William Shakespeare Hamlet analysis of the work. The plot, meaning and composition of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The main characters and their characteristics

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. The eternal questions raised in the text concern humanity to this day. Love conflicts, themes related to politics, reflections on religion: this tragedy contains all the basic intentions of the human spirit. Shakespeare's plays are both tragic and realistic, and the images have long become eternal in world literature. Perhaps this is where their greatness lies.

The famous English author was not the first to write the story of Hamlet. Before him there was The Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd. Researchers and literary scholars suggest that Shakespeare borrowed the plot from him. However, Thomas Kyd himself probably consulted earlier sources. Most likely, these were short stories from the early Middle Ages.

Saxo Grammaticus, in his book “The History of the Danes,” described the real story of the ruler of Jutland, who had a son named Amlet and a wife Geruta. The ruler had a brother who was jealous of his wealth and decided to kill him, and then married his wife. Amlet did not submit to the new ruler, and, having learned about the bloody murder of his father, decides to take revenge. The stories coincide down to the smallest detail, but Shakespeare interprets the events differently and penetrates deeper into the psychology of each character.

The essence

Hamlet returns to his native castle Elsinore for his father's funeral. From the soldiers who served at the court, he learns about a ghost who comes to them at night and whose outline resembles the late king. Hamlet decides to go to a meeting with an unknown phenomenon, a further meeting horrifies him. The ghost reveals to him the true cause of his death and persuades his son to take revenge. The Danish prince is confused and on the verge of madness. He doesn’t understand whether he really saw his father’s spirit, or was it the devil who visited him from the depths of hell?

The hero reflects on what happened for a long time and ultimately decides to find out on his own whether Claudius is really guilty. To do this, he asks a troupe of actors to perform the play “The Murder of Gonzago” to see the king’s reaction. During a key moment in the play, Claudius becomes ill and leaves, at which point a sinister truth is revealed. All this time, Hamlet pretends to be crazy, and even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who were sent to him, could not find out from him the true motives of his behavior. Hamlet intends to talk to the queen in her chambers and accidentally kills Polonius, who hid behind the curtain in order to eavesdrop. He sees in this accident a manifestation of the will of heaven. Claudius understands the criticality of the situation and tries to send Hamlet to England, where he is to be executed. But this does not happen, and the dangerous nephew returns to the castle, where he kills his uncle and himself dies from poison. The kingdom passes into the hands of the Norwegian ruler Fortinbras.

Genre and direction

“Hamlet” is written in the genre of tragedy, but the “theatrical” nature of the work should be taken into account. After all, in Shakespeare’s understanding, the world is a stage, and life is a theater. This is a specific worldview, a creative look at the phenomena surrounding a person.

Shakespeare's dramas are traditionally classified as. She is characterized by pessimism, gloom and aestheticization of death. These features can also be found in the work of the great English playwright.

Conflict

The main conflict in the play is divided into external and internal. Its external manifestation lies in Hamlet’s attitude towards the inhabitants of the Danish court. He considers them all base creatures, devoid of reason, pride and dignity.

The internal conflict is very well expressed in the hero’s emotional experiences, his struggle with himself. Hamlet chooses between two behavioral types: new (Renaissance) and old (feudal). He is formed as a fighter, not wanting to perceive reality as it is. Shocked by the evil that surrounded him on all sides, the prince is going to fight it, despite all the difficulties.

Composition

The main compositional outline of the tragedy consists of a story about the fate of Hamlet. Each individual layer of the play serves to fully reveal his personality and is accompanied by constant changes in the hero’s thoughts and behavior. Events gradually unfold in such a way that the reader begins to feel constant tension, which does not stop even after Hamlet’s death.

The action can be divided into five parts:

1. First part - plot. Here Hamlet meets the ghost of his deceased father, who bequeaths him to take revenge for his death. In this part, the prince for the first time encounters human betrayal and meanness. This is where his mental torment begins, which does not let him go until his death. Life becomes meaningless for him.
2. Second part - action development. The prince decides to pretend to be crazy in order to deceive Claudius and find out the truth about his act. He also accidentally kills the royal advisor, Polonius. At this moment, the realization comes to him that he is the executor of the highest will of heaven.
3. The third part - climax. Here Hamlet, using the trick of showing the play, is finally convinced of the guilt of the ruling king. Claudius realizes how dangerous his nephew is and decides to get rid of him.
4. Part four - The Prince is sent to England to be executed there. At the same moment, Ophelia goes crazy and tragically dies.
5. Fifth part - denouement. Hamlet escapes execution, but is forced to fight Laertes. In this part, all the main participants in the action die: Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes and Hamlet himself.

The main characters and their characteristics

• Hamlet– from the very beginning of the play, the reader’s interest is focused on the personality of this character. This “bookish” boy, as Shakespeare himself wrote about him, suffers from the disease of the approaching century - melancholy. At his core, he is the first reflective hero of world literature. Someone may think that he is a weak person, incapable of action. But in fact, we see that he is strong in spirit and is not going to submit to the problems that befell him. His perception of the world changes, particles of former illusions turn to dust. This gives rise to that same “Hamletism”—an internal discord in the hero’s soul. By nature he is a dreamer, a philosopher, but life forced him to become an avenger. Hamlet’s character can be called “Byronic”, because he is extremely focused on his inner state and is quite skeptical about the world around him. He, like all romantics, is prone to constant self-doubt and tossing between good and evil.
• Gertrude- Hamlet's mother. A woman in whom we see the makings of intelligence, but a complete lack of will. She is not alone in her loss, but for some reason she does not try to get closer to her son at a time when grief has occurred in the family. Without the slightest remorse, Gertrude betrays the memory of her late husband and agrees to marry his brother. Throughout the action, she constantly tries to justify herself. Dying, the queen understands how wrong her behavior was, and how wise and fearless her son turned out to be.
• Ophelia- daughter of Polonius and lover of Hamlet. A meek girl who loved the prince until her death. She also faced trials that she could not endure. Her madness is not a fake move invented by someone. This is the same madness that occurs at the moment of true suffering; it cannot be stopped. There are some hidden indications in the work that Ophelia was pregnant with Hamlet's child, and this makes the realization of her fate doubly difficult.
• Claudius- a man who killed his own brother to achieve his own goals. Hypocritical and vile, he still carries a heavy burden. The pangs of conscience devour him daily and do not allow him to fully enjoy the rule to which he came to in such a terrible way.
• Rosencrantz And Guildenstern– Hamlet’s so-called “friends” who betrayed him at the first opportunity to make good money. Without delay, they agree to deliver a message announcing the death of the prince. But fate has prepared a worthy punishment for them: as a result, they die instead of Hamlet.
• Horatio- an example of a true and faithful friend. The only person the prince can trust. They go through all the problems together, and Horatio is ready to share even death with his friend. It is to him that Hamlet trusts to tell his story and asks him to “breathe some more in this world.”

Themes

1. Hamlet's Revenge. The prince was destined to bear the heavy burden of revenge. He cannot coldly and calculatingly deal with Claudius and regain the throne. His humanistic principles force him to think about the common good. The hero feels responsible for those who have suffered from the evil that is widespread around him. He sees that it is not Claudius alone who is to blame for the death of his father, but all of Denmark, which blithely turned a blind eye to the circumstances of the death of the old king. He knows that to take revenge he needs to become an enemy to everyone around him. His ideal of reality does not coincide with the real picture of the world; the “shaken age” arouses hostility in Hamlet. The prince understands that he cannot restore peace alone. Such thoughts plunge him into even greater despair.
2. Hamlet's love. Before all those terrible events, there was love in the hero’s life. But, unfortunately, she is unhappy. He loved Ophelia madly, and there is no doubt about the sincerity of his feelings. But the young man is forced to give up happiness. After all, the proposal to share sorrows together would be too selfish. To finally break the connection, he has to inflict pain and be merciless. Trying to save Ophelia, he could not even imagine how great her suffering would be. The impulse with which he rushes to her coffin was deeply sincere.
3. Hamlet's friendship. The hero values ​​friendship very much and is not used to choosing his friends based on his assessment of their position in society. His only true friend is the poor student Horatio. At the same time, the prince is contemptuous of betrayal, which is why he treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern so cruelly.

Problems

The issues covered in Hamlet are very broad. Here are the themes of love and hate, the meaning of life and the purpose of man in this world, strength and weakness, the right to revenge and murder.

One of the main ones is problem of choice, which the main character faces. There is a lot of uncertainty in his soul; alone he thinks for a long time and analyzes everything that happens in his life. There is no one next to Hamlet who could help him make a decision. Therefore, he is guided only by his own moral principles and personal experience. His consciousness is divided into two halves. In one lives a philosopher and humanist, and in the other, a man who understands the essence of a rotten world.

His key monologue “To be or not to be” reflects all the pain in the hero’s soul, the tragedy of thought. This incredible internal struggle exhausts Hamlet, makes him think about suicide, but he is stopped by his reluctance to commit another sin. He began to become increasingly concerned about the topic of death and its mystery. What's next? Eternal darkness or a continuation of the suffering he endures during his life?

Meaning

The main idea of ​​tragedy is to search for the meaning of life. Shakespeare shows a man of education, eternally searching, with a deep sense of empathy for everything that surrounds him. But life forces him to face true evil in various manifestations. Hamlet is aware of it, trying to figure out how exactly it arose and why. He is shocked by the fact that one place can so quickly turn into hell on Earth. And his act of revenge is to destroy the evil that has entered his world.

Fundamental to the tragedy is the idea that behind all these royal squabbles there is a great turning point in the entire European culture. And at the forefront of this turning point, Hamlet appears - a new type of hero. Along with the death of all the main characters, the centuries-old system of understanding the world collapses.

