Why Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Is Targeted Towards an Elizabethan Audience

1231 Words5 Pages
Why Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is Targeted Towards an Elizabethan Audience Shakespeare is without a doubt, still one of the most famous playwrights to have ever lived, and likely will be remembered forever. One of his most famous plays is “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”. Believed to have been performed for the first time in the spring 1601, it remains one of the most well-known plays to date, bearing lines such as the famous “To be, or not to be, - that is the question” (Shakespeare 3.1. 56), and “Alas, poor Yorick!” (5.1.189). However, the play itself is specifically meant to be presented to an Elizabethan era audience, despite some of the more modern adaptations of the play. As such, the conversation in Act IV Scene III between Hamlet and Claudius as to where Polonius’ body is hidden, is meant to target the original Elizabethan audience by using religious allusions that would have been better understood by such an audience along with the treatment of the mentally ill, and the relations between England and Denmark. To begin with, the religious allusions that Shakespeare uses in this scene are difficult to fully understand today, unless one has a good knowledge of history, however, they would have been easily understood back when the play was first performed. In Act IV Scene III, Shakespeare deliberately has Hamlet voice a pun about the Diet of Worms, which would have been much more known to a portion of the Elizabethan audience, as religion played a much larger role in the world back then, especially in a country where there had been so many changes in religion such as England. Similarly, he also alludes to the fact that the Diet of Worms is the “best of all diets”, as it was about what the Holy Roman Empire -- who England was briefly tied to by the marriage of Elizabeth’s older sister Mary to Philip I of Spain, who was the son of Charles V, who was

More about Why Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Is Targeted Towards an Elizabethan Audience

Open Document