as "full fathom five thy father lies" or "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not".[111] [edit]Screen The Tempest first appeared on the screen in 1905. Charles Urban filmed the opening storm sequence of Herbert Beerbohm Tree's version at Her Majesty's Theatre for a 2-minute flicker, on which individual frames were hand-tinted, long before the invention of colour film. In 1908, Percy Stowe directed a Tempest running a little over ten minutes, which is now a part of the British Film Institute's compilation Silent Shakespeare. Much of its action takes place on Prospero's island before the storm which opens Shakespeare's play. At least two further silent versions, one of them by Edwin Thanhouser, are known to have existed, but have been lost.[112] The plot was adapted for the Western Yellow Sky, directed by William A. Wellman, in 1946.[113] The 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet set the story on the planet Altair IV. Professor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) are the Prospero and Miranda figures. Ariel is represented by the helpful Robbie the Robot, but Caliban is represented by the dangerous and invisible "monster from the id": a projection of Morbius' psyche.[114] In the opinion of Douglas Brode, there has only been one screen "performance" of The Tempest since the silent era: he describes all other versions as "variations". That one performance is the Hallmark Hall of Fame version from 1960, directed

22

by George Schaefer, and starringMaurice Evans, Richard Burton, Lee Remick and Roddy McDowall. Critic Virginia Vaughan praised it as "light as a souffl, but ... substantial enough for the main course."[112] In 1979, animator George Dunning, director of Yellow Submarine, planned an animated version of The Tempest; but died while working on it. Also in 1979, Derek Jarman produced a homoerotic Tempest which used Shakespeare's language, but was most notable for its deviations from Shakespeare. One scene shows a corpulent and naked Sycorax (Claire Davenport) breastfeeding her adult son Caliban (Jack Birkett). The film reaches its climax with Elisabeth Welch belting out Stormy Weather.[115] The central performances were Toyah Willcox' Miranda andHeathcote Williams' Prospero, a "dark brooding figure who takes pleasure in exploiting both his servants"[116] Paul Mazursky's 1982 modern-language adaptation of The Tempest, with Philip (Prospero) as a disillusioned New York architect who retreats to a lonely Greek island with his daughter Miranda, dealt frankly with the sexual tensions of the characters' isolated existence. The Caliban character, the goatherd Kalibanos, asks Philip which of them is going to have sex with Miranda.[116] John Cassavetes played Philip, Raul JuliaKalibanos, and Molly Ringwald Miranda. Susan Sarandon plays the Ariel character, Philip's frequently bored girlfriend Aretha. The film has been criticised as "overlong and rambling", but also praised for its good humour, especially in a sequence in which Kalibanos' and his goats dance toKander and Ebb's New York, New York.[117] John Gielgud has written that playing Prospero in a film of The Tempest was his life's ambition. Over the years, he approached Alain Resnais,Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles to direct.[118] Eventually, the project was taken on by Peter Greenaway, who directedProspero's Books (1991) featuring "an 87-year-old John Gielgud and an impressive amount of nudity".[119] Prospero is reimagined as the author of The Tempest, speaking the lines of the other characters, as well as his own.[67] Although the film was acknowledged as innovative in its use of Quantel Paintbox to create visual tableaux, resulting in "unprecedented visual complexity",[120] critical responses to the film were frequently negative: John Simon called it "contemptible and pretentious".[121] Closer to the spirit of Shakespeare's original, in the view of critics such as Brode, is Leon Garfield's abridgement of the play for S4C's 1992Shakespeare: The Animated Tales series. The 29-minute production, directed by Stanislav Sokolov and featuring Timothy West as the voice of Prospero, used stop-motion puppets to capture the fairy-tale quality of the play.
[122]

Disney's animated feature Pocahontas has been described as a "politically corrected" Tempest.[123] Another "offbeat

variation" (in Brode's words) was produced for NBC in 1998: Jack Bender's The Tempest featured Peter Fonda as Gideon Prosper, a Southern slave-owner forced off his plantation by his brother shortly before the Civil War. A magician who has learned his art from one of his slaves, Prosper uses his magic to protect his teenage daughter and to assist the Union Army.
[124]

The PBS series Wishbone featured a television adaptation of "The Tempest" in its episode "Shakespaw" with Wishbone as Ariel.

23

In Julie Taymor's 2010 film version of The Tempest, Prospero is a woman named Prospera, played by Dame Helen Mirren.

Gaius Julius Caesar[2] (Classical Latin: [a.i.s ju.l.s kaj.sar],

[3]

July 100 BC[4] 15 March 44 BC) [5] was a Roman

general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. In 60 BC, Caesar, Crassus and Pompey formed a political alliance that was to dominate Roman politics for several years. Their attempts to amass power through populist tactics were opposed by the conservative elite within the Roman Senate[citation needed], among them Cato the Younger with the frequent support of Cicero. Caesar's conquest of Gaul, completed by 51 BC, extended Rome's territory to the English Channel and the Rhine. Caesar became the first Roman general to cross both when he built a bridge across the Rhine and conducted the first invasion of Britain. These achievements granted him unmatched military power and threatened to eclipse Pompey's standing. The balance of power was further upset by the death of Crassus in 53 BC. Political realignments in Rome finally led to a standoff between Caesar and Pompey, the latter having taken up the cause of the Senate. Ordered by the Senate to stand trial in Rome for various charges, Caesar marched on Rome with one legionlegio XIIIfrom Gaul to Italy, crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC. [6] This sparked a civil war from which he emerged as the unrivaled leader of the Roman world. After assuming control of government, he began extensive reforms of Roman society and government. He centralised the bureaucracy of the Republic and was eventually proclaimed "dictator in perpetuity". A group of senators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus, assassinated the dictator on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BC, hoping to restore the constitutional government of the Republic. However, the result was a series of civil wars, which ultimately led to the establishment of the permanent Roman Empire by Caesar's adopted heir Octavius (later known as Augustus). Much of Caesar's life is known from his own accounts of his military campaigns, and other contemporary sources, mainly the letters and speeches of Cicero and the historical writings of Sallust. The later biographies of Caesar by Suetonius and Plutarch are also major sources.

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Early life and career
Caesar was born into a patrician family, the gens Julia, which claimed descent from Iulus, son of the legendary Trojan prince Aeneas, supposedly the son of the goddess Venus.[7] The cognomen "Caesar" originated, according to Pliny the Elder, with an ancestor who was born by caesarean section (from the Latin verb to cut, caedere, caes-).[8] The Historia Augustasuggests three alternative explanations: that the first Caesar had a thick head of hair (Latin caesaries); that he had bright grey eyes (Latin oculis caesiis); or that he killed an elephant (caesai in Moorish) in battle. [9]Caesar issued coins featuring images of elephants, suggesting that he favored this interpretation of his name. Despite their ancient pedigree, the Julii Caesares were not especially politically influential. Caesar's father, also called Gaius Julius Caesar, governed the province of Asia,[10] while his mother, Aurelia Cotta, came from an influential family. Little is recorded of Caesar's childhood. [11] Caesar's formative years were a time of turmoil. There were several wars from 91 BC to 82 BC, although from 82 BC to 80 BC, the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla was purging Rome of his political enemies. Domestically, Roman politics was bitterly divided. In 85 BC, Caesar's father died suddenly[12] so at sixteen Caesar was the head of the family. The following year he was nominated to be the new high priest of Jupiter.[13] Since the holder of that position not only had to be a patrician but also be married to a patrician, he broke off his engagement to a plebeian girl he had been betrothed to since boyhood, and married Lucius Cinna's daughter Cornelia.[14] Then, having broughtMithridates to terms, Sulla returned to Rome and had himself appointed to the revived office of dictator. [15] Sulla's proscriptions saw hundreds of his political enemies killed or exiled. Caesar, as the nephew of Marius and son-in-law of Cinna, was targeted. He was stripped of his inheritance, his wife's dowry and his priesthood, but he refused to divorce Cornelia and was forced to go into hiding. The threat against him was lifted by the intervention of his mother's family, which included supporters of Sulla, and the Vestal Virgins. Sulla gave in reluctantly, and is said to have declared that he saw many a Marius in Caesar. [11] Caesar left Rome and joined the army, where he won the Civic Crown for his part in an important siege. On a mission to Bithynia to secure the assistance of King Nicomedes's fleet, he spent so long at his court that rumors of an affair with the king arose, which Caesar would vehemently deny for the rest of his life.[16] Ironically, the loss of his priesthood had allowed him to pursue a military career, as the high priest of Jupiter was not permitted to touch a horse, sleep three nights outside his own bed or one night outside Rome, or look upon an army.[17] Hearing of Sulla's death in 78 BC, Caesar felt safe enough to return to Rome. Lacking means since his inheritance was confiscated, he acquired a modest house in a lower-class neighborhood of Rome. [18] Instead, he turned to legal advocacy. He became known for his exceptional oratory, accompanied by impassioned gestures and a high-pitched voice, and ruthless prosecution of former governors notorious for extortion and corruption. On the way across the Aegean Sea,[19] Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held prisoner. [20] He maintained an attitude of superiority throughout his captivity. When the pirates thought to demand a ransom of twenty talents of silver, he insisted they ask for fifty.[21][22] After the ransom was paid, Caesar raised a fleet, pursued and captured the pirates, and imprisoned them. He had them crucified on his own authority, as he had promised while in captivity [23]a promise the pirates had taken as a joke. As a sign of leniency, he first had their throats cut. He was soon called back into military action in Asia, raising a band of auxiliaries to repel an incursion from the east. [citation needed] On his return to Rome, he was elected military tribune, a first step in a political career. He was electedquaestor for 69 BC, [24] and during that year he delivered the funeral oration for his aunt Julia. His wife, Cornelia, also died that year. [25] After her funeral, in the spring or early summer of 69 BC, Caesar went to serve his quaestorship in Spain.[26] While there he is said to have encountered a statue of Alexander the Great, and realized with dissatisfaction he was now at an age when Alexander had the world at his feet, while he had achieved comparatively little. On his return in 67 BC, [27] he married Pompeia, a granddaughter of Sulla, whom he later divorced. [28] In 63 BC, he ran for election to the post of Pontifex Maximus, chief priest of the Roman state religion. He ran against two powerful senators. There were accusations of bribery by all sides. Caesar won comfortably, despite his opponents' greater experience and standing. [29] When Cicero, who was consul that year, exposed Catiline's conspiracy to seize control of the republic, several senators accused Caesar of involvement in the plot. [30] After his praetorship, Caesar was appointed to govern Spain, but he was still in considerable debt and needed to satisfy his creditors before he could leave. He turned to Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of Rome's richest men. In return for political support in his opposition to the interests of Pompey,

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Crassus paid some of Caesar's debts and acted as guarantor for others. Even so, to avoid becoming a private citizen and thus be open to prosecution for his debts, Caesar left for his province before his praetorship had ended. In Spain, he conquered two local tribes and was hailed as imperator by his troops, reformed the law regarding debts, and completed his governorship in high esteem.[31] As imperator, Caesar was entitled to a triumph. However, he also wanted to stand for consul, the most senior magistracy in the republic. If he were to celebrate a triumph, he would have to remain a soldier and stay outside the city until the ceremony, but to stand for election he would need to lay down his command and enter Rome as a private citizen. He could not do both in the time available. He asked the senate for permission to stand in absentia, but Cato blocked the proposal. Faced with the choice between a triumph and the consulship, Caesar chose the consulship. [32]

Consulship and military campaigns

Main articles: Military campaigns of Julius Caesar and First Triumvirate In 60 BC, Caesar sought election as consul for 59 BC, along with two other candidates. The election was sordid even Cato, with his reputation for incorruptibility, is said to have resorted to bribery in favor of one of Caesar's opponents. Caesar won, along with conservative Marcus Bibulus.[33] Caesar was already in Crassus' political debt, but he also made overtures to Pompey. Pompey and Crassus had been at odds for a decade, so Caesar tried to reconcile them. The three of them had enough money and political influence to control public business. This informal alliance, known as the First Triumvirate ("rule of three men"), was cemented by the marriage of Pompey to Caesar's daughter Julia.[34] Caesar also married again, this time Calpurnia, who was the daughter of another powerful senator. [35] Caesar proposed a law for the redistribution of public lands to the poor, a proposal supported by Pompey, by force of arms if need be, and by Crassus, making the triumvirate public. Pompey filled the city with soldiers, a move which intimidated the triumvirate's opponents. Bibulus attempted to declare the omens unfavorable and thus void the new law, but was driven from the forum by Caesar's armed supporters. His bodyguards had theirceremonial axes broken, two high magistrates accompanying him were wounded, and he had a bucket of excrement thrown over him. In fear of his life, he retired to his house for the rest of the year, issuing occasional proclamations of bad omens. These attempts to obstruct Caesar's legislation proved ineffective. Roman satirists ever after referred to the year as "the consulship of Julius and Caesar." [36] When Caesar was first elected, the aristocracy tried to limit his future power by allotting the woods and pastures of Italy, rather than the governorship of a province, as his military command duty after his year in office was over.[37] With the help of political allies, Caesar later overturned this, and was instead appointed to govern Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and Illyricum (southeastern Europe), with Transalpine Gaul (southern France) later added, giving him command of four legions. The term of his governorship, and thus his immunity from prosecution, was set at five years, rather than the usual one. [38] When his consulship ended, Caesar narrowly avoided prosecution for the irregularities of his year in office, and quickly left for his province. [39]

