Hamlet : A study in Postmodernism
Keywords:
Hamlet deplores, Patricia Waugh’sAbstract
Much ink has been spilled on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The bewildering variety and complexity of this tragedy have hardly left any reader or audience unstirred. No wonder, right from its production down to the present times, critics have showered profusion of phrasings to epitomize the uniqueness of the tragedy of Hamlet, but in vain T.S. Eliot described Hamlet as the ‘Mona Lisa’1 of world literature. G. Wilson Knight called Hamlet “the ambassador of death walking amid life”2. Spurgeon focused his critical searchlight on the imagistic aspect of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, A.C. Bradley employed ‘Interpretative Approach’ to explore the mysterious aspects of Hamlet’s character. The Romantic critics like Goethe and Coleridge focused their ‘Impressionistic method’ to unravel the wonderful psychological and divine forces at work in the nature and character of Hamlet and other Shakespearean characters. The present paper is a humble attempt to critically analyse Shakespeare’s Hamlet through postmodern perspective.
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