ABSTRACT
No other play by Shakespeare features such an extensive engagement with such a wide variety of antitheatrical arguments and sentiments as Hamlet does. This chapter offers an integrative account of Shakespeare’s comprehensive engagement with the early modern English antitheatrical discourse in this play. From this account, Hamlet, a revenge drama written in midcareer, emerges as Shakespeare’s defense of his craft against contemporary attacks. The first section of the chapter focuses on general ethical and ontological concerns about theater and shows how, while Hamlet voices many of the contemporary views about theater’s pervasive effects, which were often shared by both attackers and defenders of the stage, Shakespeare repeatedly weakens and qualifies them. The second section focuses on Shakespeare’s allusions, again mostly through Hamlet, to antitheatrical claims that were specific to his own culture: from cross-dressing and the plague to objections to the audience’s laughter and to the commodification of drama. It argues that Hamlet’s endorsement of antitheatrical arguments anticipates, and is analogous to, the employment of such claims on title pages and in prefaces; in both cases, antitheatrical arguments were employed to market theatrical goods to prospective customers.