Criticism

In 1837, Belinsky wrote an article dedicated to Hamlet, in which he called the tragedy a “brilliant diamond” in the “radiant crown of the king of dramatic poets,” “crowned by entire humanity and having no rival before or after himself.”

The image of Hamlet contains all the universal human traits "<…>this is me, this is each of us, more or less...”, Belinsky writes about him.

S. T. Coleridge, in his Shakespeare Lectures (1811-12), writes: “Hamlet hesitates due to natural sensitivity and hesitates, held back by reason, which forces him to turn his effective forces to the search for a speculative solution.”

Psychologist L.S. Vygotsky focused on Hamlet’s connection with the other world: “Hamlet is a mystic, this determines not only his state of mind on the threshold of double existence, two worlds, but also his will in all its manifestations.”

And literary critic V.K. Kantor looked at the tragedy from a different angle and in his article “Hamlet as a “Christian Warrior”” pointed out: “The tragedy “Hamlet” is a system of temptations. He is tempted by a ghost (this is the main temptation), and the prince’s task is to check whether it is the devil who is trying to lead him into sin. Hence the trap theater. But at the same time he is tempted by his love for Ophelia. Temptation is a constant Christian problem.”

William Shakespeare's tragedy “Hamlet” is popular and known all over the world today. The image of Hamlet remains close to his contemporaries, and the problems raised in the work are still important today.

What is the central problem of the tragedy?

The prince is faced with the question of restoring justice, but not personal, but general. Hamlet's father was killed, his uncle illegally seized the throne.

Hamlet's question is not just a question of personal revenge, but a problem of honor, without which life is unthinkable. What should Hamlet do? How to take revenge? Or how to restore the true order of things in the world?

It is difficult for Hamlet to make a choice, because not only his fate depends on his decisions. He is the prince of Denmark, and a prince cannot be free in his actions, as Laertes wisely notes.

From the very first acquaintance with Hamlet, it becomes clear that he is smart, quick-tempered and straightforward. Without hesitation, he rushes to meet the Phantom. But why does Hamlet hesitate with retribution?

Just revenge, ordinary murder in response to murder, does not suit the prince. He makes it clear to the king that he knows about his crime, which instills fear in Claudius, forcing him to remember every hour what he has done, and this is the beginning of punishment, and not a personal settling of scores.

Hamlet decides to first expose the king to make sure the Ghost's words are true. This fact only says that the hero wants to be fair in his decisions and actions. He feigns madness, turning everyone against him except his old friend Horatio. But Polonius and the king realize that madness is just a mask hiding something from others.

Hamlet, pretending to be crazy, gains the right to be frank, to express what he, as a prince, and simply as a person, could not express. He calls Polonius as honest as a fishmonger. These are not the words of a madman, but in that world such straightforwardness was impossible, so it is perceived by others as a disorder of reason.

Hamlet himself, throwing off the mask of madness, says to his mother:

My pulse, like yours, keeps time

And just as cheerful. No violations of meaning

In my words. Ask again -

I will repeat them, but the patient could not.

In the name of God, throw away your balm!

Don't console yourself with the idea that everything is a disaster

Not in your behavior, but in me.

Everyone who doesn’t like Hamlet’s words and his revelations considers the prince sick. This makes it easier to deal with your conscience. Hamlet plays the role of a sick man, he is a talented actor, it is not for nothing that the visiting theater helped him so much in exposing the king.

Everything hidden and secret in the theater can be exposed to the public. Let us remember what Hamlet says to the actors.

“Each violation of the measure deviates from the purpose of the theater, the purpose of which was and will be: to hold, so to speak, a mirror in front of nature, to show valor its true face and its true baseness, and to each age of history its unvarnished appearance.”

The desire for justice in the world shown by Shakespeare is only possible in a hidden way. Hamlet plays the role of a mentally ill person in order to have the right to tell the truth under the guise of madness.

“All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. And only under the cover of play can people become truthful.

Hamlet is straightforward, but is in no hurry to demonstrate his feelings. He loves, believes, without showing off his soul. Hamlet only hates openly. The prince was outraged by Laertes’ desire to publicly kill himself and suffer over the loss of his sister. Here Hamlet seems to repeat the words of one of Shakespeare’s own sonnets:

I love you, but I talk about it less often

I love more tenderly, but not for many eyes.

The one who is in front of the light sells feelings

He puts his whole soul on display.

(Sonnet 102)

Such straightforwardness in expressing feelings and at the same time restraint in manifestations of love are uncharacteristic of the role of a prince, who has no control over his life, and therefore has no right to personal frankness at all.

And the longer Hamlet is tormented by the need for revenge, the more he understands its uselessness and meaninglessness.

The image of Hamlet in this situation is contrasted with Laertes, who found himself in a similar situation: Laertes’ father was killed by Hamlet, Ophelia died, having gone mad due to the death of her father. But Laertes will also be satisfied with personal revenge. He is ready to secretly kill Hamlet with a poisoned blade; blood vengeance is enough for him.

Laertes is not as highly moral a person as Hamlet, who worries about general justice; it is enough for him that his personal justice triumphs. Laertes is punished: he dies by chance, exchanging swords with Hamlet.

Laertes: I deftly laid out my nets, Osric.

And he ended up in them for his cunning.

But Hamlet is not like that. Even while dying, he asks Horatio to tell the whole truth about what happened, otherwise there is no point in what he did. If the king's deeds were not known, why were there all these deaths?

Hamlet understands the pointlessness of personal revenge, understands what the secret murder of the king, the marriage of Claudius to the widow queen, the illegal possession of the crown is - all this is possible only in a split, changed and unjust world. Hamlet strives for justice, understanding his destiny, therefore he says:

The connecting thread broke for days.

How can I connect their scraps!

The prince was burdened with an unbearable burden of restoring balance in the world. There is no place for honesty and truth among the selfish and cunning servants of the throne, and Hamlet understood this.

What could he alone change? How can one avoid descending into simply settling personal scores and fighting for the crown?

To be or not to be, that is the question. Is it worthy

Resign yourself to the blows of fate,

Or must we resist

And in mortal combat with a whole sea of ​​troubles

End them? Die. Forget yourself.

But Hamlet considers death a shameful flight. He must do something. The prince will not decide to kill, he understands that it will not solve anything, and he does not know how else to do it, and at that time there were no other methods of punishment for such terrible crimes that King Claudius committed. That is why Prince Hamlet suffers, waits, listening to the call of his heart, asking his mind to give advice, but his mind tells him that there is no way out.

Hamlet is presented to us not only as an avenger and a man with insulted honor. The tragedy talks a lot about his love for Ophelia. The prince himself admits more than once that he loved Polonius’ daughter.

What kind of love is this? Ophelia, being an obedient daughter, actually agrees to betrayal: she allows her conversation with Hamlet to be overheard.

What was the reason for such treacherous behavior of the young girl? It is difficult to answer this question unequivocally. Perhaps Ophelia was too young, that is, she simply was not a person and did not understand that she was committing betrayal towards her loved one. Maybe she was just flattered at the time that the prince was courting her, and she had no feelings for Hamlet himself. How could a loving woman not understand that Hamlet is not mad at all? Or was she too young for such insight?

How could Hamlet himself, if he loved Ophelia, play madness in front of her, and then calmly enough endure the murder of her father?

There are many questions, and all the answers to them are ambiguous, because love in this tragedy did not become the driving force and did not save anyone.

The theme of love in Hamlet is in second place, and most importantly - duty, honor, justice.

Marina Tsvetaeva in her poem “Hamlet’s Dialogue with Conscience” shows us Hamlet, who, blinded by his grief and thirst for revenge, forgot about true love, and made his beloved one of the puppets of his performance.

Ophelia could not bear the burden of misfortune that fell upon her and died. With It turned out that it was Hamlet who caused the death of his beloved, because he killed her father. Could this happen in a world where there is a place for true love? No.

There is another interpretation of this topic. Hamlet may simply be a truly loving person who understands perfectly well that if he opens up to Ophelia, she will betray him. He loves her, knowing that the girl is not yet capable of high feelings, he loves her as she is. This is the very case when the object of love is not worth the feelings you have for it. Hamlet, from this point of view, is a man betrayed by everyone except his old friend Horatio.

The image of Hamlet was understood by playwrights in different ways. The Prince of Denmark was also presented as a straightforward, intelligent person, in a state of complete despair from the fact that he is forced to take revenge, fully understanding the futility and meaninglessness of revenge, which will not change the world around him. In this situation, the monologue “To be or not to be...” sounds like a cry of hopelessness. A wonderful interpretation of the tragedy of Hamlet is given in the poem “My Hamlet” by Vladimir Vysotsky.

Hamlet was also presented as a soft, calm person, who did not find the strength within himself for revenge, which was the only correct way out. Then the monologue “To be or not to be...” sounds like an attempt to understand the situation, in oneself, to force oneself to commit an act, to gain courage. The peace-loving Hamlet suffers, but does not take revenge.

However, in any interpretation, the essence of the tragedy is presented clearly: a person who wants to live his life with dignity, in harmony with his conscience, has no place in this world. That is why Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, dies.

Shakespeare is the creator of an entire artistic universe, he had incomparable imagination and knowledge of life, knowledge of people, therefore the analysis of any of his plays is extremely interesting and instructive. However, for Russian culture, of all Shakespeare’s plays, the first in importance was "Hamlet", which can be seen at least by the number of its translations into Russian - there are over forty of them. Using this tragedy as an example, let us consider what new Shakespeare contributed to the understanding of the world and man in the late Renaissance.

