Just as directors have felt compelled to cut-and sometimes to rearrange-in order to stage Hamlet successfully, so scholars and critics have neglected those aspects of the play that have threatened to hinder their interpretations of its central character. Within this, the emphasis is placed squarely on Hamlet the morally and philosophically significant character at the expense of Hamlet the ambiguous and frequently bewildering work of drama. But a disconcerting fact remains: Shaftesbury was the first, or one of the first, to delineate an approach to Hamlet that has held the field since the second half of the eighteenth century. Faced with such comments, one might respond that Shaftesbury was a woefully bad reader of vernacular literature, and that his over-fastidious tastes are precisely the sort of thing that Shakespeare enjoyed turning on its head.
It may properly be said of this Play, if I mistake not, that it has only One Character or principal Part”.
Apathetic indirection a lack of compassion series#
Hamlet was particularly noteworthy in this respect, and was to be viewed as “almost one continu’d Moral: a Series of deep Reflections, drawn from one Mouth, upon the Subject of one single Accident and Calamity, naturally fitted to move Horrour and Compassion. And yet Shakespeare was not to be dismissed out of hand: “the Justness of his Moral, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters” meant that he could help to nurture the self-examination and self-discourse on which Shaftesbury believed moral knowledge must be based. Surveying the development of English drama from the vantage of the early 1700s, he lamented Shakespeare’s “natural Rudeness, his unpolish’d Stile, his antiquated Phrase and Wit, his want of Method and Coherence, and his Deficiency in almost all the Graces and Ornaments of this kind of Writing”. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was no fan of Shakespeare.
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