Conquest of Gaul
Main article: Gallic Wars Caesar was still deeply in debt, and there was money to be made as a governor, whether by extortion[40] or by military adventurism. Caesar had four legions under his command, two of his provinces bordered on unconquered territory, and parts of Gaul were known to be unstable. Some of Rome's Gallic allies had been defeated by their rivals, with the help of a contingent of Germanic tribes. The Romans feared these tribes were preparing to migrate south, closer to Italy, and that they had warlike intent. Caesar raised two new legions and defeated these tribes. [41] In response to Caesar's earlier activities, the tribes in the north-east began to arm themselves. Caesar treated this as an aggressive move and, after an inconclusive engagement against the united tribes, he conquered the tribes piecemeal. Meanwhile, one of his legions began the conquest of the tribes in the far north (directly opposite Britain).[42] During the spring of 56 BC, the Triumvirate held a conference, as Rome was in turmoil and Caesar's political alliance was coming undone. The meeting renewed the Triumvirate and extended Caesar's governorship for another five years. [43] The conquest of the north was soon completed, while a few pockets of resistance remained. [44] Caesar now had a secure base from which to launch an invasion of Britain. In 55 BC, Caesar repelled an incursion into Gaul by two Germanic tribes, and followed it up by building a bridge across the Rhine and making a show of force in Germanic territory, before returning and dismantling the bridge. Late that summer, having subdued two other tribes, he crossed into Britain, claiming that the Britons had aided one of his enemies the previous year possibly the Venetiof Brittany.[45] His intelligence information was poor, and although he gained a beachhead on the coast, he could not advance further, and returned to Gaul for the winter. [46] He returned the following year, better prepared and with a larger force, and achieved more. He advanced inland, and established a few alliances. However, poor harvests led to widespread revolt in Gaul, which forced Caesar to leave Britain for the last time. [47] While Caesar was in Britain his daughter Julia, Pompey's wife, had died in childbirth. Caesar tried to re-secure Pompey's support by offering him his great-niece in marriage, but Pompey declined. In 53 BC Crassus was killed leading a failed invasion of the east. Rome was on the edge of civil war. Pompey was appointed sole consul as an emergency measure, and married the daughter of a political opponent of Caesar. The Triumvirate was dead.[48] In 52 BC another, larger revolt erupted in Gaul, led by Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix managed to unite the Gallic tribes and proved an astute commander, defeating Caesar in several engagements, but Caesar's elaborate siege-works at the Battle of Alesia finally forced his surrender. [49] Despite scattered outbreaks of warfare the following year, [50] Gaul was effectively conquered. Plutarch claimed that the army had fought against three million men during the Gallic Wars, of whom one million died, and another million were enslaved. The Romans subjugated 300 tribes and destroyed 800 cities. [51] However, in view of the difficulty in finding accurate counts in the first place, Caesar's propagandistic purposes, and the common exaggeration of numbers in ancient texts, the stated totals of enemy combatants are likely to be too high.

Civil war
Main article: Caesar's Civil War

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In 50 BC, the Senate, led by Pompey, ordered Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome because his term as governor had finished. [52]Caesar thought he would be prosecuted if he entered Rome without the immunity enjoyed by a magistrate. Pompey accused Caesar of insubordination and treason. In January 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon river (the frontier boundary of Italy) with only one legion and ignitedcivil war. Upon crossing the Rubicon, Caesar, according to Plutarch and Suetonius, is supposed to have quoted the Athenian playwrightMenander, in Greek, "the die is cast". [53] Erasmus, however, notes that the more accurate translation of the Greek imperative mood would be "alea icta esto" let the die be cast. [54] Pompey and much of the Senate fled to the south, having little confidence in his newly raised troops. Despite greatly outnumbering Caesar, who only had his Thirteenth Legion with him, Pompey did not intend to fight. Caesar pursued Pompey, hoping to capture him before his legions could escape. [55] Pompey managed to escape before Caesar could capture him. Caesar decided to head for Spain, while leaving Italy under the control of Mark Antony. Caesar made an astonishing 27-day route-march to Spain, where he defeated Pompey's lieutenants. He then returned east, to challenge Pompey in Greece where in July 48 BC at Dyrrhachium Caesar barely avoided a catastrophic defeat. He decisively defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in an exceedingly short engagement later that year. [56] In Rome, Caesar was appointed dictator,[57] with Mark Antony as his Master of the Horse (second in command); Caesar presided over his own election to a second consulship and then, after eleven days, resigned this dictatorship.[57][58] Caesar then pursued Pompey to Egypt, where Pompey was soon murdered. [59] Caesar then became involved with an Egyptian civil war between the child pharaoh and his sister, wife, and co-regent queen, Cleopatra. Perhaps as a result of the pharaoh's role in Pompey's murder, Caesar sided with Cleopatra; he is reported to have wept at the sight of Pompey's head, [60] which was offered to him by the pharaoh as a gift. In any event, Caesar withstood the Siege of Alexandria and later he defeated the pharaoh's forces Battle of the Nile in 47 BC and installed Cleopatra as ruler. Caesar and Cleopatra celebrated their victory with a triumphant procession on the Nile in the spring of 47 BC. The royal barge was accompanied by 400 additional ships, and Caesar was introduced to the luxurious lifestyle of the Egyptian pharaohs. Caesar and Cleopatra never married, as Roman law recognized marriages only between two Roman citizens. Caesar continued his relationship with Cleopatra throughout his last marriage, which lasted fourteen years in Roman eyes, this did not constitute adultery and may have fathered a son calledCaesarion. Cleopatra visited Rome on more than one occasion, residing in Caesar's villa just outside Rome across the Tiber.[61] Late in 48 BC, Caesar was again appointed Dictator, with a term of one year.[58] After spending the first months of 47 BC in Egypt, Caesar went to the Middle East, where he annihilated the king of Pontus; his victory was so swift and complete that he mocked Pompey's previous victories over such poor enemies. [62] Thence, he proceeded to Africa to deal with the remnants of Pompey's senatorial supporters. He quickly gained a significant victory in 46 BC over Cato, who then committed suicide. [63] After this victory, he was appointed Dictator for ten years. [64]Nevertheless, Pompey's sons escaped to Spain; Caesar gave chase and defeated the last remnants of opposition in the Battle of Munda in March 45 BC. [65] During this time, Caesar was elected to his third and fourth terms as consul in 46 BC and 45 BC (this last time without a colleague).

Dictatorship and assassination

While he was still campaigning in Spain, the Senate began bestowing honors on Caesar. Caesar had not proscribed his enemies, instead pardoning almost all, and there was no serious public opposition to him. Great games and celebrations were held in April to honor Caesars victory at Munda. Plutarch writes that many Romans found the triumph held following Caesar's victory to be in poor taste, as those defeated in the civil war had not been foreigners, but instead fellow Romans. [66] On Caesar's return to Italy in September 45 BC, he filed his will, naming his grandnephew Gaius Octavius (Octavian) as the heir to everything, including his name. Caesar also wrote that if Octavian died before Caesar did,Marcus Junius Brutus would be the next heir in succession. During his early career, Caesar had seen how chaotic and dysfunctional the Roman Republic had become. The republican machinery had broken down under the weight of imperialism, the central government had become powerless, the provinces had been transformed into independent principalities under the absolute control of their governors, and the army had replaced the constitution as the means of accomplishing political goals. With a weak central government, political corruption had spiraled out of control, and the status quo had been maintained by a corrupt aristocracy, which saw no need to change a system that had made its members rich. [citation needed] Between his crossing of the Rubicon River in 49 BC, and his assassination in 44 BC, Caesar established a new constitution, which was intended to accomplish three separate goals.[67] First, he wanted to suppress all armed resistance out in the provinces, and thus bring order back to the empire. Second, he wanted to create a strong central government in Rome. Finally, he wanted to knit together the entire empire into a single cohesive unit. [67] The first goal was accomplished when Caesar defeated Pompey and his supporters. [67] To accomplish the other two goals, he needed to ensure that his control over the government was undisputed, [68] and so he assumed these powers by increasing his own authority, and by decreasing the authority of Rome's other political institutions. Finally, he enacted a series of reforms that were meant to address several long neglected issues, the most important of which was his reform of the calendar. [citation needed]

Dictatorship
When Caesar returned to Rome, the Senate granted him triumphs for his victories, ostensibly over Gaul, Egypt, Pharnaces and Juba, rather than over his Roman opponents. Not everything went Caesar's way. When Arsinoe IV, Egypt's former queen, was paraded in chains, the spectators admired her dignified bearing and were moved to pity. [69] Triumphal games were held, with beast-hunts involving 400 lions, andgladiator contests. A naval battle was held on a flooded basin at the Field of Mars.[70] At the Circus Maximus, two armies of war captives, each of 2,000 people, 200 horse and 20 elephants, fought to the death. Again, some bystanders complained, this time at Caesar's wasteful extravagance. A riot broke out, and only stopped when Caesar had two rioters sacrificed by the priests on the Field of Mars. [70] After the triumph, Caesar set forth to passing an unprecedented legislative agenda. [70][dubious discuss] He ordered a census be taken, which forced a reduction in the grain dole, and that jurors could only come from the Senate or the equestrian ranks. He passed a sumptuary law that restricted the purchase of certain luxuries. After this, he passed a law that rewarded families for having many children, to speed up the repopulation of Italy. Then he outlawed professional guilds, except those of ancient foundation, since many of these were subversive political clubs. He then passed a term limit law applicable to governors. He passed a debt restructuring law, which ultimately eliminated about a fourth of all debts owed.[70] The Forum of Caesar, with its Temple of Venus Genetrix, was then built, among many other public works. Caesar also tightly regulated the purchase of state-subsidised grain and reduced the number of recipients to a fixed number, all of whom were entered into a special register. [71] From 47 to 44 BC he made plans for the distribution of land to about 15,000 of his veterans. [72] The most important change, however, was his reform of the calendar. The calendar at the

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time was regulated by the movement of the moon, and this had resulted in a great deal of disorder. Caesar replaced this calendar with the Egyptian calendar, which was regulated by the sun. He set the length of the year to 365.25 days by adding an intercalary/leap day at the end of February every fourth year. [73] To bring the calendar into alignment with the seasons, he decreed that three extra months be inserted into 46 BC (the ordinary intercalary month at the end of February, and two extra months after November). Thus, the Julian calendar opened on 1 January 45 BC. [70][73] This calendar is almost identical to the current Western calendar. Shortly before his assassination, he passed a few more reforms. [70] He established a police force, appointed officials to carry out his land reforms, and ordered the rebuilding of Carthage and Corinth. He also extended Latin rights throughout the Roman world, and then abolished the tax system and reverted to the earlier version that allowed cities to collect tribute however they wanted, rather than needing Roman intermediaries. His assassination prevented further and larger schemes, which included the construction of an unprecedented temple to Mars, a huge theater, and a library on the scale of the Library of Alexandria.[70] He also wanted to convert Ostia to a major port, and cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. Militarily, he wanted to conquer the Dacians, Parthians, and avenge the loss at Carrhae. Thus, he instituted a massive mobilization. Shortly before his assassination, the Senate named him censor for life and Father of the Fatherland, and the month of Quintiliswas renamed July in his honor. He was granted further honors, which were later used to justify his assassination as a would-be divine monarch; coins were issued bearing his image and his statue was placed next to those of the kings. He was granted a golden chair in the Senate, was allowed to wear triumphal dress whenever he chose, and was offered a form of semi-official or popular cult, with Mark Antony as his high priest. [70]

Political reforms
Main article: Constitutional Reforms of Julius Caesar The history of Caesar's political appointments is complex and uncertain. Caesar held both the dictatorship and the tribunate, but alternated between the consulship and the Proconsulship.[68] His powers within the state seem to have rested upon these magistracies.[68] He was first appointed dictator in 49 BC possibly to preside over elections, but resigned his dictatorship within eleven days. In 48 BC, he was re-appointed dictator, only this time for an indefinite period, and in 46 BC, he was appointed dictator for ten years. In February 44 BC, one month before his assassination, he was appointed dictator for life. Under Caesar, a significant amount of authority was vested in his lieutenants, [74] mostly because Caesar was frequently out of Italy. [74] In October 45 BC, Caesar resigned his position as sole consul, and facilitated the election of two successors for the remainder of the year which theoretically restored the ordinary consulship, since the constitution did not recognize a single consul without a colleague. [75] In 48 BC, Caesar was given permanent tribunician powers, [76] which made his person sacrosanct and allowed him to veto the Senate, [76] although on at least one occasion, tribunes did attempt to obstruct him. The offending tribunes in this case were brought before the Senate and divested of their office. [76] This was not the first time that Caesar had violated a tribune's sacrosanctity. After he had first marched on Rome in 49 BC, he forcibly opened the treasury although a tribune had the seal placed on it. After the impeachment of the two obstructive tribunes, Caesar, perhaps unsurprisingly, faced no further opposition from other members of the Tribunician College. [76] In 46 BC, Caesar gave himself the title of "Prefect of the Morals", which was an office that was new only in name, as its powers were identical to those of the censors.[76]Thus, he could hold censorial powers, while technically not subjecting himself to the same checks that the ordinary censors were subject to, and he used these powers to fill the Senate with his own partisans. He also set the precedent, which his imperial successors followed, of requiring the Senate to bestow various titles and honors upon him. He was, for example, given the title of "Father of the Fatherland" and "imperator". [74] Coins bore his likeness, and he was given the right to speak first during senate meetings. [74] Caesar then increased the number of magistrates who were elected each year, which created a large pool of experienced magistrates, and allowed Caesar to reward his supporters. [75] Caesar even took steps to transform Italy into a province, and to link more tightly the other provinces of the empire into a single cohesive unit. This addressed the underlying problem that had caused the Social Wardecades earlier, where individuals outside Rome and Italy were not considered "Roman", and thus were not given full citizenship rights. This process, of fusing the entire Roman Empire into a single unit, rather than maintaining it as a network of unequal principalities, would ultimately be completed by Caesar's successor, the emperor Augustus. When Caesar returned to Rome in 47 BC, the ranks of the Senate had been severely depleted, and so he used his censorial powers to appoint many new senators, which eventually raised the Senate's membership to 900.[75] All the appointments were of his own partisans, which robbed the senatorial aristocracy of its prestige, and made the Senate increasingly subservient to him. [77] To minimize the risk that another general might attempt to challenge him, [74] Caesar passed a law that subjected governors to term limits. [74] Near the end of his life, Caesar began to prepare for a war against the Parthian Empire. Since his absence from Rome might limit his ability to install his own consuls, he passed a law which allowed him to appoint all magistrates in 43 BC, and all consuls and tribunes in 42 BC. [75] This, in effect, transformed the magistrates from being representatives of the people to being representatives of the dictator. [75]