Let's begin with plot of "Hamlet", like virtually all of Shakespeare's other works, is borrowed from a previous literary tradition. Thomas Kidd's tragedy Hamlet, presented in London in 1589, has not reached us, but it can be assumed that Shakespeare relied on it, giving his version of the story, first told in the Icelandic chronicle of the 12th century. Saxo Grammaticus, author of the "History of the Danes", tells an episode from the Danish history of the "dark time". The feudal lord Khorwendil had a wife, Geruta, and a son, Amleth. Horwendil's brother, Fengo, with whom he shared power over Jutland, was jealous of his courage and glory. Fengo killed his brother in front of the courtiers and married his widow. Amlet pretended to be crazy, deceived everyone and took revenge on his uncle. Even before that, he was exiled to England for the murder of one of the courtiers, and there he married an English princess. Amlet was subsequently killed in battle by his other uncle, King Wiglet of Denmark. The similarity of this story with the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet is obvious, but Shakespeare's tragedy takes place in Denmark only in name; its problematics go far beyond the scope of the tragedy of revenge, and the types of characters are very different from the solid medieval heroes.

Premiere of "Hamlet" at the Globe Theater took place in 1601, and this is a year of well-known upheavals in the history of England, which directly affected both the Globe troupe and Shakespeare personally. The fact is that 1601 is the year of the “Essex Conspiracy,” when the young favorite of the aging Elizabeth, Earl of Essex, took his people to the streets of London in an attempt to rebel against the queen, was captured and beheaded. Historians regard his speech as the last manifestation of medieval feudal freemen, as a rebellion of the nobility against the absolutism that limited its rights, which was not supported by the people. On the eve of the performance, the Essex envoys paid the Globe actors to perform an old Shakespearean chronicle, which, in their opinion, could provoke discontent with the queen, instead of the play scheduled in the repertoire. The owner of Globus later had to give unpleasant explanations to the authorities. Along with Essex, the young nobles who followed him were thrown into the Tower, in particular the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron, to whom his cycle of sonnets is believed to be dedicated. Southampton was later pardoned, but while Essex's trial was going on, Shakespeare's mind must have been particularly dark. All these circumstances could further thicken the general atmosphere of the tragedy.

Its action begins in Elsinore, the castle of the Danish kings. The night watch informs Horatio, Hamlet's friend, about the appearance of the Ghost. This is the ghost of Hamlet’s late father, who in the “dead hour of the night” tells his son that he did not die a natural death, as everyone believes, but was killed by his brother Claudius, who took the throne and married Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude. The ghost demands revenge from Hamlet, but the prince must first make sure of what has been said: what if the ghost is a messenger from hell? To gain time and not be discovered, Hamlet pretends to be crazy; the incredulous Claudius conspires with his courtier Polonius to use his daughter Ophelia, with whom Hamlet is in love, to check whether Hamlet has actually lost his mind. For the same purpose, Hamlet's old friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are called to Elsinore, and they willingly agree to help the king. Exactly in the middle of the play is the famous “Mousetrap”: a scene in which Hamlet persuades the actors who came to Elsinore to perform a performance that exactly depicts what the Ghost told him about, and by Claudia’s confused reaction he is convinced of his guilt. After this, Hamlet kills Polonius, who overhears his conversation with his mother, in the belief that Claudius is hiding behind the carpets in her bedroom; Claudius, sensing danger, sends Hamlet to England, where he is to be executed by the English king, but on board the ship Hamlet manages to replace the letter, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who accompanied him, are executed instead. Returning to Elsinore, Hamlet learns of the death of Ophelia, who has gone mad, and becomes a victim of Claudius's latest intrigue. The king persuades the son of the late Polonius and Ophelia's brother Laertes to take revenge on Hamlet and hands Laertes a poisoned sword for a court duel with the prince. During this duel, Gertrude dies after drinking a cup of poisoned wine intended for Hamlet; Claudius and Laertes are killed, Hamlet dies, and the troops of the Norwegian prince Fortinbras enter Elsinore.

Hamlet- the same as Don Quixote, the “eternal image” that arose at the end of the Renaissance almost simultaneously with other images of the great individualists (Don Quixote, Don Juan, Faust). All of them embody the Renaissance idea of ​​limitless personal development, and at the same time, unlike Montaigne, who valued measure and harmony, these artistic images, as is typical in Renaissance literature, embody great passions, extreme degrees of development of one side of the personality. Don Quixote's extreme was idealism; Hamlet's extreme is reflection, introspection, which paralyzes a person's ability to act. He performs many actions throughout the tragedy: he kills Polonius, Laertes, Claudius, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, but since he hesitates with his main task - revenge, the impression of his inactivity is created.

From the moment he learns the secret of the Ghost, Hamlet's past life collapses. What he was like before the start of the tragedy can be judged by Horatio, his friend at the University of Wittenberg, and by the scene of the meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when he sparkles with wit - until the moment when the friends admit that Claudius summoned them. The indecently quick wedding of his mother, the loss of Hamlet Sr., in whom the prince saw not just a father, but an ideal person, explain his gloomy mood at the beginning of the play. And when Hamlet is faced with the task of revenge, he begins to understand that the death of Claudius will not correct the general state of affairs, because everyone in Denmark quickly consigned Hamlet Sr. to oblivion and quickly got used to slavery. The era of ideal people is in the past, and the motif of Denmark-prison runs through the whole tragedy, set by the words of the honest officer Marcellus in the first act of the tragedy: “Something has rotted in the Danish kingdom” (Act I, Scene IV). The prince comes to realize the hostility, the “dislocation” of the world around him: “The century has been shaken - and worst of all, / That I was born to restore it” (Act I, Scene V). Hamlet knows that his duty is to punish evil, but his idea of ​​evil no longer corresponds to the straightforward laws of family revenge. Evil for him is not limited to the crime of Claudius, whom he ultimately punishes; Evil is spread throughout the world around him, and Hamlet realizes that one person cannot resist the whole world. This internal conflict leads him to think about the futility of life, about suicide.

The fundamental difference between Hamlet from the heroes of the previous revenge tragedy in that he is able to look at himself from the outside, to think about the consequences of his actions. Hamlet's main sphere of activity is thought, and the sharpness of his introspection is akin to Montaigne's close introspection. But Montaigne called for introducing human life into proportionate boundaries and depicted a person occupying a middle position in life. Shakespeare draws not only the prince, that is, a person standing at the highest level of society, on whom the fate of his country depends; Shakespeare, in accordance with literary tradition, depicts an extraordinary character, large in all its manifestations. Hamlet is a hero born of the spirit of the Renaissance, but his tragedy indicates that at its later stage the ideology of the Renaissance is experiencing a crisis. Hamlet takes upon himself the work of revising and revaluing not only medieval values, but also the values ​​of humanism, and the illusory nature of humanistic ideas about the world as a kingdom of boundless freedom and direct action is revealed.

Hamlet's central storyline is reflected in a kind of mirror: the lines of two more young heroes, each of which sheds new light on Hamlet’s situation. The first is the line of Laertes, who, after the death of his father, finds himself in the same position as Hamlet after the appearance of the Ghost. Laertes, in everyone’s opinion, is a “worthy young man,” he takes the lessons of Polonius’s common sense and acts as the bearer of established morality; he takes revenge on his father's murderer, not disdaining an agreement with Claudius. The second is the line of Fortinbras; Despite the fact that he has a small place on the stage, his significance for the play is very great. Fortinbras is the prince who occupied the empty Danish throne, Hamlet's hereditary throne; he is a man of action, a decisive politician and military leader; he realized himself after the death of his father, the Norwegian king, precisely in those areas that remain inaccessible to Hamlet. All the characteristics of Fortinbras are directly opposite to the characteristics of Laertes, and we can say that the image of Hamlet is placed between them. Laertes and Fortinbras are normal, ordinary avengers, and the contrast with them makes the reader feel the exceptionality of Hamlet’s behavior, because the tragedy depicts precisely the exceptional, the great, the sublime.

Since the Elizabethan theater was poor in decorations and external effects of theatrical spectacle, the strength of its impact on the viewer depended mainly on the word. Shakespeare is the greatest poet in the history of the English language and its greatest reformer; Shakespeare's word is fresh and succinct, and in Hamlet it is striking stylistic richness of the play. It is mostly written in blank verse, but in a number of scenes the characters speak in prose. Shakespeare uses metaphors especially subtly to create the general atmosphere of tragedy. Critics note the presence of three groups of leitmotifs in the play. Firstly, these are images of illness, an ulcer that wears away a healthy body - the speeches of all the characters contain images of rotting, decomposition, decay, working to create the theme of death. Secondly, images of female debauchery, fornication, fickle Fortune, reinforcing the theme of female infidelity running through the tragedy and at the same time pointing to the main philosophical problem of the tragedy - the contrast between appearance and the true essence of the phenomenon. Thirdly, these are numerous images of weapons and military equipment associated with war and violence - they emphasize the effective side of Hamlet’s character in the tragedy. The entire arsenal of artistic means of the tragedy was used to create its numerous images, to embody the main tragic conflict - the loneliness of a humanistic personality in the desert of a society in which there is no place for justice, reason, and dignity. Hamlet is the first reflective hero in world literature, the first hero experiencing a state of alienation, and the roots of his tragedy were perceived differently in different eras.

For the first time, naive audience interest in Hamlet as a theatrical spectacle gave way to attention to the characters at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. I.V. Goethe, an ardent admirer of Shakespeare, in his novel Wilhelm Meister (1795) interpreted Hamlet as “a beautiful, noble, highly moral creature, deprived of the power of feeling that makes a hero, he perishes under a burden that he could neither bear nor throw off.” . U I.V. Goethe's Hamlet is a sentimental-elegiac nature, a thinker who cannot handle great deeds.

