ABSTRACT
In writing Hamlet, William Shakespeare is not only embracing, deliberately and wholeheartedly, a set of theatrical conventions which his audience would understand as being in the tradition of English Senecan/revenge drama; he is going a step further by taking an old and well-known play which is a jokey byword for the whole Senecan tradition and rewriting that. Shakespeare follows convention fairly closely for a large part of Hamlet. In the first two scenes of the play, for example, the writer sets up a series of expectations for his audience: he provides a court setting, a ghost, suggestions of 'some foul play' committed before the play begins, and a discontented young man in black speaking in asides and soliloquies. He thus signals to the audience that 'this is a revenge play'. Indeed, after four centuries of commentary, criticism and scholarship, the one thing that may safely be said is that Hamlet the prince and Hamlet the play are enigmatic.