Assassination
On the Ides of March (15 March; see Roman calendar) of 44 BC, Caesar was due to appear at a session of the Senate. Mark Antony, having vaguely learned of the plot the night before from a terrified Liberator named Servilius Casca, and fearing the worst, went to head Caesar off. The plotters, however, had anticipated this and, fearing that Antony would come to Caesar's aid, had arranged for Trebonius to intercept him just as he approached the portico of Theatre of Pompey, where the session was to be held, and detain him outside. (Plutarch, however, assigns this action to delay Antony toBrutus Albinus). When he heard the commotion from the senate chamber, Antony fled. [78] According to Plutarch, as Caesar arrived at the Senate, Tillius Cimber presented him with a petition to recall his exiled brother. [79] The other conspirators crowded round to offer support. Both Plutarch and Suetonius say that Caesar waved him away, but Cimber grabbed his shoulders and pulled down Caesar's tunic. Caesar then cried to Cimber, "Why, this is violence!" ("Ista quidem vis est!").[80] At the same time, Casca produced his dagger and made a glancing thrust at the dictator's neck. Caesar turned around quickly and caught Casca by the arm. According to Plutarch, he said in Latin, "Casca, you villain, what are you doing?" [81] Casca, frightened, shouted, "Help, brother!" in Greek (" , ", "adelphe, boethei"). Within moments, the entire group, including Brutus, was striking out at the dictator. Caesar attempted to get away, but, blinded by blood, he tripped and fell; the men continued stabbing him as he lay defenceless on the lower steps of the portico. According to Eutropius, around 60 or more men participated in the assassination. He was stabbed 23 times. [82] According to Suetonius, a physician later established that only one wound, the second one to his chest, had been lethal. [83] The dictator's last words are not known with certainty, and are a contested subject among scholars and historians alike. Suetonius reports that others have said Caesar's last words were the Greek phrase " ;"[84] (transliterated as "Kai su, teknon?": "You , too, child?" in English). [85] However, Suetonius says Caesar said nothing. [80] Plutarch also reports that Caesar said nothing, pulling his toga over his

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head when he saw Brutus among the conspirators. [86] The version best known in the English-speaking world is the Latin phrase "Et tu, Brute?" ("And you, Brutus?", commonly rendered as "You too, Brutus?");[87][88] this derives from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where it actually forms the first half of a macaronic line: "Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar." It has no basis in historical fact and Shakespeare's use of Latin here is not from any assertion that Caesar would have been using the language, rather than the Greek reported by Suetonius, but because the phrase was already popular when the play was written. [89] According to Plutarch, after the assassination, Brutus stepped forward as if to say something to his fellow senators; they, however, fled the building.[90] Brutus and his companions then marched to the Capitol while crying out to their beloved city: "People of Rome, we are once again free!" They were met with silence, as the citizens of Rome had locked themselves inside their houses as soon as the rumor of what had taken place had begun to spread. Caesar's dead body lay where it fell on the Senate floor for nearly three hours before other officials arrived to remove it. Caesar's body was cremated, and on the site of his cremation the Temple of Caesar was erected a few years later (at the east side of the main square of the Roman Forum). Nowadays, only its altar remains. [91][92] A lifesize wax statue of Caesar was later erected in the forum displaying the 23 stab wounds. A crowd who had gathered there started a fire, which badly damaged the forum and neighboring buildings. In the ensuing chaos Mark Antony, Octavian (later Augustus Caesar), and others fought a series of five civil wars, which would end in the formation of the Roman Empire.

Aftermath of the assassination

The result unforeseen by the assassins was that Caesar's death precipitated the end of the Roman Republic. [93] The Roman middle and lower classes, with whom Caesar was immensely popular and had been since before Gaul, became enraged that a small group of aristocrats had killed their champion. Antony, who had been drifting apart from Caesar, capitalised on the grief of the Roman mob and threatened to unleash them on the Optimates, perhaps with the intent of taking control of Rome himself. However, to his surprise and chagrin, Caesar had named his grandnephew Gaius Octavian his sole heir, bequeathing him the immensely potent Caesar name and making him one of the wealthiest citizens in the Republic. [94] The crowd at the funeral boiled over, throwing dry branches, furniture and even clothing on to Caesar's funeral pyre, causing the flames to spin out of control, seriously damaging the Forum. The mob then attacked the houses of Brutus and Cassius, where they were repelled only with considerable difficulty, ultimately providing the spark for the Liberators' civil war, fulfilling at least in part Antony's threat against the aristocrats. [95] However, Antony did not foresee the ultimate outcome of the next series of civil wars, particularly with regard to Caesar's adopted heir. Octavian, aged only 18 when Caesar died, proved to have considerable political skills, and while Antony dealt with Decimus Brutus in the first round of the new civil wars, Octavian consolidated his tenuous position. To combat Brutus and Cassius, who were massing an enormous army in Greece, Antony needed soldiers, the cash from Caesar's war chests, and the legitimacy that Caesar's name would provide for any action he took against them. With the passage of the lex Titia on 27 November 43 BC, [96] the Second Triumvirate was officially formed, composed of Antony, Octavian, and Caesar's loyal cavalry commander Lepidus.[97] It formally deified Caesar as Divus Iulius in 42 BC, and Caesar Octavian henceforth became Divi filius ("Son of a god").[98] Because Caesar's clemency had resulted in his murder, the Second Triumvirate reinstated the practice of proscription, abandoned since Sulla.[99] It engaged in the legallysanctioned murder of a large number of its opponents to secure funding for its forty-five legions in the second civil war against Brutus and Cassius. [100] Antony and Octavius defeated them at Philippi.[101] Afterward, Mark Antony formed an alliance with Caesar's lover, Cleopatra, intending to use the fabulously wealthy Egypt as a base to dominate Rome. A third civil war broke out between Octavian on one hand and Antony and Cleopatra on the other. This final civil war, culminating in the latter's defeat at Actium, resulted in the permanent ascendancy of Octavian, who became the first Roman emperor, under the name Caesar Augustus, a name that raised him to the status of a deity. [102] Julius Caesar had been preparing to invade Parthia, the Caucasus and Scythia, and then march back toGermania through Eastern Europe. These plans were thwarted by his assassination. [103] His successors did attempt the conquests of Parthia and Germania, but without lasting results. Julius Caesar was the first historical Roman to be officially deified. He was posthumously granted the titleDivus Iulius or Divus Julius (the divine Julius or the deified Julius) by decree of the Roman Senate on 1 January 42 BC. Though his temple was not dedicated until after his death, he may have received divine honors during his lifetime: [104] and shortly before his assassination, Mark Antony had been appointed as hisflamen (priest). [105] Both Octavian and Mark Antony promoted the cult of Divus Iulius. After the death of Antony, Octavian, as the adoptive son of Caesar, assumed the title of Divi Filius (son of a god).

Personal life
Health and physical appearance
Based on remarks by Plutarch, [106] Caesar is sometimes thought to have suffered from epilepsy. Modern scholarship is "sharply divided" on the subject, and some scholars believe that he was plagued by malaria, particularly during the Sullan proscriptions of the 80s.[107] Despite the commonly held belief that Caesar suffered from epilepsy, several specialists in headache medicine believe that a more accurate diagnosis would be migraine headache. [108] Caesar had four documented episodes of what may have been complex partial seizures. He may additionally have had absence seizures in his youth. The earliest accounts of these seizures were made by the biographer Suetonius, who was born after Caesar died. The claim of epilepsy is countered among some medical historians by a claim of hypoglycemia, which can cause epileptoid seizures. [109][110][111] In 2003, psychiatrist Harbour F. Hodder published what he termed as the "Caesar Complex" theory, arguing that Caesar was a sufferer oftemporal lobe epilepsy and the debilitating symptoms of the condition were a factor in Caesar's conscious decision to forgo personal safety in the days leading up to his assassination.[112] A line from Shakespeare has sometimes been taken to mean that he was deaf in one ear: Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf.[113] No classical source mentions hearing impairment in connection with Caesar. The playwright may have been making metaphorical use of a passage in Plutarch that does not refer to deafness at all, but rather to a gesture Alexander of Macedon customarily made. By covering his ear, Alexander indicated that he had turned his attention from an accusation in order to hear the defense. [114]

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The Roman historian Suetonius describes Caesar as "tall of stature with a fair complexion, shapely limbs, a somewhat full face, and keen black eyes." [115]

Name and family

Main article: Etymology of the name of Julius Caesar Main article: Julio-Claudian family tree Using the Latin alphabet as it existed in the day of Caesar (i.e., without lower case letters, "J", or "U"), Caesar's name would be rendered "GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR"; the form "CAIVS" is also attested, using the old Roman representation of G by C; it is an antique form of the more common "GAIVS". The standard abbreviation was, and this is not archaic, "C. IVLIVS CAESAR". (The letterform "" is a ligature, which is often encountered in Latin inscriptions where it was used to save space, and is nothing more than the letters "ae".) In Classical Latin, it waspronounced [ajus juljus kajsar] . In the days of the late Roman Republic, many historical writings were done in Greek, a language most educated Romans studied. Young wealthy Roman boys were often taught by Greek slaves and sometimes sent to Athens for advanced training, as was Caesar's principal assassin, Brutus. In Greek, during Caesar's time, his family name was written , reflecting its contemporary pronunciation. Thus, his name is pronounced in a similar way to the pronunciation of the German Kaiser. In Vulgar Latin, the plosive /k/ before front vowels began, due to palatalization, to be pronounced as an affricate hence renderings like [tesar ] in Italian and[tsesar] in German regional pronunciations of Latin, as well as the title of Tsar. With the evolution of the Romance languages, the affricate [ts] became a fricative [s] (thus, [sesar]) in many regional pronunciations, including the French one, from which the modern English pronunciation is derived. The original /k/ is preserved in Norse mythology, where he is manifested as the legendary king Kjrr.[116] Caesar's cognomen would itself become a title; it was greatly promulgated by the Bible, by the famous verse "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's". The title became the German Kaiser and Slavic Tsar/Czar. The last tsar in nominal power was Simeon II of Bulgaria whose reign ended in 1946; for two thousand years after Julius Caesar's assassination, there was at least one head of state bearing his name.

Julio-Claudian family tree

Parents

Sisters

Father Gaius Julius Caesar the Elder Mother Aurelia (related to the Aurelii Cottae)

Wives

Julia Caesaris "Major" (the elder) Julia Caesaris "Minor" (the younger)

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Children

First marriage to Cornelia Cinnilla, from 83 BC until her death in childbirth in 69 or 68 BC Second marriage to Pompeia, from 67 BC until he divorced her around 61 BC Third marriage to Calpurnia Pisonis, from 59 BC until Caesar's death

Julia with Cornelia Cinnilla, born in 83 or 82 BC Caesarion , with Cleopatra VII, born 47 BC. He was killed at age 17 by Caesar's adopted son Octavianus. adopted: Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, his great-nephew by blood, who later became Emperor Augustus. Marcus Junius Brutus: The historian Plutarch notes that Caesar believed Brutus to have been his illegitimate son, as his

mother Servilia had been Caesar's lover during their youth. [117]

Grandchildren

Lovers

Grandson from Julia and Pompey, dead at several days, unnamed.

Cleopatra VII mother of Caesarion Servilia Caepionis mother of Brutus Euno, queen of Mauretania and wife of Bogudes

Notable relatives

Gaius Marius (married to his Aunt Julia) Mark Antony Lucius Julius Caesar Julius Sabinus , a Gaul of the Lingones at the time of the Batavian rebellion of AD 69, claimed to be the great-grandson of Caesar on the

grounds that his great-grandmother had been Caesar's lover during the Gallic war. [118]

Political rumors
Roman society viewed the passive role during sexual activity, regardless of gender, to be a sign of submission or inferiority. Indeed, Suetonius says that in Caesar's Gallic triumph, his soldiers sang that, "Caesar may have conquered the Gauls, but Nicomedes conquered Caesar." [119]According to Cicero, Bibulus, Gaius Memmius, and others (mainly Caesar's enemies), he had an affair with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia early in his career. The tales were repeated, referring to Caesar as the Queen of Bithynia, by some Roman politicians as a way to humiliate him. It is very likely that the rumors were spread only as a form of character assassination; Caesar himself denied the accusations repeatedly throughout his lifetime, and according to Cassius Dio, even under oath on one occasion. [120] This form of slander was popular during this time in the Roman Republic to demean and discredit political opponents. A favorite tactic used by the opposition was to accuse a popular political rival as living a Hellenistic lifestyle based on Greek and Eastern culture, where homosexuality and a lavish lifestyle were more acceptable than in Roman tradition. [citation needed] Catullus wrote two poems suggesting that Caesar and his engineer Mamurra were lovers, [121] but later apologised. [122] Mark Antony charged that Octavian had earned his adoption by Caesar through sexual favors. Suetonius described Antony's accusation of an affair with Octavian as political slander. Octavian eventually became the first Roman Emperor. [123]

Literary works
Caesar was considered during his lifetime to be one of the best orators and authors of prose in Romeeven Cicero spoke highly of Caesar's rhetoric and style. [124] Among his most famous works were his funeral oration for his paternal aunt Julia and his Anticato, a document written to defame Cato and respond to Cicero's Cato memorial. Poems by Caesar are also mentioned in ancient sources. [125] His works other than his war commentaries have been lost, although a few sentences are quoted by other authors.