The romantics explained the inactivity of the first in a series of “superfluous people” (they were later “lost”, “angry”) by the excessiveness of reflection, the disintegration of the unity of thought and will. S. T. Coleridge in “Shakespeare's Lectures” (1811-1812) writes: “Hamlet hesitates due to natural sensitivity and hesitates, held back by reason, which forces him to turn his effective forces to the search for a speculative solution.” As a result, the romantics presented Hamlet as the first literary hero in tune with modern man in his preoccupation with introspection, which means that this image is the prototype of modern man in general.

G. Hegel wrote about Hamlet’s ability - like other most lively Shakespearean characters - to look at himself from the outside, to treat himself objectively, as an artistic character, and to act as an artist.

Don Quixote and Hamlet were the most important "eternal images" for Russian culture of the 19th century. V.G. Belinsky believed that Hamlet's idea consists "in weakness of will, but only as a result of decay, and not by its nature. By nature, Hamlet is a strong man... He is great and strong in his weakness, because a strong-spirited man and in his very fall is higher than a weak man, in his very fall his uprising." V.G. Belinsky and A.I. Herzen saw in Hamlet a helpless but stern judge of his society, a potential revolutionary; I.S. Turgenev and L.N. Tolstoy is a hero rich in intelligence that is of no use to anyone.

Psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, bringing to the fore the final act of the tragedy in his analysis, emphasized Hamlet’s connection with the other world: “Hamlet is a mystic, this determines not only his mental state on the threshold of double existence, two worlds, but also his will in all its manifestations.”

English writers B. Shaw and M. Murray explained Hamlet's slowness by unconscious resistance to the barbaric law of family revenge. Psychoanalyst E. Jones showed that Hamlet is a victim of the Oedipus complex. Marxist criticism saw him as an anti-Machiavellian, a fighter for the ideals of bourgeois humanism. For Catholic K.S. Lewis's Hamlet is a "everyman", an ordinary person, depressed by the idea of ​​original sin. In literary criticism there has been a whole gallery of mutually exclusive Hamlets: an egoist and a pacifist, a misogynist, a brave hero, a melancholic incapable of action, the highest embodiment of the Renaissance ideal and an expression of the crisis of humanistic consciousness - all this is a Shakespearean hero. In the process of comprehending the tragedy, Hamlet, like Don Quixote, broke away from the text of the work and acquired the meaning of a “supertype” (Yu. M. Lotman’s term), that is, it became a socio-psychological generalization of such a wide scope that its right to timeless existence was recognized.

Today in Western Shakespeare studies the focus is not on “Hamlet”, but on other plays of Shakespeare - “Measure for Measure”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, “Othello”, also, each in its own way, consonant with modernity, since in each Shakespeare's play poses eternal questions of human existence. And each play contains something that determines the exclusivity of Shakespeare's influence on all subsequent literature. American literary critic H. Bloom defines his author’s position as “disinterest”, “freedom from any ideology”: “He has no theology, no metaphysics, no ethics, and less political theory than modern critics “read” into him. Based on the sonnets it is clear that, unlike his character Falstaff, he had a superego; unlike Hamlet of the final act, he did not cross the boundaries of earthly existence; unlike Rosalind, he did not have the ability to manage his own life at will. But since he invented them, we can assume that he deliberately set certain boundaries for himself. Fortunately, he was not King Lear and refused to go mad, although he could perfectly imagine madness, like everything else. His wisdom is endlessly reproduced in our sages from Goethe to Freud, although Shakespeare himself refused to be considered a sage"; "You cannot limit Shakespeare to the English Renaissance any more than you can limit the Prince of Denmark to his play."

This term is used by English Shakespeare scholars (followed by Shakespeare scholars from other countries) to refer to four of Shakespeare's tragedies, which constitute the pinnacle of his work: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.

They are distinguished by a new (in comparison with Shakespeare's early tragedies - Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, as well as in comparison with the Renaissance tragedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries) understanding of the tragic. According to L. E. Pinsky, the main plot of the “great tragedies” is the fate of an outstanding personality, the discovery by man of the true face of the world. Tragedies lose Renaissance optimism, the confidence that man is the “crown of all living things,” the heroes discover the disharmony of the world, the power of evil previously unknown to them, they must make a choice: how they deserve to exist in a world that has encroached on their dignity.

Unlike chronicles, which are linked together, Shakespeare's tragedies (including early ones) do not form a cycle. If they contain the same characters (for example, Antony in “Julius Caesar” and in “Antony and Cleopatra”), then these are essentially different people; the problem of character identity in tragedies is not worth it. The appearance of twins in tragedy is unthinkable: the genre requires the uniqueness of the individual. The hero of the tragedy is a powerful, titanic figure, he himself builds the line of his destiny and is responsible for the choices he makes (unlike the heroes of the melodrama genre that emerged by the end of the 18th century, in which the hero, and more often the heroine, pure but weak creatures, experience the blows of the unknown fate, suffer persecution from terrible villains and are saved thanks to the help of patrons). As L. E. Pinsky noted, in Shakespeare’s comedies the hero is “not free”, he is subject to natural instincts, the world, on the contrary, is “free”, which is manifested in the game of chance. In tragedies, everything is the other way around: the world is inhumanly ordered, unfree, but the hero freely decides “to be or not to be,” based only on “what is nobler.”

Each of the tragedies is unique in its structure. Thus, the composition of “Hamlet” with its climax in the middle of the work (the “mousetrap” scene) is in no way reminiscent of the harmonious composition of “Othello” or the composition of “King Lear,” in which, essentially, there is no exposition.

In some tragedies, fantastic creatures appear, but if in “Hamlet” the appearance of a ghost follows from the concept of the Single Chain of Being (this is the result of a crime), then in “Macbeth” witches, these bubbles of the earth, appear long before the hero’s crime, they are representatives of evil, which becomes not temporary (during periods of chaos), but a permanent component of the world.

In the concept of “great tragedies” as the basis of the second (in another periodization - the third), namely the tragic period of Shakespeare’s work, a special place is given to the tragedy “Julius Caesar” as transitional in the nature of the tragic. It is noted that this character changes again in Shakespeare's later plays ("Cymbeline", "The Winter's Tale", "The Tempest"), which is evidence of the end of the period of "great tragedies" and the entry of Shakespeare into the final phase of his work.

King Lear. 1606
The plot and source of the tragedy.
The main “support” for the play was “The History of the Britons” - a historical chronicle of the 12th century by G. Monmouth, which told about a certain king Leir, who, after 60 years of ruling the country, decided to divide his state between three daughters - Honorilla, Regau and Cordeila.
As in Shakespeare’s play, the heroines of the historical chronicle had to convince their father of the strength of their feelings, but their answers did not have a destructive effect on the king’s mind, giving him the opportunity to admit his mistakes and the rightness of his youngest daughter.
The story of the blinding of Gloucester, which became the second plotline of the tragedy, originates in the novel “Arcadia” by F. Sidney, which tells the story of the king of Paphlagonia, deprived of his sight by his illegitimate son Plexyrtus and supported in his beggarly wanderings by his once offended son Leonatus.
Issues and conflict
problems family relations are closely intertwined with social and political issues. These three planes share the same theme of the clash of a pure soul, sincerity with soullessness, self-interest and ambition.
The struggle for power, during which they step over everyone (even their relatives), expulsion from home and return, the theme of righteous revenge, as a result - the death of the main characters against the background of the discovery of the betrayal of the perpetrators.
At the beginning of the tragedy, Lear is intoxicated with the illusion of his omnipotence, blind to the needs of his people, disposing of the country as his personal estate, which he can divide and give away as he pleases. From everyone around him, even from his daughters, he demands, instead of sincerity, only blind obedience. His dogmatic and scholastic mind does not require a truthful and direct expression of feelings, but external, conventional signs of submission. The two eldest daughters take advantage of this, hypocritically assuring him of their love. They are opposed by Cordelia, who knows only one law - the law of truth and naturalness. But Lear is deaf to the voice of truth, and for this he suffers severe punishment.
Two conflict- in the royal family and in the family of the nobleman close to him. The tragedy depicting two family conflicts turns out to be the tragedy of an entire dying social system.
Image of Lear.
At the beginning of the tragedy, Lear is a proud and self-willed despot who compares himself in a moment of anger with an angry dragon. He decided to renounce power in order to remove “the yoke of worries from his decrepit shoulders” and “prevent any dispute” that might arise over the inheritance after his death. At the same time, Lear decided to arrange a kind of competition in the outpouring of feelings. in order to bestow the most generous gift on the one of his daughters who loves him more than the others. But Lear was wrong. He mistook the outer expression of a feeling for the feeling itself. This is a blind man who does not see and does not want to see life and does not even know his own daughters. This “competition” itself is the whim of a despot, who from a young age considers himself a “god-crowned” King and is accustomed to self-will. Under the influence of an outburst of angry irritation he banishes Kent and Cordelia.At the beginning of the tragedy, every action of Lear evokes in us a feeling of angry indignation.
But here Lear wanders through the gloomy steppe, for the first time in his life he remembers the “homeless, naked wretches.” This is a different Lear, this is a Lear beginning to see the light. He saw a man in the jester: “Go ahead, my friend. You are poor, homeless” (Act III, Scene 3). Scenes of Lear's madness follow. His madness is not pathological madness: it is a pressure of violent feelings from within, shaking, like the explosions of a volcano, the whole being of old Lear. You had to love your daughters passionately to be so passionately indignant at them. As Lear changes, so does our attitude towards him. Looking at him, we first feel hatred for this dissolute despot; but, following the development of the drama, we become more and more reconciled with him as with a person and end up being filled with indignation and burning anger, no longer towards him, but for him and for the whole world - to that wild, inhuman situation that can lead to such madness even of people like Lear.
The essence of Lear's experiment. Confident in the fair structure of the world, Lear carries out a grandiose experiment (dividing the state between his daughters), which should confirm the true absolute value of a person: Lear is a father, an old man, a king by birth. Lear is trusting, he has lost his sense of the fragility of the world and “tragic anxiety.” At the cost of suffering, loneliness and deprivation of reason, he will have to look into the real face of this world.
Blindness and sight.*Blindness* Lyra comes from an incorrect *vision* of the structure of the world... Only shortly before his death, the king *saw his sight*, came out of hibernation, out of the darkness... But it was too late... His mind could not stand the “light”..
4)Character system( from Pinsky) The main characters of the British tragedy also belong to two families, but are still separated by a social-hierarchical distance. The decisive role, however, is played not by open (public) family and social ties, but by the facet of the moral (internal) order that opens up over time: the characters are “good” and “evil.” Only a few main characters retain their original social and family ties, others change them (or their social position changes radically) - over time, two parties are formed. Goneril - and her husband, the eldest daughters - and the youngest, Edmund - and his brother, Cornwall - and Cornwall's servant enter into a mortal struggle. The place allocated by tradition and hierarchy turns out to be ephemeral for many. The king, the Earl of Gloucester and his legal heir descend to the last social level, lifting the powerless bastard to the very top - until in the end, for him, “the wheel has come full circle.”
The tragic time in "King Lear" begins with a scene in which almost all of its participants - one way or another, openly or secretly - fall out of obedience, out of hierarchy, out of established decorum, out of traditional good manners. So far - not even so much “evil”, not so much the eldest daughters, who seem to behave as befits during a solemn ceremony; not the “evil” Cornwall, whom the viewer cannot yet distinguish from the “good” Albany; and, of course, not Edmund, the still flawless “beautiful fruit” (I, 1) of Gloucester; Edmund, as he should be, is an extra in this scene. In the beginning, “nature,” which is immoral among the vicious, is covered up by civilized hypocrisy; among the noble, it openly manifests itself - through personal disobedience.
(Internet) Each of the characters that make up the camp of evil remains a clearly individualized artistic image; This method of characterization gives the depiction of evil a special realistic persuasiveness. But despite this, in the behavior of individual characters one can identify features that are indicative of the entire group of characters as a whole.
The image of Oswald - albeit in a crushed form - combines deceit, hypocrisy, arrogance, self-interest and cruelty, that is, all the traits that, to one degree or another, determine the face of each of the characters that make up the camp of evil. The opposite technique was used by Shakespeare when depicting Cornwall. In this image, the playwright highlights the only leading character trait - the unbridled cruelty of the Duke, who is ready to put any of his opponents to the most painful execution. However, the role of Cornwall, like the role of Oswald, does not have a self-sufficient significance and essentially performs a service function. The disgusting, sadistic cruelty of Cornwall is interesting not in itself, but only as a way for Shakespeare to show that Regan, whose soft nature Lear speaks of, is no less cruel than her husband.
Therefore, the compositional techniques with which Shakespeare removes Cornwall and Oswald from the stage long before the finale are quite natural and understandable, leaving on stage at the time of the decisive clash between the camps only the main bearers of evil - Goneril, Regan and Edmund. The starting point in the characterization of Regan and Goneril is the theme of children's ingratitude towards their fathers. The above description of certain events typical of London life at the beginning of the 17th century was intended to show that cases of deviation from the old ethical norms, according to which the respectful gratitude of children towards their parents was something taken for granted, became so frequent that the relationship between parents and heirs turned into a serious problem that worried various circles of the then English public.

