and Ethan Hawke played him as the son of a 20th-century business executive in a 2000 film version.īloom analyzes Hamlet - and "Hamlet" - with segments briefly laid out following particular lines of the play (for those who are interested, Bloom used the current Arden edition of "Hamlet"). Was he insane? Did he merely act that way? Was his famed indecision part of his personality or a contrived creation? "It really has more in common with the two major works it comes between, the two great comedies 'As You Like It' and 'Twelfth Night'."īut the meat of Bloom's work is in its discussion of the central character, an endless source of interpretation for 400 years of actors and scholars. "The real 'Hamlet' is of course later, first performed in 1600, then performed with revisions in 1601, and eventually included in the First Folio after Shakespeare's death," Bloom continued. The first play, he added, was written between 15, around the time of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Titus Andronicus." "Nobody has ever seen the 'Ur-Hamlet,' " Bloom said, adding that the play's existence is documented by the writings of Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Nash. Of course, in order to dig into the play, Bloom once again had to discuss its roots - which predate its first performance about 1600. "So I wrote this to make up for that, but also because I felt that I had understood aspects of the mature play better and better, and I wanted to put them in one place." "I had become so obsessed with the question of the 'Ur-Hamlet' that most of what I thought I felt and understood about the mature 'Hamlet' we know was set aside," he said in a phone interview from his home in Connecticut. What emerged was Bloom's new book, "Hamlet: Poem Unlimited" (Riverhead). That drove him back to the much-discussed work about the troubled Prince of Denmark, whose father is murdered and whose mother marries the murderer - Hamlet's uncle. In focusing so intently on the play's roots, however, he felt he missed the play itself. NEW YORK (CNN) - Five years ago, in his book "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," Harold Bloom explored the authorship of the Hamlet saga in a text he referred to as the "Ur-Hamlet." The idea was to trace the genesis of the play and deal with the questions of Shakespeare's authorship, a hotly debated issue among some scholars.
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