ABSTRACT
Outlining ‘critical interpretations’, the editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition identifies this as a ‘challenge’ which ‘future Hamlet interpreters will confront’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was projecting on Hamlet a paradigm of the Romantic poet; but the hero’s reflective cast of mind is more probing of his world than this suggests. Hamlet’s first soliloquy makes clear his extreme disappointment with his world, the world to which, given his promise to his mother, his existence is bound. The shrewd questioning continues as Hamlet seeks to probe the truth about what they have been telling him of the Ghost’s appearance. An audience may initially wonder why Hamlet insists so emphatically on secrecy and, supported by the Ghost, has his companions swear to it on the cross-like hilt of his sword. Hamlet almost lets his guard down in meeting his former ‘good friends’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but being shrewd enough to suspect they have been ‘sent for’, eventually encourages them to admit it.
