'Hamlet ... made another thing' : an examination of adapted versions of Hamlet

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of three centuries of adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet and of how artistic considerations and political events affected the adaptors' decisions in choosing and altering Hamlet, and of how the adaptations, in turn, may have influenced dramatic values and increased public awareness of political and social mores. Hamlet was chosen for examination because its enduring popularity has provided numerous alterations and adaptations for study and because the play itself deals with art and politics. Hamlet alters a play, The Murder of Gonzago, in an attempt to test whether or not his uncle is guilty of regicide. Hamlet also gives explicit instructions to the players as to how this play should be acted. Chapter one of this thesis looks at the following Restoration and eighteenth-century alterations of Hamlet: the 1676, 1703, 1718, and 1751 texts of Hamlet which were published by the Cornmarket Press in 1969 and David Garrick's alteration of Hamlet. Chapter two examines the following nineteenth-century burlesques of Hamlet, all of which are included in Stanley Wells's Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, Volume I-IV (London: Diploma Press, 1977-8): John Poole's Hamlet Travestie (1810), Charles Beckington's Hamlet the Dane (1847), Hamlet Travestie (attributed to Francis Talfourd, 1849), A Thin Slice of Hamlet! (anon., 1863), W.S. Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1874), and A.C. Hilton's Hamlet, or Not Such a Fool as He Looks (1882). Chapter three is a survey of twentieth-century Hamlet s and a discussion of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Dogg's Hamlet; Cahoot's Macbeth (1979), Jumpers (1972), and Travesties (1975) and of Charles Marowitz Hamlet (1963) as they relate to Shakespeare's Hamlet.