Hamlet Shows Shakspeare's Long-Lasting Cultural Effect

Pondering the Definitions of Popular Culture, Again.

What is Popular Culture? The definition in “The Introduction” by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes to Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture seems like a good definition to me “cultural products created of the people… for the people.” But who are “the people?” In this introduction they say that “citizens and yeomen were frequently were frequently classed together as ‘the middling sort of people’, divided between town and country and it is these groups rather than those who ‘have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth as Smith puts it, who would usually have been referred to as ‘the people’.” To me, this is an insufficient definition of “the people.” Everyone, from the Queen down to “those who ‘have no voice nor authority’” are people and are therefore part of “the people.” Sometimes it is useful to look at the different aspects of a culture, the types of literature that make it into textbooks, films that win awards and praise while being perhaps a little too aware of their own artsy-ness and other praise-able qualities, art that is found in museums, to the generally enjoyed books, movies, and TV… and other aspects of a culture that are less snobby and may or may not have plenty of their own merits. Shakespeare wrote for and was appreciated by the snobby elite and the groundlings and the in-betweens of his own day, and he has returned (if he ever left) from the realms of the snobby elite to being accessible and enjoyable to all of the people from the snobby elites to the couch potatoes. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet has been an inspiration and a source of cultural reference points for the people that have gone before us and it still is for us, the people, now.

A. Hamlet has been an inspiration... for better or for worse:

   1.For Art.

• I discovered, while I was creating my post Ophelia, Her Death as Mad and as Picturesque as Our Imagination Paints It, a small part of what Hamlet and the Visual Arts called the “The Ophelia Phenomenon” which has been developing since “the latter part of the eighteenth century.”  Evidently the Victorians in general were not satisfied with how Shakespeare portrayed Ophelia and they tried to limit her sexuality, but the painters kind of emphasized it and they made lots of paintings on the subject of Ophelia. People have created a lot more art on the subject of Ophelia since then, and she is by no means the only subject from Hamlet that has been frequently depicted in some way or another.

• Sarah also discovered some of the Ophelia-art.

   2. For Music.

• Brandon’s blog post Modern Day Song References to Shakespeare
• Lianna's planning on writing her own Shakespeare-related song and she's thinking of writing it from Ophelia's point of view as of her most recent post

   3. And for Spin-Offs and Parodies in Books, Movies, Plays and so forth.

• The Lion King, is based on Hamlet.
• Rosencratz and Guildenstern are dead. Brook K. in our class posted about a less than wonderful reaction to this absurdist take on Hamlet.
• YA books, like Jessica's been talking about.

B. Hamlet serves as a cultural reference point, a source for allusions and familiar lines. Almost everyone is to some degree familiar with Hamlet, and so references and allusions to Hamlet, Ophelia, Polonius to a degree, and the famous lines carry a lot more meaning than the same number of other words which lack the background wealth of connotations that come from familiarity with a work like Hamlet.

   1. Through characters.

• Hamlet: You can say "I'm feeling Hamlet-like today" and people get that you're feeling mopey and a bit depressed and that you feel like questioning the meaning of life and all the great profound questions Hamlet's agonizing over.
• Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov alluded to Ophelia, Hamlet, and Polonius. The Ophelia reference (in the same post I mentioned above, Ophelia, Her Death as Mad and as Picturesque as Our Imagination Paints It) was the first I came across, but I later found four references to Hamlet one of which was connected to a reference to Polonius. Because Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most famous plays, and Ophelia and the circumstances surrounding her death are well known, we understand what Dostoevsky is talking about when he says that "And so she died, entirely to satisfy her own whim, and to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia. If this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would have never taken place." We remember that Ophelia was mad, that she drowned, and that there was something picturesque and exquisitely tragic about it.
• Uranus's moons are named after Shakespeare's characters. 

   2. Through lines, most notably through Hamlet's soliloquies.

• "To be or not to be: that is the question " that everybody knows and most people know to associate it with Hamlet. It was quoted in General Conference, for example, a broadcast meant for people all over the world and in many different social and economic classes. "To be or not to be" is accessible to everyone.
• In The Shakespeare Code they wrote a running joke of time paradoxes where The Doctor quotes Shakespeare's works some of which Shakespeare hadn't yet written. Among those lines were "To be or not to be" and "the play's the thing!"

   3. Just the culture that we live in has surrounded Hamlet and esteemed Hamlet for so long that renditions of Hamlet bring us back to other aspects of popular culture. The performances themselves reflect various aspects of the culture they're set in.

• When I watched David Tennant's Hamlet, I was reminded of Doctor Who, and on further reflection I realized that Jessica's post on the similarities between The Doctor and Hamlet are worth consideration. They're both tired of their lives, but they keep on going because they are afraid of death and they aren't quite ready yet, so they keep going through the journey of life though Hamlet's life journey is stuck in Denmark and The Doctor has the whole Universe to travel through. But you can definitely hear and see the echoes of The Doctor when watching David Tennant"s Hamlet... and that makes you wonder if The Doctor is in any way inspired by Hamlet, which came first and is such an important part of our culture. 
• I also had the somewhat off-the-wall connection of that version of Hamlet to popular culture when I considered that the broken mirror could represent the different aspects of Hamlet people remember, and the different aspects of his culture that he included in his plays such as Hamlet, and the different aspects we see of our lives still in Hamlet and the other plays. 

C. Shakespeare has been a part of the English speaking culture ever since he started writing, and he's not only part of the English speaking culture now.

   1. He borrowed from the other plays, books, culture of his time to assist in making his own works.

• Hamlet itself is a remix of the play Hamlet that was popular a little before Shakespeare wrote his version. He also most likely borrowed and played off of Tom a Lincoln by Richard Johnson.
• I noticed on one of Whitney's posts she explains a joke that comes up in the gravediggers scene that is joke to the audience rather than among the characters as the one gravedigger tells the other to "go get thee to Yaughan: fetch me a stoup of liquor." Evidently there was an inn-keeper by that name near where Shakespeare was performing.

  2. Shakespeare is responsible for adding a heck of a lot of words and expressions to the English language, many of which we don't even remember came from Shakespeare to begin with. Cara made a great post about this. It seems like clear proof to me that Shakespeare has made a profound affect on the English language that he created over 10,000 words, he is the most quoted man in the English language, and that only the King James Bible has been printed in more languages.  I don't know how much of this came through Hamlet other than the phrase "method in his madness" which is one of those famous lines that you hear all the time and is one of the few very famous lines from Hamlet that Hamlet didn't say.

  3. One of the other languages that Hamlet is very important in, is German. David T's blog (not the blog of David Tennant, the blog of David T of our Shakespeare class) talks extensively about how the Germans love Shakespeare, and Hamlet, and how that is very much a part of their tradition now.

To Conclude for now:

Shakespeare and his works, Hamlet especially, have managed to become a common cultural ground for many different layers of society, for all of the people, and even for people who speak different languages. Not everything that relates to Hamlet is a positive connection, but I do think that it is a good thing for Shakespeare to be known by so many people. Common ground and common experiences make the bonds to other people stronger, and Shakespeare is a great place to have that commonality. Is everything that attaches to Shakespeare and Hamlet great? By no means, but sometimes a connection can be made which through an intelligent use of Shakespeare's work and ideas both the new creation and Shakespeare's work can benefit. The new work gets the borrowed glory and good ideas from Shakespeare, and the new work illuminates and breaths life into Shakespeare's work.