Shakespeare and Hamlet Background 
The most influential writer in all of English literature, 
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a successful 
middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, 
England.As the Renaissance spread to other countries in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, a more 
skeptical strain of humanism developed, stressing the 
limitations of human understanding.The scholars who enthusiastically 
rediscovered these classical texts were motivated by an 
educational and political ideal called (in Latin) 
humanitas--the idea that all of the capabilities and virtues 
peculiar to human beings should be studied and developed 
to their furthest extent.For 
instance, whether Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, shares in 


Claudius's guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia 
even as he spurns her, in Act III; whether Ophelia's death is 
suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable 
knowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, 
perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be 
morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle.The 
unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a 
fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life, but the dearth of 
biographical information has left many details of 


Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery.Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various 
editions in the century following his death, and by the early 
eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever 
to write in English was well established.Some 
people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare's 
plays were really written by someone else--Francis Bacon 
and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular 
candidates--but the support for this claim is 
overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken 
seriously by many scholars.A number of 
Shakespeare's plays seem to have transcended even the 
category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to 
profoundly affect the course of Western literature and 
culture ever after.Shakespeare went far 
beyond making uncertainty a personal quirk of Hamlet's, 
introducing a number of important ambiguities into the play 
that even the audience cannot resolve with certainty.By modifying his source materials in this way, Shakespeare 
was able to take an unremarkable revenge story and make it 
resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems 
of the Renaissance.The Renaissance is a vast cultural 
phenomenon that began in fifteenth-century Italy with the 
recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been 
lost to the Middle Ages.The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing 
Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders 
the prince's father, marries his mother, and claims the 
throne.Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story 
entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically minded 
prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of 
his uncle's crime is so uncertain.Hamlet's famous 
speech in Act II, "What a piece of work is a man! How 
noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving 


how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in 
apprehension how like a god--the beauty of the world, the 
paragon of animals!"(II.ii.293-297) is directly based upon 
one of the major texts of the Italian humanists, Pico della 
Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man.At the time of 
Shakespeare's death, literary luminaries such as Ben 
Jonson hailed his works as timeless.In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, 
Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-
seven plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name.Renaissance humanism, as this 
movement is now called, generated a new interest in human 
experience, and also an enormous optimism about the 
potential scope of human understanding.Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford 
and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two.For the 
humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to 
a better understanding of how to act, and their fondest hope 
was that the coordination of action and understanding 
would lead to great benefits for society as a whole.Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his 
formal education proceeded no further.His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 
1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625), and he was a 
favorite of both monarchs.Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes riding on some 
of these questions are enormous--the actions of these 
characters bring disaster upon an entire kingdom.Public and critical success quickly followed, and 
Shakespeare eventually became the most popular 
playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe 
Theater.The prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw 
his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in 
revenge.Around 1590 he left his family behind and 
traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright.Indeed, James granted 
Shakespeare's company the greatest possible compliment 
by bestowing upon its members the title of King's Men.The legacy 
of this body of work is immense.In 1582 he married 
an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children 
with her.At the 
play's end it is not even clear whether justice has been 
achieved.