Renaissance In Hamlet Research Paper

With The Tragedy of Hamlet, Shakespeare was able to take a revenge tragedy and use it to portray problems and fundamental themes of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a large cultural movement that began in the fifteenth-century and was driven by an idea known as humanitas. This was the idea that all the capabilities and virtues unique to human beings should be studied to their furthest extent (Nardo, 1999). Renaissance humanism, as the movement is now known, caused a new interest in human experience and an unwavering optimism about the extent of human understanding to develop. The purpose of the movement was to gain a better understanding of how to act, and the hope was that this understanding would lead to great benefits for society (Nardo,

1999). However, as the Renaissance spread a more skeptical branch of humanism developed, one that stressed the limitations of human understanding. Michel de Montaigne, for example, thought that the world of experience was a world of appearances, and that human beings can’t see past those appearances into the “realities” that lie behind them. This is the type of world in which Shakespeare places Hamlet. Hamlet is faced with the difficult task of correcting an injustice that he can never have sufficient knowledge of—a dilemma that is by no means unique, or even uncommon. And while Hamlet is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be answered because they concern supernatural and metaphysical matters, the play chiefly demonstrates the difficulty of knowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence, their motivations, their feelings, their relative states of sanity or insanity. The world of other people is a world of appearances, and Hamlet is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty of living in that world.