They are the play’s only perfectly symmetrical pair they stand for difference in perfect accord, a world that can successfully make unity out of disparity, and yet they are wholly contemptible.

Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz…

Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern. They are the perfect pair, nearly twins who can tell them apart?Ĭlaudius. To approach obliquely, consider the tragedy’s comic-relief villains, or rather henchmen to the main villain, the sycophantic and hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Unless we are satisfied that the social, political, and metaphysical world in which we find ourselves makes sense and can appease our desires, we are all the children of this prince who died before he could reproduce anything but his skepticism, disgust, and spoiled faith, which are his bequest to us.īut let’s not look directly at this black sun (“Not so, my lord I am too much i’ the sun”), lest we be blinded. Hamlet, the son who cannot fill his father’s armor, the poet and playwright who would rather compose a play than plot revenge, the inward emigrant who sniffs something rotten in the state, the maddened misogynist whose abuse compels his spurned lover to become a mad artist in her turn-it is Hamlet that and who taught the Romantics and the modernists, the Marxists and the feminists, everything they know. Why is this bizarre, disorderly, long, and poorly transmitted tragedy from the turn of the 17th century the central work of the western literary tradition, its hero the keystone in the arch of modern literature? Because the distance he created between himself and the world is the chasm across which the serious artist has ever after beheld society-not as celebrant bard (Homer) or religious preceptor (Dante), but rather as jeering fool or insurgent radical.

Shakespeare william hamlet