Memoirs

The Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War), campaigns in Gallia and Britannia during his term as proconsul; and The Commentarii de Bello Civili (Commentaries on the Civil War), events of the Civil War until immediately after Pompey's death in Egypt.

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Other works historically attributed to Caesar, but whose authorship is doubted, are:

De Bello Alexandrino (On the Alexandrine War), campaign in Alexandria; De Bello Africo (On the African War), campaigns in North Africa; and De Bello Hispaniensi (On the Hispanic War), campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula.

These narratives were written and published annually during or just after the actual campaigns, as a sort of "dispatches from the front." Apparently simple and direct in styleto the point that Caesar'sCommentarii are commonly studied by first and second year Latin studentsthey are in fact highly sophisticated tracts, aimed most particularly at the middle-brow readership of minor aristocrats [citation needed] in Rome, Italy, and the provinces.

Legend and legacy

In the Middle Ages Caesar was created a member of the Nine Worthies, a group of heroes encapsulating all the ideal qualities of chivalry.

Chronology of his life

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32

Hamlet
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Set in theKingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudiusfor murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness from overwhelming grief to seething rage and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others."[1]The play was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime[2] and still ranks among his most-performed, topping the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance list since 1879.[3] It has inspired writers from Goethe and Dickens to Joyce and Murdoch, and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella".[4] Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar Franois de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet. He almost certainly created the title role for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time.[5] In the 400 years since, the role has been performed by highly acclaimed actors and actresses from each successive age. Three different early versions of the play are extant, the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604), and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines, and even entire scenes, missing from the others. The play's structure and depth of characterisation have inspired much critical scrutiny. One such example is the centuries-old debate about Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle, which some see as a mere plot device to prolong the action, but which others argue is a dramatization of the complex philosophical and ethical issues that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge, and thwarted desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet's unconscious desires, and feminist critics have re-evaluated and rehabilitated the often maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.

Characters

HamletSon of the former king, and nephew of the present King ClaudiusKing of Denmark, Hamlet's uncle. GertrudeQueen of Denmark, and mother to Hamlet PoloniusLord Chamberlain OpheliaDaughter to Polonius HoratioFriend to Hamlet LaertesSon to Polonius

Osrica Courtier Marcellusan Officer Bernardoan Officer Franciscoa Soldier ReynaldoServant to Polonius Ghost of Hamlet's Father FortinbrasPrince of Norway

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Plot

Voltimand, CorneliusCourtiers

GravediggersA sexton and a clown

Rosencrantz, GuildensternCourtiers, friends to Hamlet

Player King, Player Queen, Lucianus, etc.Players

The protagonist of Hamlet is Prince Hamlet of Denmark, son of deceased King Hamlet and his wife,Queen Gertrude. The story opens on a chilly night at Elsinore, the Danish royal castle. Francisco, one of the sentinels, is relieved of his watch by Bernardo, another sentinel, and exits while Bernardo remains. A third sentinel, Marcellus, enters with Horatio, Hamlet's best friend. The sentinels inform Horatio that they have seen a ghost that looks like the dead King Hamlet. After hearing from Horatio of the Ghost's appearance, Hamlet resolves to see the Ghost himself. That night, the Ghost appears again. It leads Hamlet to a secluded place, claims that it is the actual spirit of his father, and discloses that hethe elder Hamletwas murdered by his brother Claudius pouring poison in his ear. The Ghost demands that Hamlet avenge him; Hamlet agrees, swears his companions to secrecy, and tells them he intends to "put an antic disposition on"[7] (presumably to avert suspicion). Hamlet initially attests to the ghost's reliability, calling him both an "honest ghost" and "truepenny." Later, however, he expresses doubts about the ghost's nature and intent, claiming these as reasons for his inaction. Polonius is Claudius's trusted chief counsellor; Polonius's son, Laertes, is returning to France, and Polonius's daughter, Ophelia, is courted by Hamlet. Both Polonius and Laertes warn Ophelia that Hamlet is surely not serious about her. Shortly afterward, Ophelia is alarmed by Hamlet's strange behaviour, reporting to her father that Hamlet rushed into her room, stared at her, and said nothing. Polonius assumes that the "ecstasy of love"[8] is responsible for Hamlet's "mad" behaviour, and he informs Claudius and Gertrude. Perturbed by Hamlet's continuing deep mourning for his father and his increasingly erratic behaviour, Claudius sends for two of Hamlet's acquaintancesRosencrantz and Guildensternto find out the cause of Hamlet's changed behaviour. Hamlet greets his friends warmly but quickly discerns that they have been sent to spy on him. Together, Claudius and Polonius convince Ophelia to speak with Hamlet while they secretly listen. When Hamlet enters, she offers to return his remembrances, upon which Hamlet questions her honesty and furiously rants at her to "get thee to a nunnery."[9] Hamlet remains uncertain whether the Ghost has told him the truth, but the arrival of a troupe of actors at Elsinore presents him with a solution. He will have them stage a play, The Murder of Gonzago, re-enacting his father's murder and determine Claudius's guilt or innocence by studying his reaction to it. The court assembles to watch the play; Hamlet provides an agitated running commentary throughout. When the murder scene is presented, Claudius abruptly rises and leaves the room, which Hamlet sees as proof of his uncle's guilt. Gertrude summons Hamlet to her closet to demand an explanation. On his way, Hamlet passes Claudius in prayer, but hesitates to kill him, reasoning that death in prayer would send him to heaven. However, it is revealed that the King is not truly praying, remarking that "words" never made it to heaven without "thoughts."[11] An argument erupts between Hamlet

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and Gertrude. Polonius, spying on the scene from behind an arras and convinced that the prince's madness is indeed real, panics when it seems as if Hamlet is about to murder the Queen and cries out for help. Hamlet, believing it is Claudius hiding behind the arras, stabs wildly through the cloth, killing Polonius. When he realises that he has killed Ophelia's father, he is not remorseful, but calls Polonius "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool."[12] The Ghost appears, urging Hamlet to treat Gertrude gently, but reminding him to kill Claudius. Unable to see or hear the Ghost herself, Gertrude takes Hamlet's conversation with it as further evidence of madness. Claudius, now fearing for his life, finds a legitimate excuse to get rid of the prince: he sends Hamlet to England on a diplomatic pretext, accompanied (and closely watched) by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Alone, Claudius discloses that he is actually sending Hamlet to his death. Prior to embarking for England, Hamlet hides Polonius's body, ultimately revealing its location to the King. Upon leaving Elsinore, Hamlet encounters the army of Prince Fortinbras en route to do battle in Poland. Upon witnessing so many men going to their death on the brash whim of an impulsive prince, Hamlet declares, "O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!"[13] At Elsinore, further demented by grief at her father Polonius's death, Ophelia wanders the castle, acting erratically and singing bawdy songs. Her brother, Laertes, returns from France, horrified by his father's death and his sister's madness. She appears briefly to give out herbs and flowers. Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet is solely responsible; then news arrives that Hamlet is still alivea story is spread that his ship was attacked by pirates on the way to England, and he has returned to Denmark. Claudius swiftly concocts a plot to kill his nephew but make it appear to be an accident, taking all of the blame off his shoulders. Knowing of Hamlet's jealousy of Laertes' prowess with a sword, he proposes a fencing match between the two. Laertes, enraged at the murder of his father, informs the king that he will further poison the tip of his sword so that a mere scratch would mean certain death. Claudius, unsure that capable Hamlet could receive even a scratch, plans to offer Hamlet poisoned wine if that fails. Gertrude enters to report that Ophelia has drowned. In the Elsinore churchyard, two "clowns", typically represented as "gravediggers," enter to prepare Ophelia's grave, and, although the coroner has ruled her death accidental so that she may receive Christian burial, they argue about its being a case of suicide. Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with one of them, who unearths the skull of a jester whom Hamlet once knew, Yorick ("Alas, Poor Yorick; I knew him, Horatio."). Ophelia's funeral procession approaches, led by her mournful brother Laertes. Distraught at the lack of ceremony (due to the actually-deemed suicide) and overcome by emotion, Laertes leaps into the grave, cursing Hamlet as the cause of her death. Hamlet interrupts, professing his own love and grief for Ophelia. He and Laertes grapple, but the fight is broken up by Claudius and Gertrude. Claudius reminds Laertes of the planned fencing match. Later that day, Hamlet tells Horatio how he escaped death on his journey, disclosing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been sent to their deaths instead. A courtier, Osric, interrupts to invite Hamlet to fence with Laertes. Despite Horatio's warnings, Hamlet accepts and the match begins. After several rounds, Gertrude toasts Hamletagainst the urgent warning of Claudiusaccidentally drinking the wine he poisoned. Between bouts, Laertes attacks and pierces Hamlet with his

35

poisoned blade; in the ensuing scuffle, Hamlet is able to use Laertes's own poisoned sword against him. Gertrude falls and, in her dying breath, announces that she has been poisoned. In his dying moments, Laertes is reconciled with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's murderous plot. Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword, and then forces him to drink from his own poisoned cup to make sure he dies. In his final moments, Hamlet names Prince Fortinbras of Norway as the probable heir to the throne, since the Danish kingship is an elected position, with the country's nobles having the final say. Horatio attempts to kill himself with the same poisoned wine but is stopped by Hamlet, as he will be the only one left alive who can give a full account of the story. When Fortinbras arrives to greet King Claudius, he encounters the deadly scene: Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet are all dead. Horatio asks to be allowed to recount the tale to "the yet unknowing world," and Fortinbras orders Hamlet's body borne off in honour. Sources Hamlet-like legends are so widely found (for example in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia) that the core "hero-as-fool" theme is possibly Indo-European in origin.[15] Several ancient written precursors to Hamlet can be identified. The first is the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki. In this, the murdered king has two sonsHroar and Helgi who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's.[16] The second is the Roman legend of Brutus, recorded in two separate Latin works. Its hero, Lucius ("shining, light"), changes his name and persona to Brutus ("dull, stupid"), playing the role of a fool to avoid the fate of his father and brothers, and eventually slaying his family's killer, King Tarquinius. A 17th-century Nordic scholar, Torfaeus, compared the Icelandic hero Amlodi and the Spanish hero Prince Ambales (from the Ambales Saga) to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Similarities include the prince's feigned madness, his accidental killing of the king's counsellor in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of his uncle.[17] Many of the earlier legendary elements are interwoven in the 13th-century Vita Amlethi ("The Life of Amleth")[18] by Saxo Grammaticus, part of Gesta Danorum.[19] Written in Latin, it reflects classical Roman concepts of virtue and heroism, and was widely available in Shakespeare's day.[20] Significant parallels include the prince feigning madness, his mother's hasty marriage to the usurper, the prince killing a hidden spy, and the prince substituting the execution of two retainers for his own. A reasonably faithful version of Saxo's story was translated into French in 1570 by Franois de Belleforest, in his Histoires tragiques.[21] Belleforest embellished Saxo's text substantially, almost doubling its length, and introduced the hero's melancholy.[22] According to a popular theory, Shakespeare's main source is believed to be an earlier playnow lostknown today as the Ur-Hamlet. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd or even William Shakespeare himself, the Ur-Hamlet would have been in performance by 1589 and the first version of the story known to incorporate a ghost.[23] Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men, may have purchased that play and performed a version for some time, which Shakespeare reworked.
[24]

Since no copy of the Ur-Hamlet has survived, however, it is impossible to compare its language and style with the known

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works of any of its putative authors. Consequently, there is no direct evidence that Kyd wrote it, nor any evidence that the play was not an early version of Hamlet by Shakespeare himself. This latter ideaplacing Hamlet far earlier than the generally accepted date, with a much longer period of developmenthas attracted some support, though others dismiss it as speculation.[25] The upshot is that scholars cannot assert with any confidence how much material Shakespeare took from theUr-Hamlet (if it even existed), how much from Belleforest or Saxo, and how much from other contemporary sources (such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy). No clear evidence exists that Shakespeare made any direct references to Saxo's version. However, elements of Belleforest's version which are not in Saxo's story do appear in Shakespeare's play. Whether Shakespeare took these from Belleforest directly or through the Ur-Hamlet remains unclear.[26] Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at age eleven. Conventional wisdom holds that Hamlet is too obviously connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the time.[27] However, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the coincidence of the names and Shakespeare's grief for the loss of his son may lie at the heart of the tragedy. He notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford neighbour after whom Hamnet was named, was often written as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable.[28]Sadler's first name is spelled "Hamlett" in Shakespeare's will.[29] Scholars have often speculated that Hamlet's Polonius might have been inspired by William Cecil (Lord Burghley)Lord High Treasurer and chief counsellor to Queen Elizabeth I. E. K. Chambers suggested Polonius's advice to Laertes may have echoed Burghley's to his son Robert Cecil. John Dover Wilson thought it almost certain that the figure of Polonius caricatured Burleigh, while A. L. Rowse speculated that Polonius's tedious verbosity might have resembled Burghley's .
[30]

Lilian Winstanley thought the name Corambis (in the Ist Quarto) did suggest Cecil and Burghley.[31] Harold Jenkins

criticised the idea of any direct personal satire as "unlikely" and "uncharacteristic of Shakespeare",[32] while G.R.Hibbard hypothesized that differences in names (Corambis/Polonius:Montano/Raynoldo) between the First Quarto and other editions might reflect a desire not to offend scholars at Oxford University.[33] Date "Any dating of Hamlet must be tentative", cautions the New Cambridge editor, Phillip Edwards.[34]The earliest date estimate relies on Hamlet's frequent allusions to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, itself dated to mid-1599.[35] The latest date estimate is based on an entry, of 26 July 1602, in theRegister of the Stationers' Company, indicating that Hamlet was "latelie Acted by the Lo: Chamberleyne his servantes". In 1598, Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia, a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named. Hamlet is not among them, suggesting that it had not yet been written. As Hamlet was very popular, Bernard Lott, the series editor of New Swan, believes it "unlikely that he [Meres] would have overlooked ... so significant a piece".[36]

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The phrase "little eyases"[37] in the First Folio (F1) may allude to the Children of the Chapel, whose popularity in London forced the Globe company into provincial touring. This became known as theWar of the Theatres, and supports a 1601 dating.[36] A contemporary of Shakespere's, Gabriel Harvey, wrote a marginal note in his copy of the 1598 edition of Chaucer's works, which some scholars use as dating evidence. Harvey's note says that "the wiser sort" enjoy Hamlet, and implies that the Earl of Essexexecuted in February 1601 for rebellionwas still alive. Other scholars consider this inconclusive. Edwards, for example, concludes that the "sense of time is so confused in Harvey's note that it is really of little use in trying to date Hamlet". This is because the same note also refers to Spenser and Watson as if they were still alive ("our flourishing metricians"), but also mentions "Owen's new epigrams", published in 1607.[38] Three early editions of the text have survived, making attempts to establish a single "authentic" text problematic.[39] Each is different from the others:[40]

First Quarto (Q1) In 1603 the booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundell published, and Valentine

Simmesprinted the so-called "bad" first quarto. Q1 contains just over half of the text of the later second quarto.

