Page "Hamlet" Paragraph 64

Hamlet departed from contemporary dramatic convention in several ways.

For example, in Shakespeare's day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poetics: that a drama should focus on action, not character.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies, not the action, that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts.

The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of action, except in the " bad " quarto.

At one point, as in the Gravedigger scene, Hamlet seems resolved to kill Claudius: in the next scene, however, when Claudius appears, he is suddenly tame.

Scholars still debate whether these twists are mistakes or intentional additions to add to the play's theme of confusion and duality.

Finally, in a period when most plays ran for two hours or so, the full text of Hamlet — Shakespeare's longest play, with 4, 042 lines, totalling 29, 551 words — takes over four hours to deliver.

Even today the play is rarely performed in its entirety, and has only once been dramatised on film completely, with Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version.

Hamlet also contains a favourite Shakespearean device, a play within the play, a literary device or conceit in which one story is told during the action of another story.