In the course of revealing the theme of ingratitude, the main aspects of the moral character of Goneril and Regan are revealed - their cruelty, hypocrisy and deceit, covering up the selfish aspirations that guide all the actions of these characters. “The forces of evil,” writes D. Stampfer, “acquire a very large scale in King Lear, and there are two special variants of evil at work: evil as the animal nature, represented by Regan and Goneril, and evil as theoretically based atheism, presented by Edmund. Mix these varieties should not in any way."
Edmund is a villain; in the monologues repeatedly spoken by these characters, their deeply hidden inner essence and their villainous plans are revealed; a character who would never commit crimes and cruelty in order to admire the results of villainous “exploits”. At each stage of his activity, he pursues very specific tasks, the solution of which should serve his enrichment and elevation.

Understanding the motivations that guide the representatives of the evil camp is inseparable from the theme of fathers and sons, the theme of generations, which, during the creation of King Lear, occupied Shakespeare's creative imagination especially deeply. Evidence of this is not only the story of Lear and Gloucester, fathers plunged into the abyss of disasters and ultimately destroyed by their children. This theme is repeatedly heard in individual remarks of the characters.

Reckless due to his natural character, King Lear truly loses his mind under the influence of the misfortunes that befall him. The faithful jester, who accompanies the noble sufferer in his wanderings around Britain, wisely notes that the one who acts as his master clearly does not make friends with his head. If we continue the line of reasoning of the buffoon, we can say that King Lear lost little in terms of sobriety of mind, the clarification of which came actually before his death, which freed the grief-stricken man from further earthly torment.

The mad King Lear in Shakespeare's tragedy at some point is likened to a jester, but not in madness, but in the truthfulness of the sayings expressed. For example, it is he who says one of the wisest thoughts of the play to the blinded Earl of Gloucester: “Eccentric! You don’t need eyes to see the course of things in the world.”

5) The role of time in"Lyre" will become clearer when we compare the architectonics of the characters in the British and Verona tragedies in terms of how the family-age principle is applied in it. The main characters in both plays are parents, children and people close to them. But in King Lear the age difference is more differentiated than in Romeo and Juliet - not two generations, but four ages:
I. The aged eighty-year-old Lear.
II. Seniors: Kent, Gloucester - and Oswald.
III. The eldest children and sons-in-law who reached the prime of life: Edgar, Albany - and Goneril, Regan, Cornwall.
IV. Young, younger children just entering life: Cordelia and Edmund.
Limiting ourselves to twelve main figures, we can represent the archtechnique of the characters in King Lear in time with the following diagram:
Lear → Kent, Gloucester, Oswald → Edgar, Albany, Jester, Cornwall, Regan, Goneril → Cordelia, Edmund

In the characters, there are noticeable differences between male and female figures, always characteristic of the anthropological method of the Renaissance artist Shakespeare. Among the “good” ones, Kent, Albani and especially Edgar are endowed with a greater tendency to reflect than the feminine Cordelia; in the world of the “evil”, the maxims and program monologues belong to Edmund, and Goneril and Regan surpass him in emotionality. No less obvious are the differences in time and age. Noble, faithful Kent is a close friend of the “sinful” Gloucester, like Kent, a faithful vassal; but even the base servant Oswald, in his own way, is faithful to his mistress to the end. The discord, the enmity between the “good” and the “evil” in the third age is much sharper. The camp of the “good” is crowned by two characters of the fourth age: the youngest daughter, young Cordelia, to whom all eyes are turned throughout the action, leads the forces of the “good” in the decisive battle, and the world of the “evil” in the finale is led by the youngest son, young Edmund. Moral and cultural contrasts are growing, age distances are increasing, and the sides of the angle are diverging in time.
Both fathers, the average images of the scheme, the heroic Every Man and the ordinary Every Man are syncretic natures of this world. In other images, “nature” was determined from the very beginning and only manifests itself in the course of action - “good” or “evil”; in Lear and Gloucester she changes significantly; the suffering she endures gives her character. Human nature progressively changes in height over generations, the “good” and “evil” in moral terms are increasingly diverging, the architectonics of the characters in “King Lear” gravitate towards a triangle, where the protagonist is at the forefront, the apex. The greatest discord in the tragic world, which intensifies as the action progresses, is accompanied in the souls of the fathers by the acute awareness that each of them gave birth to both good and evil, that they did not understand children, and turned out to be “natural jesters of fortune.” Time (in this regard, still small, not historical, but natural-age time) gives birth, cultivates and qualifies “nature” in its characteristic quality, sign - giving rise to a tragic crisis in life and in personal consciousness.
6) Nature itself is space(poetically living Nature!) is ambiguous in King Lear. At first it seems, “appears” to us as the “good nature” of good characters, the Nature of King Lear, his formidable intercessor. We hear the first peals of thunder and “the sound of a storm in the distance” at the end of the second act, during the break with the daughters and departure to the steppe, immediately after Lear’s words: “I will do such things... I don’t know what; but something that will terrify the universe ". Nature then, as it were, responds to Lear at the climax, as if submitting to his spells at the very beginning of III, 2 (“Be angry, wind, blow until your cheeks burst... Smashing thunder, flatten the globe of the earth! Break nature’s form, destroy ungrateful people, seed !"). It seems to us that this is the nature of Rome on the eve of the assassination of Julius Caesar; those formidable omens (or warnings) that Horatio recalls at the beginning of Hamlet; or that this is Scottish nature on the night of Duncan’s murder, when the sun did not appear in the sky for a long time (“against nature, as what happened,” “the day was ashamed of the people,” Macbeth, III, 4). But the “evil” in Lear are not at all afraid of this terrible thunderstorm; Regan, Cornwall and Oswald took refuge in the castle at the end of the second act; storm, rain, thunder, sulfur fire rage in the steppe over the homeless Lear, Kent and Jester. The nature of "Lear", perhaps, is rather on the side of the "evil" - Kent and Gloucester twice call the night of the third act "tyrannical" (III, 4); Lear shames the elements, calling them “obsequious servants” of his evil daughters (“To help the evil daughters, you fell with all the heavenly power on your head - so gray and old! Oh, shame, shame!”). It turns out that we, viewers and readers, along with the hero turned out to be “natural jesters” of tragic fate, “fortune”. Or rather, nature itself in the British tragedy is at odds with itself, it is with both good and evil, it is two-faced, if not two-faced. This is the sick, “out of joint” nature of the disintegrating Great Chain of Being.
7) The main characters of Shakespeare’s tragedies, especially the protagonists, are not only living individuals, but also “principles”, “beginnings”, the most important facets of human nature, gravitating towards poetic symbols, felt as large generalizations of human consciousness (including historical consciousness - in a large sense Time), and therefore these images-characters as individuals are to some extent conditional. To the same extent, the circumstances and situations around the characters are conditionally true - artistic conventions exclude a limited perception of the image in a uniquely individual way. Conventions here too (as in anachronisms) transfer the image from a uniquely typical small time (and small nature) to a large plane; this is their poetically expressive function......
Against the background of all the implausible conventions of Lear - the psychologically fairy-tale plot, the failure to recognize the son by the father and the old courtier by the king (the conventions of almost the entire action), the accompaniment of cosmic forces in the thunderstorm scenes, the speeches of the mad hero and his “fool”, always imbued with the highest wisdom, not a single a “stupid” word, etc. - against the backdrop of all this, being surprised at the lack of verisimilitude of some detail of one scene is about the same as being surprised at the not entirely natural order of words (convention of inversion) in a poem with a complex and magnificent meter.