Second Quarto (Q2) In 1604 Nicholas Ling published, and James Roberts printed, the second quarto. Some

copies are dated 1605, which may indicate a second impression; consequently, Q2 is often dated "1604/5". Q2 is the longest early edition, although it omits 85 lines found in F1 (most likely to avoid offending James I'squeen, Anne of Denmark).[41]

First Folio (F1) In 1623 Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard published the First Folio, the first edition of

Shakespeare's Complete Works.[42]

Other folios and quartos were subsequently publishedincluding John Smethwick's Q3, Q4, and Q5 (161137)but these are regarded as derivatives of the first three editions.[42] Early editors of Shakespeare's works, beginning with Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Lewis Theobald (1733), combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1. Each text contains material that the other lacks, with many minor differences in wording: scarcely 200 lines are identical in the two. Editors have combined them in an effort to create one "inclusive" text that reflects an imagined "ideal" of Shakespeare's original. Theobald's version became standard for a long time,[43] and his "full text" approach continues to influence editorial practice to the present day. Some contemporary scholarship, however, discounts this approach, instead considering "an authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal. ... there are texts of this play but no text".[44] The 2006 publication by Arden Shakespeare of different Hamlet texts in different volumes is perhaps the best evidence of this shifting focus and emphasis.[45] Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare's plays have divided them into five acts. None of the early texts of Hamlet, however, were arranged this way, and the play's division into acts and scenes derives from a 1676 quarto. Modern editors generally

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follow this traditional division, but consider it unsatisfactory; for example, after Hamlet drags Polonius's body out of Gertrude's bedchamber, there is an act-break[46] after which the action appears to continue uninterrupted.[47] The discovery in 1823 of Q1whose existence had been quite unsuspectedcaused considerable interest and excitement, raising many questions of editorial practice and interpretation. Scholars immediately identified apparent deficiencies in Q1, which was instrumental in the development of the concept of a Shakespearean "bad quarto".[48] Yet Q1 has value: it contains stage directions that reveal actual stage practices in a way that Q2 and F1 do not; it contains an entire scene (usually labelled 4.6)[49] that does not appear in either Q2 or F1; and it is useful for comparison with the later editions. The scene order is more coherent, without the problems of Q2 and F1 of Hamlet seeming to resolve something in one scene and enter the next drowning in indecision. The major deficiency of Q1 is in the language: particularly noticeable in the opening lines of the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy: "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. / To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all: / No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes." Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, by an actor who played a minor role (most likely Marcellus).[50] Scholars disagree whether the reconstruction was pirated or authorised. Another theory, considered by New Cambridge editor Kathleen Irace, holds that Q1 is an abridged version intended especially for travelling productions.[51] The idea that Q1 is not riddled with error but is instead eminently fit for the stage has led to at least 28 different Q1 productions since 1881.[52] Analysis and criticism Main article: Critical approaches to Hamlet Critical history From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of melancholy and insanity, leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama.[53] Though it remained popular with mass audiences, late 17th-century Restorationcritics saw Hamlet as primitive and disapproved of its lack of unity and decorum.
[54]

This view changed drastically in the 18th century, when critics regarded Hamlet as a heroa pure, brilliant young man

thrust into unfortunate circumstances.[55] By the mid-18th century, however, the advent of Gothic literature brought psychological and mystical readings, returning madness and the Ghost to the forefront.[56] Not until the late 18th century did critics and performers begin to view Hamlet as confusing and inconsistent. Before then, he was either mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no in-betweens.[57] These developments represented a fundamental change in literary criticism, which came to focus more on character and less on plot.[58] By the 19th century, Romantic critics valued Hamlet for its internal, individual conflict reflecting the strong contemporary emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in general.[59] Then too, critics started to focus on Hamlet's delay as a character trait, rather than a plot device.[58] This focus on character and internal struggle continued into the 20th century, when criticism branched in several directions, discussed in context and interpretation below. Dramatic structure

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Hamlet departed from contemporary dramatic convention in several ways. For example, in Shakespeare's day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poetics: that a drama should focus on action, not character. In Hamlet, Shakespeare reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies, not the action, that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts. The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of action, except in the "bad" quarto. At one point, as in the Gravedigger scene,[10] Hamlet seems resolved to kill Claudius: in the next scene, however, when Claudius appears, he is suddenly tame. Scholars still debate whether these twists are mistakes or intentional additions to add to the play's theme of confusion and duality.[60] Finally, in a period when most plays ran for two hours or so, the full text ofHamletShakespeare's longest play, with 4,042 lines, totalling 29,551 wordstakes over four hours to deliver.[61] Even today the play is rarely performed in its entirety, and has only once been dramatised on film completely, with Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version. Hamlet also contains a favourite Shakespearean device, a play within the play, a literary device or conceit in which one story is told during the action of another story.[62] Language Compared with language in a modern newspaper, magazine or popular novel, Shakespeare's language can strike contemporary readers as complex, elaborate and at times difficult to understand. Remarkably, it still works well enough in the theatre: audiences at the reconstruction of 'Shakespeare's Globe' in London, many of whom have never been to the theatre before, let alone to a play by Shakespeare, seem to have little difficulty grasping the play's action.[63] Much of Hamlet's language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier. This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. Osric and Polonius, especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius's speech is rich with rhetorical figuresas is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia'swhile the language of Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius's high status is reinforced by using the royal first person plural ("we" or "us"), and anaphora mixed with metaphor to resonate with Greek political speeches.[64] Hamlet is the most skilled of all at rhetoric. He uses highly developed metaphors, stichomythia, and in nine memorable words deploys both anaphora and asyndeton: "to die: to sleep / To sleep, perchance to dream".[65] In contrast, when occasion demands, he is precise and straightforward, as when he explains his inward emotion to his mother: "But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe".[66] At times, he relies heavily on puns to express his true thoughts while simultaneously concealing them.[67] His "nunnery" remarks[68] to Ophelia are an example of a cruel double meaning asnunnery was Elizabethan slang for brothel.[9][69] His very first words in the play are a pun; when Claudius addresses him as "my cousin Hamlet, and my son", Hamlet says as an aside: "A little more than kin, and less than kind."[70] An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention the audience realises that the character's speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly (in character or out) or represent an unspoken thought. An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys, appears in several places in the play. Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: "Th'expectancy and rose of the fair state"; "And I, of ladies most deject and wretched".

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[71]

Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the

play. One explanation may be that Hamlet was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot. Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation.[72] Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet because he "showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings." She gives the example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery", which is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality.[73] Context and interpretation Religious

Written at a time of religious upheaval, and in the wake of the English Reformation, the play is alternately Catholic (or piously medieval) and Protestant (or consciously modern). The Ghost describes himself as being in purgatory, and as dying without last rites. This and Ophelia's burial ceremony, which is characteristically Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections. Some scholars have observed that revenge tragedies come from traditionally Catholic countries, such as Spain and Italy; and they present a contradiction, since according to Catholic doctrine the strongest duty is to God and family. Hamlet's conundrum, then, is whether to avenge his father and kill Claudius, or to leave the vengeance to God, as his religion requires.[74] Much of the play's Protestantism derives from its location in Denmarkboth then and now a predominantly Protestant country, though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the play is intended to mirror this fact. The play does mention Wittenberg, where Hamlet, Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attend university, and where Martin Luther first proposed his 95 theses in 1517, effectively ushering in the Protestant Reformation.[75] In Shakespeare's day Denmark, as the majority of Scandinavia, was Lutheran.[76] Philosophical Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character, expounding ideas that are now described as relativist,existentialist, and sceptical. For example, he expresses a subjectivistic idea when he says to Rosencrantz: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".[77] The idea that nothing is real except in the mind of the individual finds its roots in the Greek Sophists, who argued that since nothing can be perceived except through the sensesand since all individuals sense, and therefore perceive, things differentlythere is no absolute truth, only relative truth.[78] The clearest example of existentialism is found in the "to be, or not to be"[79] speech, where Hamlet uses "being" to allude to both life and action, and "not being" to death and inaction. Hamlet's contemplation of suicide in this scene, however, is less philosophical than religious as he believes that he will continue to exist after death.[80]

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Scholars agree that Hamlet reflects the contemporary scepticism that prevailed in Renaissance humanism.[81] Prior to Shakespeare's time, humanists had argued that man was God's greatest creation, made in God's image and able to choose his own nature, but this view was challenged, notably in Michel de Montaigne's Essais of 1590. Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man" echoes many of Montaigne's ideas, but scholars disagree whether Shakespeare drew directly from Montaigne or whether both men were simply reacting similarly to the spirit of the times.[82] Hamlet's scepticism is juxtaposed in the play with Horatio's more traditional Christian worldview. Despite the friends' close bond, Hamlet counters Horatio's faith with the seemingly agnostic comment, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Psychoanalytic In the first half of the 20th century, when psychoanalysis was at the height of its influence, its concepts were applied to Hamlet, notably bySigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, and Jacques Lacan, and these studies influenced theatrical productions. In his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud's analysis starts from the premise that "the play is built up on Hamlet's hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations".[83] After reviewing various literary theories, Freud concludes that Hamlet has an "Oedipal desire for his mother and the subsequent guilt [is] preventing him from murdering the man [Claudius] who has done what he unconsciously wanted to do".[84] Confronted with his repressed desires, Hamlet realises that "he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish".[83] Freud suggests that Hamlet's apparent "distaste for sexuality"articulated in his "nunnery" conversation with Opheliaaccords with this interpretation.[85][86] John Barrymore's long-running 1922 performance in New York, directed by Thomas Hopkins, "broke new ground in its Freudian approach to character", in keeping with the post-World War I rebellion against everything Victorian.[87] He had a "blunter intention" than presenting the genteel, sweet prince of 19th-century tradition, imbuing his character with virility and lust.[88] Beginning in 1910, with the publication of "The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: Study in Motive,"[89] Ernest Jonesa psychoanalyst and Freud's biographerdeveloped Freud's ideas into a series of essays that culminated in his book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Influenced by Jones's psychoanalytic approach, several productions have portrayed the "closet scene",[90] where Hamlet confronts his mother in her private quarters, in a sexual light. In this reading, Hamlet is disgusted by his mother's "incestuous" relationship with Claudius while simultaneously fearful of killing him, as this would clear Hamlet's path to his mother's bed. Ophelia's madness after her father's death may also be read through the Freudian lens: as a reaction to the death of her hoped-for lover, her father. She is overwhelmed by having her unfulfilled love for him so abruptly terminated and drifts into the oblivion of insanity.[91] In 1937, Tyrone Guthrie directed Laurence Olivier in a Jones-inspired Hamlet at the Old Vic.[92] Olivier later used some of these same ideas in his 1948 film version of the play.

