I would love someday to write a book about the influences of Hamlet on world cultures and on later dramas. There have been hundreds (at least) of “Hamlet Plays” since the original’s premiere in 1600. What is it about the figure of Hamlet that keeps artists and philosophers coming back to him again and again for models of their own consciousnesses?
I might argue, perhaps, that the interpretive openness of Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character is partly what permits them both to be re-appropriated and always made relevant over time. The fact that we don’t know why he delays allows us to put into his story whatever we want depending on our own social circumstance.
A potential layout of potential chapters:
Chapter 1—Who’s There?
A chapter on the play Hamlet itself, offering some theories about the play’s reception in 1600 England, with its relationship to revenge tragedy. And, were alternate versions of the play performed throughout history, like with Macbeth, so that we need to contextualize what we mean when we say Hamlet in the rest of the study?
Chapter 2—Even though most of the juicy stuff begins in the Romantic age, there must be something interesting in the 17th and 18th centuries. Find it and write about it. Maybe Life is a Dream? I don’t know how influenced that was by Hamlet… ☺
Chapter 3—Russia: The influence of the Hamlet figure from Turgenev (essays, etc) through Chekhov (Ivanov, The Seagull); remember to consider the specific translation Chekhov would have seen when he first saw the play in his homeland.
Chapter 4—Germany: The influence of the Hamlet figure from Kleist (Prince of Homburg) to Schlegel to Hegel to Brecht (Baal); German Romanticism baby!
Chapter 5—Poland and Czechoslovakia: The influence of the Hamlet figure from Witkiewicz (The Water Hen) through Mrosek and Gombrowicz (Amy Boratko, I think, is writing her dissertation on this very subject)
Chapter 6—Postmodern America (or Postmodernism in General?): Consider the proliferation of Hamlet plays since the 1960s, including Ludlam (Stage Blood), Stoppard (Rozencrantz and Guildenstern…) and Müller (Hamletmachine). I’m not sure whether I should focus on America (and consider film versions, etc), English-speaking countries (so include Canada: Slings and Arrows; and Stoppard), or the Western world (thus Müller, though we’d have to differentiate this from Ch. 5). The point of a tighter study could be Hamlet as "Theater" (i.e. when people think of The Theater they think of Hamlet, as though its content were irrelevant); of a broader study it could be Hamlet as Postmodernist (the way he was a Romanticist in Ch. 4)
I don’t know where to put Pirandello, but he goes somewhere in here.
You might end up with an intellectual history of Western Europe just by tracking Hamlet and Hamlet plays throughout!