If individual insignificant improbabilities are only a kind of “poetic license”, justified by the special condensation of the dramatic whole, then more significant conventions, maintained throughout a number of scenes or the entire plot, give the entire action of “King Lear” a more expressive tone than usual in Shakespeare; the established conventions then become poetic means of special expressiveness, like the well-known conventions of poetic speech. Compared to British tragedy, the “language” of the action of “Othello” and three Roman tragedies is just rhythmic prose, the language of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” is prose alternating with poetry, “Lear” alone is entirely poetic and therefore so often upset fans strict plausibility of the action (“this doesn’t happen in life”). Even positivist criticism of the 19th century was aware that in many positions of Lear the usual heightened expressiveness develops into symbolism: scenes of Lear’s wanderings with his companions across the steppe; Edgar as Tom of Bedlam; the trial of three madmen over the daughters of Lear; the procession of blind Gloucester with his mad guide to Dover; three "undresses" of Lear; the duel between the Duke of Cornwall and a servant; Gloucester's "jump" from the cliff; awakening of Lear; the final duel between two brothers. The “metaphorical” connotation is felt in Lear’s royal title, and in the illegitimacy of Edmund’s “natural son,” and in Edgar’s “undressing” immediately after he was deprived of his inheritance, and in the fact that one father loses his mind and the other loses his sight , etc. Sometimes symbolism and metaphor are immediately revealed by the characters themselves (Lear: “A king, and a king to the end of his nails”; he also talks about naked Edgar: “A man without embellishment is only a poor, naked, two-legged animal like you "; Edmund: “Nature, you are my goddess. I am subject to your laws"; Gloucester: “This is our age: the blind are led by madmen”)….

V.P. Komarova

The relationship between man and the time in which he lives constantly attracted Shakespeare's attention. In the tragedy "Hamlet", the hero considers the highest goal of his life to be a difficult and dangerous feat: he must correct his time, even if he has to pay for it with his life.

In historical dramas, the problem of the relationship between personality and “time” is posed in a different way: how is the fate of historical figures connected with “time”, what is “time”, why some rulers achieve success in their actions, while others die in a clash with “time” ? In Shakespeare's historical dramas, the word “time” most often means the relationship of political and social forces in society, the trend of historical development characteristic of the era. “Time” in Shakespeare’s chronicles is a dynamic and dialectical concept associated with the concept of necessity, writes the modern Czech researcher Zdenek Strzibrna in the book “The Historical Chronicles of Shakespeare”. In the historical process, “time” is the main force that destroys the old law and order, sometimes acting against the will of kings and great men, forcing them to submit to necessity. This is an observation expressed in the monograph Zd. Strzybrny, helps the author to convincingly refute the concept of Y.M.U. Tillard, who argued that the idea of ​​order dominates in Shakespeare's chronicles.

In Shakespeare's early chronicles - in the trilogy "King Henry VI" and in the tragedy "Richard III" - the references of individual characters to "time" are not yet associated with an understanding of the laws of historical development, nevertheless time is a formidable force, the reason for the emergence, development and destruction of everything that exists. Time punishes injustice, unravels knots, washes away guilt, reveals cunning tricks. Heroes of chronicles often place their hopes on “time”: the hero, powerless to resolve contradictions, punish the offender or take revenge on enemies, hopes that time will complete what man could not do.

In the early chronicles there is a character whose fate connects the past, present and future - Queen Margaret. An unknown French princess, who captivated Suffolk and Henry VI with her beauty, she becomes the queen of England, achieves the fall of her enemies, and achieves complete power. And at that moment, when the murder of the “good Duke Humphrey” seemed to rid her of her last enemy, blows of fate followed one after another: her lover was expelled and killed, her husband Henry VI was deposed and stabbed to death in prison by Richard of Gloucester, Margaret’s son was killed in in her eyes. In powerless rage, she curses her enemies and threatens them with the judgment of time. Margarita survived all her enemies, and all her terrible prophecies were fulfilled. She triumphs over Queen Elizabeth: it seems to her that the “wheel of justice” has made Elizabeth “prey of time” (Richard III). She does not notice that the “judgment of time” has taken place on herself, if she perceives her misfortunes the way she perceives those of others.

Even Richard III, that murderous king, appeals to “time” to justify his crimes. True, he blames heaven and nature for his ugliness, but, in addition, he blames the “peaceful age”, which deprived him of the joy of military exploits.

Nowhere in Shakespeare's play is there any idea that time vindicates the tyrant. "Richard III" is a tragedy about the causes of tyranny. In the first three acts, Shakespeare depicts how the tyrant subjugates all the forces in the state, all the authorities. A tyrant is a perversion of human nature, a moral monster, inevitably doomed to death. The horror experienced by the viewer is intensified by the knowledge that such intelligence, will, energy, courage serve vile, cruel deeds. Richard's self-justification, his references to "time" are self-deception in some cases and a political ploy in others.

Characters in chronicles dating back to Shakespeare's mature period often invoke “time” to justify and explain their actions. “The time of troubles forces us to do this,” the archbishop justifies himself, raising a rebellion against Henry IV. When King Westmoreland's ambassador asks him about the reasons for the discontent, the archbishop replies: “We have seen where the stream of times is heading.” He recognizes that personal grievances have deep roots. “Time” seems to be the archbishop’s enemy, since the strengthening of royal power is a feature of “time.”

One of the lords refuses to take part in the rebellion, citing “inopportune timing”; Northumberland, committing treason against his allies, reassures himself that he will act at a more convenient time; The Chief Justice tells Falstaff that only “restless times” allowed him to safely escape punishment; Falstaff, like other characters, refers to a corrupt age to justify his lifestyle.

Westmoreland, a supporter of the king, appeals to “time” to justify the king’s policies: “It is not the king but time that wrongs you,” he answers the rebels and reminds them of the popular support that made Henry of Lancaster king. Henry Hotspur spoke indignantly about the means that Henry resorted to in order to win the love of the people: Henry softens the harsh Laws, is indignant at abuses, pretending to cry over the suffering of his homeland and defending justice. So, the need for popular support is portrayed as the main reason for the success of the ruler, as a requirement of the time.

In the chronicle “King John,” all the warring parties talk about a “sick time,” but at the same time they have different ideas about the causes of the disease and the means to cure it. Lord Salisbury refers to the "sick time" to justify the rebellion and laments the forced betrayal.

Salisbury's words convey the complexity of the relationship between “right” and “wrong” in historical events. Trying to understand the contradictions, the reasons for the misfortunes of the state and his own grievances, Salisbury resorts to the image of a “sick time.”

In King John's speech, the same image symbolizes the general state of the state. Rebellion within the country threatens his power, war with France, and the struggle with the Catholic Church threaten the existence of the English nation, so the king is forced to reconcile with the Pope in order to cope with other enemies with his help. He explains this concession by reference to “time”: “Our time is afflicted with such a disease that it is urgent to take medicine to prevent an incurable outcome.”

The subjective meaning of characters' references to time lies in the characters' desire to understand and explain their actions. But these references also have an objective meaning - thanks to them, an idea arises of a turbulent century full of struggle and bloody events: cruel, disastrous, dangerous, restless, wild, sad, painful, warring, sorrowful, rotten, corrupt times - this is how the heroes of Shakespeare’s chronicles his era.

Turning to the concept of “time” to explain certain phenomena, Shakespeare’s characters often complement this explanation with an analysis of the political situation in the country. Lord Bardolph advises the rebels to calculate their forces and foresee the consequences of their dangerous undertaking: before building, you need to imagine what the building will be like, you need to draw up a plan, calculate the costs, and, if the funds are not enough, is it not better to conceive a building of a smaller size or abandon it altogether? the buildings? Moreover, in such a great matter as the destruction of a state and the creation of a new one, it is necessary to build on a solid foundation, otherwise the entire building will exist only on paper and in numbers. In response to his speech, Hastings and the archbishop give an assessment of the “time”: Henry’s troops are divided into three parts, his treasury is empty, the state has “eaten up” with Bolingbroke, the crowd that glorified him before is now fed up with him and wants to return Richard. The characteristic of “time” is turned into an assessment of the political situation. At the same time, personal interests blind the participants in the rebellion and lead them to an erroneous assessment of the present, just as the past also appears to them in a distorted light.

In many cases, the nature of “time” is determined by the characteristics of the government. The Duke of York, knowing that his son remained loyal to the deposed Richard II, advises him to be careful under the new ruler. York accepted Bolingbroke as the "rightful" king, so he compares his reign to "a new spring of time." The warning to the son is couched in poetic imagery: if the plant does not develop well in the spring, it may be cut off before it blooms (Richard II). King Henry IV, anticipating his death, fears that with the accession of his son, “bad times” will come in England, when dissipation and violence will dominate the country and England will again become a prey to civil unrest, a wild desert inhabited by wolves. When the king dies and Prince Henry becomes King Henry the Fifth, the Chief Justice prepares to bravely face the "conditions of the times" that threaten him with a "terrible gaze." In these cases, the change in the nature of “time” is associated with a change of ruler. The characters' ideas about time are complemented by specific political considerations.