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In the 1950s, Lacan's structuralist theories about Hamlet were first presented in a series of seminars given in Paris and later published in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet". Lacan postulated that the human psyche is determined by structures of language and that the linguistic structures of Hamlet shed light on human desire.[84] His point of departure is Freud's Oedipal theories, and the central theme of mourning that runs through Hamlet.[84] In Lacan's analysis, Hamlet unconsciously assumes the role of phallusthe cause of his inactionand is increasingly distanced from reality "by mourning, fantasy, narcissism and psychosis", which create holes (or lack (manque)) in the real, imaginary, and symbolic aspects of his psyche.[84] Lacan's theories influenced literary criticism of Hamlet because of his alternative vision of the play and his use of semantics to explore the play's psychological landscape.[84] Feminist In the 20th century feminist critics opened up new approaches to Gertrude and Ophelia. New Historicist and cultural materialist critics examined the play in its historical context, attempting to piece together its original cultural environment.
[94]

They focused on the gender system of early modern England, pointing to the common trinity of maid, wife, or widow,

with whores alone outside of the stereotype. In this analysis, the essence of Hamlet is the central character's changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a whore and dishonest with Hamlet. Ophelia, by some critics, can be honest and fair; however, it is virtually impossible to link these two traits, since 'fairness' is an outward trait, while 'honesty' is an inward trait.[95] Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 essay "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" defends Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet. This analysis has been championed by many feminist critics. Heilbrun argued that men have for centuries completely misinterpreted Gertrude, accepting at face value Hamlet's view of her instead of following the actual text of the play. By this account, no clear evidence suggests that Gertrude is an adulteress: she is merely adapting to the circumstances of her husband's death for the good of the kingdom.[96][97] Ophelia has also been defended by feminist critics, most notably Elaine Showalter.[98] Ophelia is surrounded by powerful men: her father, brother, and Hamlet. All three disappear: Laertes leaves, Hamlet abandons her, and Polonius dies. Conventional theories had argued that without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia is driven into madness.[99] Feminist theorists argue that she goes mad with guilt because, when Hamlet kills her father, he has fulfilled her sexual desire to have Hamlet kill her father so they can be together. Showalter points out that Ophelia has become the symbol of the distraught and hysterical woman in modern culture.[100] Influence See also Literary influence of Hamlet Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature.[101] As such, it reverberates through the writing of later centuries. Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional

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accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play.[102] Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, published about 1749, describes a visit to Hamlet by Tom Jones and Mr Partridge, with similarities to the "play within a play".[103] In contrast, Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, written between 1776 and 1796, not only has a production of Hamlet at its core but also creates parallels between the Ghost and Wilhelm Meister's dead father.[103] In the early 1850s, inPierre, Herman Melville focuses on a Hamlet-like character's long development as a writer.[103] Ten years later, Dickens's Great Expectationscontains many Hamlet-like plot elements: it is driven by revenge-motivated actions, contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwitch and Miss Havisham), and focuses on the hero's guilt.[103] Academic Alexander Welsh notes that Great Expectations is an "autobiographical novel" and "anticipates psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet itself".[104] About the same time, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss was published, introducing Maggie Tulliver "who is explicitly compared with Hamlet"[105] though "with a reputation for sanity".[106] L. Frank Baum's first published short story was "They Played a New Hamlet" (1895). When Baum had been touring New York State in the title role, the actor playing the ghost fell through the floorboards, and the rural audience thought it was part of the show and demanded that the actor repeat the fall, because they thought it was funny. Baum would later recount the actual story in an article, but the short story is told from the point of view of the actor playing the Ghost. In the 1920s, James Joyce managed "a more upbeat version" of Hamletstripped of obsession and revenge in Ulysses, though its main parallels are with Homer's Odyssey.[103] In the 1990s, two women novelists were explicitly influenced by Hamlet. In Angela Carter's Wise Children, To be or not to be[107] is reworked as a song and dance routine, and Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince has Oedipal themes and murder intertwined with a love affair between a Hamlet-obsessed writer, Bradley Pearson, and the daughter of his rival.[105] There is the story of the woman who read Hamlet for the first time and said, "I don't see why people admire that play so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together." Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, pg vii, Avenal Books, 1970 Performance history Main articles: Hamlet in performance and Shakespeare in performance Shakespeare's day to the Interregnum Shakespeare almost certainly wrote the role of Hamlet for Richard Burbage. He was the chief tragedian of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, with a capacious memory for lines and a wide emotional range.[5] Judging by the number of reprints, Hamlet appears to have been Shakespeare's fourth most popular play during his lifetimeonly Henry IV Part 1, Richard IIIand Pericles eclipsed it.[2] Shakespeare provides no clear indication of when his play is set; however, as

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Elizabethan actors performed at theGlobe in contemporary dress on minimal sets, this would not have affected the staging.[109] Firm evidence for specific early performances of the play is scant. What is known is that the crew of the ship Red Dragon, anchored off Sierra Leone, performed Hamlet in September 1607;[110] that the play toured in Germany within five years of Shakespeare's death;[111] and that it was performed before James I in 1619 and Charles I in 1637.
[112]

Oxford editor George Hibbard argues that, since the contemporary literature contains many allusions and

references to Hamlet (only Falstaff is mentioned more, from Shakespeare), the play was surely performed with a frequency that the historical record misses.[113] All theatres were closed down by the Puritan government during the Interregnum.[114] Even during this time, however, playlets known as drollswere often performed illegally, including one called The Grave-Makers based on Act 5, Scene 1 of Hamlet.[115] Restoration and 18th century The play was revived early in the Restoration. When the existing stock of pre-civil war plays was divided between the two newly created patent theatre companies, Hamlet was the only Shakespearean favourite that Sir William Davenant's Duke's Company secured.[116] It became the first of Shakespeare's plays to be presented with movable flats painted with generic scenery behind the proscenium arch of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre.[117] This new stage convention highlighted the frequency with which Shakespeare shifts dramatic location, encouraging the recurrent criticisms of his violation of the neoclassical principle of maintaining a unity of place.[118] Davenant cast Thomas Betterton in the eponymous role, and he continued to play the Dane until he was 74.[119] David Garrick at Drury Lane produced a version that adapted Shakespeare heavily; he declared: "I had sworn I would not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act. I have brought it forth without the grave-digger's trick, Osrick, & the fencing match".[120] The first actor known to have played Hamlet in North America is Lewis Hallam. Jr., in the American Company's production in Philadelphia in 1759.[121] John Philip Kemble made his Drury Lane debut as Hamlet in 1783.[122] His performance was said to be 20 minutes longer than anyone else's, and his lengthy pauses provoked the suggestion that "music should be played between the words".[123] Sarah Siddons was the first actress known to play Hamlet; many women have since played him as a breeches role, to great acclaim.[124] In 1748,Alexander Sumarokov wrote a Russian adaptation that focused on Prince Hamlet as the embodiment of an opposition to Claudius's tyrannya treatment that would recur in Eastern European versions into the 20th century.[125] In the years following America's independence, Thomas Apthorpe Cooper, the young nation's leading tragedian, performed Hamlet among other plays at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and at the Park Theatre in New York. Although chided for "acknowledging acquaintances in the audience" and "inadequate memorisation of his lines", he became a national celebrity.[126] 19th century

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From around 1810 to 1840, the best-known Shakespearean performances in the United States were tours by leading London actorsincluding George Frederick Cooke, Junius Brutus Booth,Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kemble. Of these, Booth remained to make his career in the States, fathering the nation's most notorious actor, John Wilkes Booth (who later assassinated Abraham Lincoln), and its most famous Hamlet, Edwin Booth.
[127]

Edwin Booth's Hamlet was described as "like the dark, mad, dreamy, mysterious hero of a poem ... [acted] in an

ideal manner, as far removed as possible from the plane of actual life".[128] Booth played Hamlet for 100 nights in the 1864/5 season at The Winter Garden Theatre, inaugurating the era of long-run Shakespeare in America.[129] In the United Kingdom, the actor-managers of the Victorian era (including Kean, Samuel Phelps, Macready, and Henry Irving) staged Shakespeare in a grand manner, with elaborate scenery and costumes.[130] The tendency of actormanagers to emphasise the importance of their own central character did not always meet with the critics' approval. George Bernard Shaw's praise for Johnston Forbes-Robertson's performance contains a sideswipe at Irving: "The story of the play was perfectly intelligible, and quite took the attention of the audience off the principal actor at moments. What is the Lyceum coming to?"[131] In London, Edmund Kean was the first Hamlet to abandon the regal finery usually associated with the role in favour of a plain costume, and he is said to have surprised his audience by playing Hamlet as serious and introspective.[132] In stark contrast to earlier opulence, William Poel's 1881 production of the Q1 text was an early attempt at reconstructing the Elizabethan theatre's austerity; his only backdrop was a set of red curtains.[133] Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in her popular 1899 London production. In contrast to the "effeminate" view of the central character that usually accompanied a female casting, she described her character as "manly and resolute, but nonetheless thoughtful ... [he] thinks before he acts, a trait indicative of great strength and great spiritual power In France, Charles Kemble initiated an enthusiasm for Shakespeare; and leading members of the Romantic movement such as Victor Hugo andAlexandre Dumas saw his 1827 Paris performance of Hamlet, particularly admiring the madness of Harriet Smithson's Ophelia.[135] In Germany, Hamlet had become so assimilated by the mid-19th century that Ferdinand Freiligrath declared that "Germany is Hamlet".[136] From the 1850s, the Parsi theatre tradition in India transformed Hamlet into folk performances, with dozens of songs added.[137] 20th century .Apart from some western troupes' 19th-century visits, the first professional performance of Hamlet in Japan was Otojiro Kawakami's 1903 Shimpa ("new school theatre") adaptation.[138] Shoyo Tsubouchi translated Hamlet and produced a performance in 1911 that blended Shingeki ("new drama") and Kabuki styles.[138] This hybrid-genre reached its peak in Fukuda Tsuneari's 1955Hamlet.[138] In 1998, Yukio Ninagawa produced an acclaimed version of Hamlet in the style of Ntheatre, which he took to London.[139] Constantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craigtwo of the 20th century's most influential theatre practitioners collaborated on the Moscow Art Theatre's seminal production of 191112.[140] While Craig favoured stylised abstraction, Stanislavski, armed with his 'system,' explored psychological motivation.[141] Craig conceived of the play as

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a symbolist monodrama, offering a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet's eyes alone.[142] This was most evident in the staging of the first court scene.[143] The most famous aspect of the production is Craig's use of large, abstract screens that altered the size and shape of the acting area for each scene, representing the character's state of mind spatially or visualising a dramaturgical progression.[144] The production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre and placed it "on the cultural map for Western Europe".[145] Hamlet is often played with contemporary political overtones. Leopold Jessner's 1926 production at the Berlin Staatstheater portrayed Claudius's court as a parody of the corrupt and fawning court of Kaiser Wilhelm.[146] In Poland, the number of productions of Hamlet has tended to increase at times of political unrest, since its political themes (suspected crimes, coups, surveillance) can be used to comment on a contemporary situation.
[147]

Similarly, Czech directors have used the play at times of occupation: a 1941 Vinohrady Theatre production

"emphasised, with due caution, the helpless situation of an intellectual attempting to endure in a ruthless environment".
[148]

In China, performances of Hamlet often have political significance: Gu Wuwei's 1916 The Usurper of State Power,

an amalgam of Hamlet andMacbeth, was an attack on Yuan Shikai's attempt to overthrow the republic. In 1942, Jiao Juyin directed the play in a Confucian temple inSichuan Province, to which the government had retreated from the advancing Japanese.[149] In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of theprotests at Tiananmen Square, Lin Zhaohua staged a 1990 Hamlet in which the prince was an ordinary individual tortured by a loss of meaning. In this production, the actors playing Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius exchanged roles at crucial moments in the performance, including the moment of Claudius's death, at which point the actor mainly associated with Hamlet fell to the ground.

Notable stagings in London and New York include Barrymore's 1925 production at the Haymarket; it influenced subsequent performances by John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier.[150] Gielgud played the central role many times: his 1936 New York production ran for 136 performances, leading to the accolade that he was "the finest interpreter of the role since Barrymore".
[151]

Although "posterity has treated Maurice Evansless kindly", throughout the 1930s and 1940s he was regarded by many as the

leading interpreter of Shakespeare in the United States and in the 1938/9 season he presented Broadway's first uncut Hamlet, running four and a half hours.[152] Olivier's 1937 performance at the Old Vic Theatre was popular with audiences but not with critics, with James Agate writing in a famous review in The Sunday Times, "Mr. Olivier does not speak poetry badly. He does not speak it at all.".[153] In 1937 Tyrone Guthrie directed the play at Elsinore, Denmark with Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Vivien Leigh as Ophelia. In 1963, Olivier directed Peter O'Toole as Hamlet in the inaugural performance of the newly formed National Theatre; critics found resonance between O'Toole's Hamlet and John Osborne's hero, Jimmy Porter, fromLook Back in Anger.
[154]

Richard Burton received his third Tony Award nomination when he played his second Hamlet, his first under John Gielgud's direction, in 1964 in a production that holds the record for the longest run of the play in Broadway history (136 performances). The performance was set on a bare stage, conceived to appear like a dress rehearsal, with Burton in a black v-neck sweater, and Gielgud himself tape-recorded the voice for the Ghost (which appeared as a

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looming shadow). It was immortalised both on record and on a film that played in US theatres for a week in 1964 as well as being the subject of books written by cast members William Redfield and Richard L. Sterne. Other New York portrayals of Hamlet of note include that of Ralph Fiennes's in 1995 (for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor) which ran, from first preview to closing night, a total of one hundred performances. About the Fiennes Hamlet Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that it was "...not one for literary sleuths and Shakespeare scholars. It respects the play, but it doesn't provide any new material for arcane debates on what it all means. Instead it's an intelligent, beautifully read..."[155] Stacy Keach played the role with an all-star cast at Joseph Papp's Delacorte Theatre in the early 70's, with Colleen Dewhurst's Gertrude, James Earl Jones's King, Barnard Hughes's Polonius, Sam Waterston's Laertes and Raul Julia's Osric. Sam Waterston later played the role himself at the Delacorte for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the show transferred to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1975 (Stephen Lang played Bernardo and other roles). Stephen Lang's Hamlet for the Roundabout Theatre Company in 1992 received positive reviews, and ran for sixty-one performances. David Warner played the role with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1965.William Hurt (at Circle Rep Off-Broadway, memorably performing "To Be Or Not to Be" while lying on the floor), Jon Voight at Rutgers, andChristopher Walken (fiercely) at Stratford CT have all played the role, as has Diane Venora at the Public Theatre. Off Broadway, the Riverside Shakespeare Company mounted an uncut first folio Hamlet in 1978 at Columbia University, with a playing time of under three hours.[156] In fact,Hamlet is the most produced Shakespeare play in New York theatre history, with sixty-four recorded productions on Broadway, and an untold number Off Broadway.[157] Ian Charleson performed Hamlet from 9 October to 13 November 1989, in Richard Eyre's production at the Olivier Theatre, replacing Daniel Day-Lewis, who had abandoned the production. Seriously ill from AIDS at the time, Charleson died eight weeks after his last performance. Fellow actor and friend, Sir Ian McKellen, said that Charleson played Hamlet so well it was as if he had rehearsed the role all his life; McKellen called it "the perfect Hamlet".[158]
[159]

