著者

成田 英明

出版者

東京芸術大学

雑誌

東京藝術大学音楽学部紀要 (ISSN:09148787)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.25, pp.A21-A38, 1999

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The Play Hamlet is a story of a quite impressive prince as well as a history played by the symbolic characters of three sons who had their fathers killed, a king, a queen, courtiers, and a daughter. Though it follows the hero's inner self closely, the play has a structure which relativizes his existence in comparison to the outer world. It is a tragedy as well as a revenge play. The reason why it is considered Shakespeare's "tragedy of tragedies" is that it is the only one in which the protagonist is forced to bear the result of the deeds which do not involve him. While the tragedy of King Lear comes from nothing other than Lear's own stupidity, the audience focuses its attention on Lear's agonies. The tragedy of Hamllet, however, comes from such an incredible role given to an individual by history causing the audience to turn its attention to the outer world surrounding Hamlet. The story goes back to the time when Prince Hamlet was born. The audience meets the three sons in the same circumstance 30 years later. The one son plays the role of a fool who reacts hastily upon his father's death. The second is caught in a dilemma between two worlds: that of the kingdom and that of the individual. The last one is watching Denmark for a chance to take revenge. The eyes of the last son Fortinbras exist in this drama from the beginning, which relativizes the existence of the protagonist Hamlet. At the end of the play, Fortinbras regains more than his father lost and the tragedy appears to have finished. However, the real fear is hidden in the sensation that the wheel of history might begin turning again around 'a little patch of ground' in Poland. Young Fortinbras might be the second King Hamlet. Hamlet is a special work in the genealogy of melancholy in that the protagonist has every feature of melancholy that is not on the surface but rooted in his deep existence. He embodies all the history of melancholy since the ancient Greek through Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Acedia, agony of love, malcontentedness, deep contemplation, genius foresight, and the sudden appearance of Herculean madness are all syndromes of melancholy. A solely new melancholy hero was born from this meeting of an old history and a traditional idea. By transferring old fake madness played in revenge tragedies into deep inner melancholy, Shakespeare produced a quite new tragic hero who can contemplate on universal life and death. A prince in a kingdom has been raised to a hero in the universe through melancholy. Hamlet is the symbolic work of late Renaissance in Britain and reflects the actual fear in the society of the late Elizabethan Age through the death of the prince and the change of monarchy. Through the melancholy hero, the Elizabethan audience must have seen the tragedy not as a distant old history but as their own contemporary history.