Hamlet as Revenge Tragedy

About the lecture

In this module, we think about Hamlet as a revenge tragedy. In one sense, Hamlet is quite typical in its narrative; as with other revenge tragedies, there is (a) the victim (Hamlet Senior), (b) the murderer (Claudius) and (c) the avenger (Hamlet). What Shakespeare does with Hamlet, however, is to complicate each element of the traditional revenge tragedy, before adding a second revenge tragedy narrative that is set in motion after Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius. The module ends by considering why revenge was so fascinating to the original Elizabethan audience.

About the lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.