The performance garnered other major accolades as well, some critics echoing McKellen in calling it the definitive

Hamlet performance.[160] 21st century Hamlet continues to be staged regularly in Britain, with actors such as Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant, Angela Winkler, Samuel West andChristopher Eccleston performing the lead role.[161][162][163][164] In May 2009, Hamlet opened with Jude Law in the title role at the Donmar Warehouse West End season at Wyndham's Theatre. The production officially opened on 3 June and ran through 22 August 2009.[165][166] A further production of the play ran at Elsinore Castle in Denmark from 2530 August 2009.[167] The Jude Law Hamlet then moved to Broadway, and ran for 12 weeks at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York.[168][169] Screen performances Main article: Hamlet on screen

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The earliest screen success for Hamlet was Sarah Bernhardt's five-minute film of the fencing scene,[170]produced in 1900. The film was a crude talkie, in that music and words were recorded on phonograph records, to be played along with the film.[171] Silent versions were released in 1907, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1917, and 1920.[171] In the 1920 version, Asta Nielsen played Hamlet as a woman who spends her life disguised as a man.[171] Laurence Olivier's 1948 moody black-and-white Hamlet won best picture and best actor Oscars, and is still, as of 2011, the only Shakespeare film to have done so. His interpretation stressed the Oedipal overtones of the play, and cast 28year-old Eileen Herlie as Hamlet's mother, opposite himself, at 41, as Hamlet. Shakespeare experts Sir John Gielgud and Kenneth Branagh consider the definitive rendition of the Bard's tragic tale[173] to be the 1964 Russian film Gamlet (Russian: ) based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and directed by Grigori Kozintsev, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich.[174] Innokenty Smoktunovsky was cast in the role of Hamlet; he was particularly praised by Sir Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in a Broadway production at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 19645, the longestrunning Hamlet in the U.S. to date. A live film of the production was produced using "Electronovision", a method of recording a live performance with multiple video cameras and converting the image to film.[175]Eileen Herlie repeated her role from Olivier's film version as the Queen, and the voice of Gielgud was heard as the Ghost. The Gielgud/Burton production was also recorded complete and released on LP by Columbia Records. The first Hamlet in color was a 1969 film directed by Tony Richardson with Nicol Williamson as Hamlet and Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia. In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have been described as "sensual rather than cerebral",[176] cast Mel Gibsonthen famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon moviesin the title role of his 1990 version, and Glenn Closethen famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attractionas Gertrude.[177] In contrast to Zeffirelli, whose Hamlet was heavily cut, Kenneth Branagh adapted, directed, and starred in a 1996 version containing every word of Shakespeare's play, combining the material from the F1 and Q2 texts. Branagh's Hamlet runs for around four hours.[178] Branagh set the film with late 19th-century costuming and furnishings;[179] and Blenheim Palace, built in the early 18th century, became Elsinore Castle in the external scenes. The film is structured as an epic and makes frequent use of flashbacks to highlight elements not made explicit in the play: Hamlet's sexual relationship with Kate Winslet's Ophelia, for example, or his childhood affection for Yorick (played by Ken Dodd).[180] In 2000, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet set the story in contemporary Manhattan, with Ethan Hawke playing Hamlet as a film student. Claudius (played by Kyle MacLachlan) became the CEO of "Denmark Corporation", having taken over the company by killing his brother.[181] Notable made-for-television productions of Hamlet include those starring Christopher Plummer (1964), Richard Chamberlain (1970; Hallmark Hall of Fame), Derek Jacobi (1980; Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC), Kevin Kline (1990), Campbell Scott (2000) and David Tennant (2009; Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC).[182]

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There have also been several films that transposed the general storyline of Hamlet or elements thereof to other settings. There have also been many films which included performances of scenes from Hamlet as a play-within-a-film. See Hamlet on screen#Adaptations and Hamlet on screen#Theatrical performances within films for further details. Stage pastiches There have been various "derivative works" of Hamlet which recast the story from the point of view of other characters, or transpose the story into a new setting or act as sequels or prequels to Hamlet. This section is limited to those written for the stage. The best-known is Tom Stoppard's 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which retells many of the events of the story from the point of view of the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well as giving them a backstory of their own. The play was nominated for eight Tony Awards, and won four: Best Play, Scenic and Costume Design, and Producer; the director and the three leading actors were nominated but did not win. It also won Best Play from the New York Drama Critics Circle in 1968, and Outstanding Production from the Outer Critics Circle in 1969. Several times since 1995, the American Shakespeare Center has mounted repertories that included both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with the same actors performing the same roles in each; in their 2001 and 2009 seasons the two plays were "directed, designed, and rehearsed together to make the most out of the shared scenes and situations".[183] W.S. Gilbert wrote a comic play titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in which Guildenstern helps Rosencrantz vie with Hamlet to make Ophelia his bride. Lee Blessing's Fortinbras is a comical sequel to Hamlet in which all the deceased characters come back as ghosts. The New York Timesreviewed the play saying it is "scarcely more than an extended comedy sketch, lacking the portent and linguistic complexity of Tom Stoppard'sRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Fortinbras operates on a far less ambitious plane, but it is a ripping yarn and offers Keith Reddin a role in which he can commit comic mayhem."[184] Heiner Mller's cutting-edge drama "The Hamletmachine" was first produced in Paris by director Jean Jourdheuil in 1979 and swiftly became a classic of postmodern drama. This play in turn inspired Giannina Braschi's dramatic novel "United States of Banana," which takes place at the Statue of Liberty in post-9/11 New York City. In it, Hamlet, Zarathustra, and Giannina are on a quest to free the Puerto Rican prisonerSegismundo from the dungeon of Liberty, where Segismundo's father, Basilio, the King of the United States of Banana, imprisoned him for the crime of having been born. The work intertwines the plots and characters of Calderon de la Barca's "Life is a Dream" with Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Caridad Svich's 12 Ophelias (a play with Broken Songs) includes elements of the story of Hamlet but focuses on Ophelia. In Svich's play, Ophelia is resurrected and rises from a pool of water, after her death in Hamlet. The play is a series of scenes and songs, and was first staged at public swimming pool in Brooklyn.[185] Heidi Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times said of the play "Far more surreal and twisted than Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are

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Dead, 12 Ophelias is a reminder of just how morphable and mysterious Shakespeare's original remains."[186]Other characters are renamed: Hamlet is Rude Boy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are androgynous helpers known simply as R and G, Gertrude is the madam of a brothel, Horatio becomes H and continues to be Hamlet's best friend/confidante, and a chorus of Ophelias serves as guide. A new character, Mina, is introduced, and she is a whore in Gertrude's brothel. David Davalos' Wittenberg is a "tragical-comical-historical" prequel to Hamlet that depicts the Danish prince as a student at Wittenberg University (now known as the University of Halle-Wittenberg), where he is torn between the conflicting teachings of his mentors John Faustusand Martin Luther. The New York Times reviewed the play saying "Mr. Davalos has molded a daft campus comedy out of this unlikely convergence," [187] and nytheatre's review said the playwright "has imagined a fascinating alternate reality, and quite possibly, given the fictional Hamlet a back story that will inform the role for the future.

A Mother's Day Play, in One Act Girl, says to her mother: "Do you mind that there weren't any gifts for Mother's Day?" Mom: "No, not really. I didn't expect anything. I would have been happy just to get cards from everyone." Girl: "I told him to do one, but he's sooooo selfish! He drew other things and watched TV." Mom: "He's still a little boy and he doesn't understand its meaning to me. I already knew that, but I have to admit, I was still a little disappointed." Girl: "Daddy should have made him!" Mom: "Well, that's another story. We'll leave it there until you understand more about people and the reason they do what they do." There's something called psychology that helps you understand why. Have you ever heard of psychology? Girl: Yes, it's the name of your favourite magazine. Mom laughs, and says "Yes and it's the name for a science that you can study or learn from observing, like, the difference between expecting something and hoping for it." Girl: "That sounds confusing. Is that like hoping you would get a nice card from all of us and expecting that you wouldn't get a present? 'Cause you said you didn't expect a present, but maybe you hoped for one." Mom: "How old are you? I think we'll leave the subject of emotional intelligence out of it today. That comes from a science too." Girl: "I thought science was about making things with liquid and gasses in beakers to see if they bubble up or go flat, and taking samples on the moon, or in a river. It's like what doctors study to find cures." Mom: "That too."

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mahasweta devis mother of 1084: a narrative of healing By rananayar 1 Comment Categories: Uncategorized Abstract In the first half of the paper, I offer explanation as to why Ive chosen to digress from the theme of the seminar. Thereafter, I go on to discuss four types of narratives that help us in historicizing the feminist discourse. After situating this particular novel within the total corpus of Mahasweta Devi, I offer a reading of this novel as a narrative of healing. In the process, I do not simply define the concept but also discuss how it deviates from other forms of narrative. My methodology in this paper is partly structuralist and partly post-structuralist, as I approach narratives first to construct and classify and then deconstruct them. Text of the Essay: Before I start postulating the hypothesis proposed in this paper, Id like to make a few preliminary observations by way of explanation, if not clarification. The title of my paper is bound to raise eyebrows, as it apparently doesnt conform to the theme of the seminar. Not only have I taken the liberty to discuss the work of Mahasweta Devi, who by no stretch of imagination could be described as an Indian English writer, (only as a Bengali or an Indian writer), but I have also not focused upon the images of woman as I was expected to. Let me say that both these choices have resulted not from an oversight but from a carefully worked out strategic, ideological move. Let me first explain the dynamics of this move. By choosing to read this paper on the novel of Mahasweta Devi, Im raising basic questions about the way in which relationships between the English and Bengali, centre and margin, metropolitan and moffusil are essentially mediated in our context. Moreover, this would also foreground the politics of exclusion that often operates in our context in relation to the regional writers, especially when they are pitted against the canonical Indian English writers. It really doesnt take much to become a canonical writer within the range of Indian English fiction. Arundhati Roy has apparently made it on the basis of her solo effort. (Even within the domain of Indian English fiction, which is hardly homogenous

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and unified, one may further make distinction in terms of male and female writers, with muchtoo-obvious conclusions about exclusionary politics.) Its significant that this national seminar is being held in a moffusil town like Ludhiana. Had it been somewhere in Delhi, Bombay or Kolkatta, Id have still understood the rationale behind this exclusive focus upon Indian writing in English. In view of the location of the seminar, the neglect of the regional literatures becomes all the more glaring and pronounced. Particularly because the present venue did have the inherent potential of turning into a site of contesting, conflicting ideologies of languages, cultures and discourses, which given the theme of the seminar now has a very little chance of being realized. This is what makes the absence of our regional literatures from the seminar all the more distressing and agonizing. Let me now turn to the other fancy phrase images of woman. I was particularly struck by the word images, which despite its plurality, has this uncanny tendency to stabilize and fossilize whatever it describes. The etymology of the word image can easily be traced back to iconography and therefore to the realm of religious discourse. Any attempt to create a feminist discourse around the notion of images of woman is bound to be counter-productive, as itd only result in giving legitimacy to the traditional or stereotypical role/function of women. As the images are already fixed in time, space, history and culture, any attempt to construct them in context of the fictional works is not likely to provide the cutting edge to the feminist discourse. My understanding of the feminist discourse is that it constantly seeks to interrogate, overturn and undermine all stereotypical representations of women, located both in the patriarchal and matrilineal discourses. To me it appears that if feminist discourse is to constitute itself as a resistance, though not as a reactionary movement, then rather than deliberate over the images of woman, itd be much more profitable to historicize this discourse in terms of different narrative possibilities that are either available or are exercised by the women writers for narrativizing their stories. Before I proceed any further, Id like to hypothesize, certainly not with the intention of essentializing, four different possibilities with regard to women and the narrativization of their stories. First is the narrative of oppression or captivity, which may be created by a male or a female, and which may in turn impose restrictions upon a woman, projecting her as a traditionbound creature, not a person, defined stereotypically and symptomatically in terms of social,

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historical and cultural forces. Second is the narrative of self-liberation, which projects the woman as a social rebel, who raises a banner of revolt against the tyranny of social laws, conventions and standards, defining her distinctive, sometimes existential value-system in the process. Third is the narrative of emancipation, within which woman becomes an instrument of change and so works not just toward her own liberation but that of her race, religion, community or sisterhood, too. Fourth is the narrative of healing, strategically positioned half way between the narrative of oppression and the narrative of self-liberation, which helps a woman ultimately become a person or an individual. Constituting an important stage in the evolution of womans consciousness, this narrative presupposes that much before a woman is able to raise the banner of revolt, she needs to recover from several inflictions of the narrative of oppression. For this reason, the narrative of healing is an intermediate form of narrative, which looks back to the narrative of oppression and forward to the narrative of liberation. Though it combines the elements of both, it is unable to acquire the character or function of either. Despite that, it often transcends the limitations of both. Both as a writer and as a social activist, Mahasweta Devi has always positioned herself neither fully within the domain of her bhadralok, bourgeoisie background nor within the space of tribals, among whom and for whom she does most of her work. Situating herself in the third space, she has always tried to mediate the differences and negotiate the troubling questions arising from the clash and conflict between the familiar, civilized world of the bhadraloks and the less known, primitive, subliminal world of the tribals. In a conversation with Gayatri Spivak, she is believed to have stated: the tribals and the mainstream have always been parallel. There has never been a meeting point. The mainstream simply doesnt understand the parallel. No wonder, her interventions as a writer, journalist or an activist have been somewhat in the nature of an interlocutor who, gifted with a social conscience and commitment, is forever seeking to create newer meeting points, forever building bridges across the parallel lines. This explains to a large extent why the intermediate form of narrative of healing has almost become the stock-in-trade of Mahasweta, who heals as she narrativizes and narrativizes as she constructs the discourse of healing.