Shakespeare illuminates the relationship between a historical figure and time in different ways in different chronicles. This problem was first raised in the chronicle “Richard II”. Richard's monologue in prison contains an allegory that helps to understand the reasons for the tragic fate of the ruler. Richard hears music, and the thought of a violation of harmony in music gives rise to a figurative comparison: in life, people need to maintain harmony and prevent violations of tact. And Richard understands his guilt - he did not hear the right tact to coordinate his policy with the times. “Harmony” of the mode of government and “time” means in this case the correspondence of the ruler’s policy to the needs of historical development. Long before this final scene in the gardener's councils, Shakespeare gave in allegorical form the idea of ​​a "government" that could preserve order in the state. Richard's opponent, the Duke of Lancaster, seems to follow the advice of the gardener and wins the fight, and Richard dies, perceiving his death as retribution for bad rule. The general rebellion in the state, his own fall, Bolingbroke’s victory - all these political events take on in his thoughts the appearance of “time”, which takes revenge on the ruler for his mistakes.

Richard feels like a victim of time, just like the rebellious feudal lords in Henry IV and King John. A person who does not maintain harmony with time becomes its victim. The political events preceding this philosophical generalization help to feel the meaning of Richard's appeal to the image of time. Many critics see the reason for Richard's tragedy in the peculiarities of his character. But Richard's mistakes, which lead to his death, stem mainly from his belief in the divine origin and inviolability of his power. His “guilt” is generated by the prevailing ideas in society. The loss of power helps him understand his delusion, understand the variability of everything in the world - law, rights, property, power.

The scene in the garden has constantly attracted the attention of researchers. The gardener, whom the queen calls “the likeness of old Adam,” uses allegory to outline advice on how to maintain order in the state. Shakespeareologists have studied numerous sources, classical and contemporary to Shakespeare, which could have given rise to certain ideas and images in the gardener’s advice. In the articles by X.D. Leon and the comments of P. Ur in the new Ardennes edition contains English, Latin and French sources containing the most distant parallels. However, they do not mention the closest, as it seems to us, source - the speech of John Ball, given in Stowe’s “Annals” and in Holinshed’s “Chronicles” in the section on the reign of Richard II when describing the uprisings of Wat Tyler.

Comparing the state to a garden is one of the most common allegories in Shakespeare's time. Tie up the branches that have bent under the weight of the apricots - this is the gardener’s first advice. The words “idle,” “oppression,” “disobedient,” “wasteful, excessive” explain the meaning of this allegory: it is necessary to support the useful, “fruit-bearing” elements in the state, oppressed by wasteful idlenesses.

And you go and, like an executioner, cut off the heads of the shoots that have risen too high in our state. Everyone should be equal under our rule. For this idea X.D. Leon discovered several classical sources. Bacon has similar advice: Periander led the messenger into the garden and cut off the tallest flowers, as if saying that the heads of the nobility and grandees should be cut off.

The gardener further explains his idea: at certain times of the year we cut off excess shoots in order to give life to fruit-bearing branches. We trim the bark so that the tree does not die from excess sap and blood, from excessive wealth. If Richard had done this to powerful people who seek to rise, he would have retained power. If the sources talk about ambitious people who are dangerous for a battering ram, then in Shakespeare the gardener advises suppressing noble and rich idlers who are ruining the state.

Particularly important in a gardener’s speech is such an allegory as clearing the garden of weeds. “I will go and uproot the more harmful weeds that take food away from the useful flowers,” says the gardener, and his servant continues the allegory: our country is a garden full of weeds, its best flowers are smothered and useful plants are eaten away by caterpillars. “Weeds have been used for political allegory so often that the image has become proverbial, and therefore no particular source should be sought,” writes Peter Ur. But the author immediately cites a distant source (1546), explaining that Shakespeare compares the “elements of disorder” in the state to weeds.

Researchers have not paid attention to the closer parallels that exist in the speech of John Ball given in the chronicles of Stowe and Holinshed. Stowe tells how during the rebellion of Wat Tyler (this uprising took place just during the reign of Richard II, in 1381), the preacher John Ball suggested that the rebels follow the example of a good farmer who cuts out all harmful weeds.

Holinshed gives this advice in a slightly modified form: Ball advised to get rid of noxious weeds that choke and destroy good grains, and called for the destruction of great lords so that everyone would have equal freedom and equal power.

Shakespeare preserves not only individual expressions and words, but also the general idea: weeds oppress, choke and destroy good grains. The gardener offers not calls for legality, but a reasonable use of force, and calls weeds not “elements of disorder,” but idle nobles proud of their origin and wealth. Of course, it would be too imprudent to see in this advice a support for the egalitarian ideas of John Ball, but it is quite possible that this speech served as one of the sources of the scene in the garden.

Let's compare the gardener's advice with Richard II's reasoning about time and with the policies of Henry IV, which Hotspur indignantly recalls, and we will see how the relationship between a historical figure and “time” is revealed: “time” acts as an ally of the ruler in the struggle if his policy corresponds to the interests of those forces in the state that are victorious in a given historical period.

How does Shakespeare feel about a hero who submits to the demands of the times? Does he approve of such submission? It seems to us that the author's assessment changes at different stages of creativity. In the chronicle “King John,” one of the heroes, the Bastard (Illegitimate), admits that he wants to obey the time in which he lives. This hero evokes the sympathy of the audience with his wit, resourcefulness, and courage. In his view, “time” is the laws and customs of society. He does not perceive “time” as something hostile to the existing order, and is not going to enter into a fight with the century. But his daring spirit cannot be satisfied with the role of “the bastard son of time.” There are no internal contradictions in the character of the hero, who, submitting to his age, thereby asserts himself as an individual. He is ironic about the knighthood, but understands that this title gives him the opportunity to get into “respectable society.” He wants not only in clothes and manners, but also in inner impulses to flatter time, “to exude the sweet, sweet, sweet poison of the teeth of time.” He will learn all the tricks of the century, not in order to deceive others, but so as not to be among those deceived. The hero’s position in life is completely clear: the Bastard wants to study his age, so as not to be an invisible spectator, but to control events, he wants to adapt to the time in order to achieve his own exaltation.

He becomes the king's right hand and penetrates the secrets of state politics. When John sends him to “shake the abbots’ sacks,” Philip cheerfully replies: “Bell, book and candle (the usual attributes of excommunication) will not deter him when gold and silver beckon him forward.” He is outraged by the vile compromise of the kings, but is able to objectively judge his indignation.

People's concepts of good and evil change along with their situation - this is how the Bastard justifies his submission to the universal law of Benefit. Is it possible to agree with the assessment that the hero himself gives to his behavior? Interest rules the world - this generalization contains the central idea of ​​the chronicle “King John”, dedicated to the problem of driving forces in historical events. But what is the “benefit” for the hero? The bastard influences the king for the good of England. He advises the king to change the policy according to the times. His courage in battle and cunning in politics save England at a difficult moment, when the pitiful, frightened king was at a loss at the news of the rebellion, obeying the laws of the time, the Bastard retains his moral dignity. His hatred of Limoges, Duke of Austria, cannot be explained simply by a desire to avenge the murder of Richard the Lionheart. Seeing the cowardly Duke dressed in a lion's skin, the Bastard turns to him: “You are the hare who, as the proverb says, bravely pulls dead lions by the beard.” This indignation at cowardice and meanness is stronger than political considerations. When John reconciles with France and Limoges turns from enemy to ally, the Bastard shares the contempt of Constance, who curses the turncoat: “Insignificant in valor, you are strong in meanness ... (always strong on the side of the strongest ... you enter into battle when fortune grants safety ...flattering greatness"). The Bastard's agreement with these assessments is expressed in the fact that he picks up the last words of Constance: “Throw the calf skin, coward, over your shoulders,” and this refrain accompanies all subsequent remarks of Limoges. The hero follows “profit”, but despises meanness and apostasy. The bastard obeys the king’s policies in everything, but upon learning of the death of young Prince Arthur, he says to Hubert, whom he considers the king’s tool: “Cursed if you consented to this murder!” However, at this dangerous moment, as later, at the time of the death of the king, he first of all thinks about the fate of England. This is how the hero’s assessment of himself is corrected.

According to the unanimous opinion of critics, Shakespeare created a positive image of the ruler in the chronicle “King Henry V”. Researchers argue that in this image, Shakespeare, following the theories of most humanists, expressed his dream of an ideal ruler who achieves unity and order within the country and thanks to this wins brilliant victories in France.

In the image of Henry V, writes Zd. Strzybrny, - Shakespeare created the ideal of a humanistic ruler who cares about the welfare of the people, pacifies the rebellious forces, internal and external, due to the fact that he coordinates his policies with the “time”. This people's king is opposed to both the weak Richard II and the tyrant Richard III; he gets rid of the hobbies of his youth and submits to the needs of the time. The idea that Henry V subordinates his policies to the demands of “the times” is quite fair, but on this basis it is unlikely that he can be called a “king of the people.” Can the chronicles of Henry IV and Henry V be seen as supporting humanist theories of the ideal ruler?

E. Graeter cites numerous parallels with the ideas of Thomas Eliot in the chronicle “Henry V” and concludes that Shakespeare, following Eliot, creates the image of an ideal monarch. Thomas Eliot in his; The extremely popular work “The Ruler” sets out the program for the humanistic education of the king. Eliot condemns the idea of ​​equal distribution of property and justifies the bloody laws against vagrants, "created for the due punishment of these idlers." Eliot calls sympathy for them “a vain pity, in which there is neither justice nor mercy, but from which flow idleness, neglect, disobedience and all incurable misfortunes.” E. Graeter does not examine these ideas of Eliot and does not notice a hidden polemic with Eliot’s book in Shakespeare’s chronicles.