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Mother of 1084 (orig. Hajar Chaurasi Maa) is essentially such a narrative of healing, positioned strategically both within the realm of Mahaswetas corpus of work (in her literary oeuvre consisting of forty one novels, fifteen short story collections, some plays, five childrens short stories and two historical biographies) and that of Indian fiction, not necessarily of the Indian English variety. Originally written as a story for the periodical Prasad in 1972 and adapted for the stage by the writer herself in 1973, it grew into a full-scale novel a year later in 1974. (Govid Nihalani made it into a film, too, in 1997). In its journey of rapid transformation from a play into an extended narrative, Mother of 1084 has, interestingly enough, sought to reverse the traditional mode of adaptation, in which its often drama that originates or grows out of a familiar or popular story, legend or myth. The revolutionary potential of this narrative is, therefore, inscribed in the very process of its creation. Not without a reason has Mahasweta described it as a narrative about the awakening of an apolitical mother. Focalized around Sujata, a middle-aged woman belonging to a bhadralok, bourgeoisie Calcutta family, narrative of Mother of 1084 is strikingly rich in its layered intensity and complexity. Born into a conservative, affluent family, Sujata is allowed to do her B.A. so that it helps her marriage prospects, but is ultimately married off to Divyanath Chatterjee, a Chartered Accountant, despite the fact that his financial situation is far from encouraging. In thirty-four years of their married life, Sujata gives birth to four children, two sons (Jyoti and Brati) and two daughters (Nipa and Tuli). When the novel opens, two of her children are already married, Jyoti to Bina and Nipa to Amrit. In the eyes of the world, all of them are leading perfectly happy and settled lives, but as Sujata goes on to discover later, this happiness is only skin-deep. Significantly, Sujata makes this and several other such discoveries only after the sudden and mysterious death of Brati, her younger son, with whom she had always shared a very special relationship. For instance, she discovers that all of thirty-four years of her married life, she has been living a lie as her husband, being an incorrigible philanderer, always cheated on her with his mothers and worse still, his childrens tacit approval. If he fixed up a petty bank job for her when Brati was barely three years old, it wasnt out of any consideration for her economic independence, but essentially to help the family tide over a temporary financial mess. And as soon as the tide turns, he wants her to give up the job, something Sujata simply refuses to do. She also discovers that her children, too, are leading

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lives very similar to her own. If there is someone who has dared to be different, its Brati. Sullenly rebellious, right from his childhood Brati has made no secret of his disregard, even contempt, for his familial code and value-system. Turning his back upon this decadent and defunct code, Brati decides to join the Naxalite movement sweeping through the state of West Bengal in late 1960s and early 1970s. Unaware of his secret mission, Sujata is not even able to dissuade her son from taking the plunge. During his period of struggle, he comes into contact with a young girl, Nandini, who is also a member of the underground movement and with whom he shares his vision of a new world order. On being betrayed by one of his comrades, who is bought off by the state, Brati and three of his close associates, Somu, Parth and Laltu, are brutally murdered by the goons hired by police. Later, the police call up his father, asking him to come and identify the dead body of his son, who, has in the meantime been divested of his identity as a person, and given another dehumanized identity as corpse number 1084. Not only does the father refuse to go, but he also forbids other family members from doing so. Outraged at the manner in which his associates, his immediate family and the state have abandoned the dead Brati, his mother, Sujata decides to go, throwing all pretensions to false social respectability and the fear of public censure to winds. In a way, Mother of 1084 is a story of Sujatas multiple oppressions within a stifling, familial, patriarchal and feudal order. However, it could also be read as a story of how Sujata moves out of her cocoon of social respectability and civilized faade, only to discover the little known, primitive, underground world of the Naxalites or that of her son, about whom she knew very little while he was alive. Going beyond, its also a story of how an apolitical mother, ultimately pushed over the threshold, is compelled to recognize the basic human need to formulate or re-formulate her moral/political or ideological position in a crass narcissistic, utterly commercial world of bhadraloks such as Chatterjees. If its any indication of what Mahasweta actually wanted to communicate, Id like to believe, her position is unambiguously clear. Its only in the process of formulating or defining ones moral/political, ideological position that an individual could possibly hope to heal several inflictions of oppression, or prepare himself/herself to fight the mechanics of oppression at personal or collective level, thus paving the way for self-liberation.

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Its important to point out here that this particular work of Mahasweta does stand apart from the rest of her oeuvre, in more ways than one. Unlike some of her earlier short narratives such asStandayini, Draupadi and Gohumni, which are focalized around the tribal women, this particular novella is centred on an upper middle-class, bourgeoisie, apolitical woman. Moreover, unlike so many of her stories, which by virtue of their location in the oral/folk tradition often betray stark simplicity of the folk narrative, Mother of 1084 possesses a rare sophistication in its handling of the temporal/spatial design as well as in the complex structuration of the events/situations. Conceived on the lines of Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, the entire action of this narrative, too, is confined to a single day. And if the comparison is extended a little further, it also makes use of stream of consciousness technique the way Virginia Woolf often does. The only difference is that Mahasweta has schematically divided the entire span of twenty-four hours into four timeframes viz., dawn, afternoon, evening and night, one succeeding the other. Superficially, it may even be seen as an oppressive, linear narrative that has been so designed as to project the multiple oppressions Sujata is made to suffer in the Chatterjee household. But a closer examination shows how the linearity is constantly ruptured and disrupted through a series of memory snapshots and flashbacks, which not only help Sujata in the reclaiming her personal memory, but also provide her the much-needed psychic healing. By thus consciously disturbing the chronological, sequential and linear pattern of the narrative, Mahasweta Devi is clearly pointing out that the narrative of Mother of 1084 is anything but a narrative of oppression. As Sujata ultimately collapses into a heap, much before she can walk out on her husband, unlike Noras in A Dolls House, hers is not a narrative of self-liberation either. Each of the four chapters in the narrative marks a new stage in the evolution of Sujatas consciousness, as it enables her to re-order her fragmented and chaotic life in search of a cohesive identity. Each time she visits either her own past or that of Brati, Somus mother or Nandini, her long-suppressed personal loss/grief is slowly released into the ever-widening, eddying spirals of collective framework of betrayal, guilt and suffering. Now whether its a question of becoming acutely conscious of other peoples suffering or that of her own situation, or simply gaining a more enlightened understanding of the circumstances that compelled Brati to make the kind of choices he did, all of these do facilitate Sujatas transformation. From a

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weak-willed, hopelessly dependent and a non-assertive moral coward, Sujata is transformed into a morally assertive, politically enlightened and a socially defiant individual. The novel begins on the dawn of January 17, the day Sujatas youngest daughter Tuli is to be engaged to Toni Kapadia, a Sweden based exporter. As her son Brati was born on the same day and died barely two years ago on the night of January 16, Sujata cannot help but walk down the memory lane. As a new beginning threatens to collapse into the memory of a tragic end, Sujatas mind races back to the day Brati had come into her world. She remembers how she had packed up her bag, hired a taxi and rushed to the hospital on her own, with no assistance from her mother-in-law or husband. Indifference of her husband, hostility of her mother-in-law and her own isolation in the Chatterjee household hit her in a single momentary flash. With epiphanic clarity, it dawns on her that her husband only lusted after her, never loved her; he was willing to impregnate her with child after child, but was never around to own up responsibility for her. Soon after marriage, he had begun to run a secret liaison with a typist in his office, for whom he had later rented out an apartment, too. As a result, all her children were born out of a combination of lust, hatred and self-recrimination. But Bratis case was somewhat different. On learning that Bratis life was in danger, her heart had melted with maternal affection, thus forging a special bond with him while he was still in her womb. He was a fear-stricken child, who clung to his mother for security and comfort and was often dubbed by her father as Mamas boy. With equal clarity, she remembers how twenty years later, the news of Bratis death had thrown the settled life of Chatterjees into a state of turmoil and confusion. Disowned by his family, Brati had died in a state of disgrace, so much so that the family had refused to cremate him, even locked up all his memories into an attic room, not even allowing Sujata the luxury of articulating her grief. Now Sujata realizes that her son was no criminal, as his only crime was that he refused to accept the code of a decadent society. She also realizes that death is the only punishment for those who lose faith in the system. (p. 27). In the first chapter, significantly titled Dawn, Sujata primarily returns to her interior, private world of personal suffering, torture, betrayal and loneliness. Negotiating the inner space/time in relation to her immediate familial situation, she becomes aware of how she and Brati were not just fellow sufferers but also soul mates.

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In the second chapter, Afternoon, Sujatas visit to the bank to get jewellery from the locker is only a pretext for her intended visit to the house of Somus mother. A close associate of Brati, Somu had been killed in the same encounter as him. More significantly, before his sudden, mysterious disappearance and later death, Brati had spent his lifes last night in Somus house. While Sujata goes to Somus mother with the specific aim of retrieving the memories of Bratis last few hours, it turns out to be her entry and then initiation into another world altogether, which simply is not within the range of her conception or comprehension. It is the world of world of primitive squalor, filth, poverty, degradation and subhuman existence that only hovers tentatively on the margins of bhadraloks consciousness. Breaking the glass ceiling of her cloistered, though unprotected existence in a false, hypocritical world of bhadraloks, Sujata enters into the little known world of slum dwellers. The sight of Somus ageing mother, her disgruntled daughter and that of their ramshackle tenement with a straw roof is enough to complete the rituals of initiation. While talking to her, she suddenly discovers that Somus mother had known the spontaneous, tingling laughter of Brati, something she as his biological mother, had also not known ever. It was only in company of his associates that Brati recovered his primeval innocence and spontaneity temporarily, as he otherwise maintained a studied faade in the presence of his family. Across the class and the caste divide, a strange bond develops between two suffering mothers, enabling Sujata to see the chaotic nature of her personal loss, suffering and grief within a much wider framework of social and historical injustice and/or denial. Recovering from her over-romanticized, narcissistic notions of self-pity and grief, Sujata suffers the reality assault, internalizes the sufferings of those less privileged than her, and thus heals herself, at least partly, through gestures of empathy and compassion. This process of healing is not only about recovering memory, personal and collective, but is equally about becoming a moral/political being. For Mahasweta Devi, political naivet is as much a sin and a social crime as is political indifference or an immoral political choice. For this reason, Sujatas healing process runs a complete circle only in the third chapter, titled Evening, when she visits Nandini, who apart from being Bratis comrade-in-arms was also his beloved. Its Nandini who reconstructs for Sujata all the events leading up to Bratis betrayal and murder. In the process, she also initiates Sujata into the little known world of the

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underground movement, explaining to her the logic for an organized rebellion, giving her first hand account of state repression and its multiple failures. Its through Nandini that Sujata is finally able to understand the reasons for Bratis political convictions and his rejection of the bourgeoisie code. All this leaves her so completely bewildered that she openly admits to Nandini, I didnt really know Brati. (p. 87). Mahasweta Devi has captured the impact of Sujatas meeting with Nandini in very poetic terms. Commenting upon it, she says: With the flow of time, the grief and pain settle into layers of sedimentation. Then one day, penetrating these layers, new buds sprout forth, stretching out their little fingers. These fingers ache to touch the sky. The buds of hope, sorrow, joy and bliss the buds with little aching fingers! (p. 81). Healing is possible only because the dynamics of grief, loss and pain is finally understood and accepted by Sujata; in doing so, she manages to break the vicious cycle, even transcends it. Once healing is over, it remains to be demonstrated how far Sujata could go now in readjusting her priorities and re-ordering her life. In the last section of the novel titled Night, therefore, we meet a transformed Sujata, one who is more self-assured, morally confident and politically sensitive. She decides to leave the house in which Brati never felt at home, where he wasnt valued while he was alive, nor his memory respected after his death. Having found a soul mate in Brati, she turns her back on Divyanath and his decadent value-system. Bound by a sense of moral responsibility, she does go through all the rituals and ceremonies connected with Tulis engagement, but during the party, she maintains stiff, studied silence. Her insistence on wearing a plain, white saree for the party is also a significant gesture. Though she had earlier committed all her jewellery to Tuli, now she changes her mind, refusing to part with what her father had given her, only passing on Tuli what Divyanath had gifted her with. Had Sujata been somewhat younger like Nora, she would have possibly made a dramatic gesture of shutting the door in her husbands face. But being physically weak and fragile, (for a few years, she had living with a rotten appendix inside her system), and traumatized by her younger sons death and subsequent repression of grief, she simply gives up on life. When she screams and collapses into a heap, her husband is quick to speculate that her appendix has burst. Whatever the symbolic overtones of his statement, she certainly succumbs to the slow process of inner/outer rot and decay. Finally, as she herself says, Now that Brati is dead, I,

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too, wouldnt like to go on living. She recovers her humanity, but loses her will to live and survive. Had she lived, hers would have been a narrative of self-liberation or even that of emancipation. But as it stands, it ends up essentially as an intermediate form, as a narrative of healing. In this bi-focal narrative, time constantly swings back and forth, and so does the pendulum of two interconnected, intertwined lives, that of Sujata and her son, Brati. Interestingly, it is death that unites them both, irrevocably asserting the authenticity of their lives, too. For death, as the existentialists believe, is the ultimate form of transcendence. Not only does it put us beyond the pale of class or caste conflict, but also dissolves the compulsions of politics or history into an endless spiral of nothingness. In this realization lies our survival, or perhaps our redemption, too. ____________________________________

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