Eliot quite seriously advises the ruler to get to know the life of his people, to personally study all the corners of the country, all the customs, both good and bad. Only then will the ruler be able to find the cause of the decline and apply the best medicines to heal the sick state. Eliot describes in detail the program for such a study of life. The ruler must know what his subjects think and say, what kind of honest and wealthy citizens live in his country, what is their way of life, their justice, generosity, zeal in the execution of laws and other virtues. He must also know who the people consider to be oppressors. Only then can he seek advice from “time” to find the necessary medicine.

In Shakespeare's chronicles, Prince Henry seems to follow Eliot's advice. But Shakespeare translates the whole theme of “knowledge of the life of the people” into a comic plane: from the “people” he selects the most rejected elements, bringing the prince closer to the lower classes of London. These elements of society were especially numerous at that time, and Shakespeare did not characterize their condemnation expressed in Eliot's book. Shakespeare selects many dark sides from “life” and confronts the future ruler with them. The paradox and absurdity of such a direct rapprochement between the heir to the throne and the “people” is completely obvious. Shakespeare contrasts Eliot's serious thoughts and prescriptions for healing a sick state with something similar to parodic comments on Eliot's advice, and thanks to the comic portrayal, the impracticability of such a program becomes clear. Prince Henry perceives his attraction to the world of Falstaff and to the life of the lower classes of London as something unnatural for the heir to the throne. He does not understand himself and explains his own actions either as a cunning political calculation (monologue “I know you all...”) or as a hobby of his youth. Henry IV convinces his son that his hobby threatens to overthrow the order in the state, that the thirst for “popularity” will cause him the contempt of all his subjects. Having become king, Henry submits to the Supreme Judge, the highest council of the state, parliament and promises to elect wise and noble advisers. So Henry pays tribute to the times, fulfilling his promise.

This scene could well serve as a bright ending if Shakespeare's goal was to create the image of an “ideal monarch.” But it is followed by three more in a completely different spirit. In the third scene of the fifth act, the viewer sees with what sincere delight Falstaff receives the news that his “tender lamb” has become king. In the fourth scene, two guards drag Mistress Quickly and Doll Tershit to prison, and in the fifth scene we see Falstaff and his friends at Westminster Abbey. And here Falstaff never once remembers the benefits of his position, but speaks only of affection for his friend. He stands, dusty from the road, and laments that he did not have time to buy a new dress with the thousand pounds he took from Shallow. “But nothing, this pitiful appearance is more suitable - it shows how I long to see him... the depth of my affection... my devotion... Here I stand, splashed with mud from the road, sweating from the desire to see him, about nothing without thinking about a friend, forgetting about all other matters, as if I had nothing but the desire to see him.” When the king appears, Falstaff's friendly exclamations are heard: "God bless you, Hal!" "Be happy, dear boy!" But he hears the king’s cold answer: “My Lord Judge, talk to a fool,” and then Henry’s speech, filled with teachings. “Old man, I don’t know you!” - the king cruelly announces and advises his former friend to leave buffoonery, turn to prayers and think about his imminent death. And although he promises to give Falstaff the means to live, the Chief Justice immediately after the king’s departure imprisons Sir John. In the subsequent chronicle, “Henry V,” Falstaff’s friends say that the king broke the poor knight’s heart, and the story of gossip Quickley about Falstaff’s death evokes a touching feeling among the audience.

Such an ending does not seem strange to us, based on the general concept of the chronicles about King Henry IV. J.B. Priestley, as well as the English Marxist critic T. Jackson, were deeply right when they saw the manifestation of Shakespeare's humanism, his sympathy for even the most outcast sections of English society. In the era of primitive accumulation, vagrancy and poverty assumed the proportions of a national disaster. A characteristic feature of Falstaff's humor is a constant reminder of the “diseases of the century.” The phenomena that Falstaff turns into a source of laughter are in themselves so terrible that in some scenes a tinge of bitterness is felt (for example, in the recruitment scenes, in the description of the ragged army).

Shakespeare's contemporary England appears in the chronicles "Henry IV" and "Henry V" as divided into two hostile and alien worlds: in one, the struggle for power, conspiracies, military exploits, pomp of clothing, solemn speech, in the other - ruined nobles, vagabonds, petty thieves, ragged troops, peasants fleeing military service, innkeepers, servants, cab drivers - everyone who stands on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Prince Henry was proud that he could drink with any coppersmith and speak the language of the lower classes of London. The pathetic tavern servant Francis, who gave the prince a lump of sugar, makes Henry sadly think about what a primitive life a person can live. The Prince is really close to the lower classes of London, who arouse interest and sympathy in him.

But, having become a king, he must break with this world; for him there is no other way out. His submission to “time” is a submission to the interests of the upper classes in the state. Before us is a good king: an intelligent politician, a valiant military leader, who knows the life of his subjects, obedient to parliament and the law. However, he is forced to execute his friends, praising loyalty in friendship, he must brutally deal with the lower classes of society with whom he sympathized when he was only a prince, he makes speeches about right and wages an unjust war with France. In the first scene of the chronicle “Henry V,” Shakespeare points out the true reasons for the war: in order to save their wealth, which is encroached upon by Parliament, the highest prelates of the church persuade the king to start a war with France. In this play, Shakespeare creates a bloody image of war, senseless and destructive. Henry's heroic tirades are usually followed by comic scenes that may serve as a parody of the heroic portrayal of Henry V's wars in English historiography.

Henry's reconciliation with the demands of state necessity forced him to abandon his personal feelings and sympathies. At the same time, he lost many attractive qualities, lost personal freedom and became one of the parts of the state machine. If in the chronicle “King John” Shakespeare portrayed the Bastard’s submission to his time in a positive light, then the ethical assessment of Henry’s reconciliation with time is much more complex. Henry must do this, for the king achieves success by submitting to “time,” but this submission looks like a bitter necessity. Later chronicles allow us to conclude that Shakespeare was critical of the humanist theories about the ideal ruler. Even a monarch with “ideal” personal qualities is forced to submit to circumstances. His position alienates him from the people, forces him to obey the demands of the upper classes, the laws of political struggle. The positive principle, opposing Falstaff’s skepticism and selfishness, takes on the still traditional forms of concern for the good of the state. Henry feels that the king's goals are incomprehensible and alien to the soldiers, but does not perceive this contradiction as tragic. Henry accepts the world as it is and subordinates his actions to external forces independent of his will.

The relationship between personality and time becomes tragic in the late historical drama Coriolanus (1609). Without touching on the numerous problems associated with the drama itself, one of the most difficult to interpret, we will dwell only on the depiction of the relationship between the hero and time. For the first time in Shakespeare's dramaturgy, “time” appears as the social struggle in a given era and the psychological and philosophical contradictions generated by it. The hero consciously refuses to submit to the demands of the time, if for this he must violate his nature, stop being himself.

It is incorrect to portray Coriolanus as short-sighted and blind in public life. He is more perceptive than other patricians.

He predicts that "the mob will eventually achieve greater power and: make even greater demands to justify their rebellions." He proposes to deprive the people of representatives in the people's assembly who can say “yes” and “no” (a detail of the parliamentary struggle - in the House of Commons even the members of the house themselves were called “yes” and “no” when voting on bills). Coriolanus urges the patricians to “tear out the tongue of the crowd, not to allow it to lick the sweet poison of freedom.” But he is forced to recognize the strength of the people and predicts the fall of the nobility. The episode from the siege of Coriol, when Coriolanus alone rushes into the enemy’s gates, was introduced not only to show the hero’s courage. It characterizes the life position of Coriolanus, who acts alone in state life, without thinking about the consequences and danger. But when he shows the same courage in political struggle, the tribunes accuse him of treason for insulting the law and authority, for, unlike Plutarch, Shakespeare portrays the tribunes as persons vested with full government power. His illness is contagious, his thoughts are poison for others, he proposes dangerous innovations, he resists the law, he is a traitor - death to him! Coriolanus hears such accusations even before he actually betrays Rome.

One of the reasons for the death of the hero - a vice of judgment - is named in the monologue of Dufidius, which is not given enough attention in critical works. Aufidius himself puts a limited meaning into these words: Coriolanus failed to take advantage of the opportunity for success. But the tragedy as a whole allows us to interpret these words differently: Coriolanus was unable to question his ossified idea of ​​the world and understand that his virtues do not have an absolute meaning independent of society. “Our virtues lie in the understanding of time,” this observation, which has caused so many comments, contains an important philosophical generalization: the assessment of our virtues depends on how a given time understands them. It is difficult to say what is better for Coriolanus, to adapt to the “time” or to remain steadfast, but his tragic fate contains, in addition to condemnation of treason, the idea of ​​​​the tragic intractability of the hero’s conflict with the new time.

So, the relationship between the hero and time in Shakespeare's historical dramas testifies to Shakespeare's deep penetration into objective historical patterns. Only the ability to understand their time and obey it allows heroes to become creators of history. In early chronicles such submission is depicted as a positive principle. But already in Henry V, Henry’s submission to time leads him to violence against his own personality and does not resolve the contradictions that the ruler faces. Finally, in Coriolanus “time” is defined as social struggle, its laws and trends. If the hero does not submit to this objective force, he is doomed to death. This is how the problem of the relationship between personality and time in Shakespeare's later historical dramas is resolved.

L-ra: Bulletin of Leningrad State University. Series history, linguistics, literature. – 1966. – Issue. 3. – No. 14. – P. 82-93.