Going Beyond Vengeance in HamletThe simplest and superficially most appealing way to understand Shakespeare's Hamlet is to see it as a revenge tragedy. This genre was well established and very popular in Shakespeare's time, but it was precisely part of his genius to be able to take old forms and renew them by creatively violating their norms. As this essay will explore, Hamlet turns conventional revenge tragedy on its head and uses the tensions created by this type reversal to add depth to its characters and story. The revenge tragedy of Shakespeare's era, exemplified in productions such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Henry Chettle's The Hoffman Tragedy were gruesome to some extent. In this last work, for example, the hero shows on stage the skeleton of his father, tortured to death for piracy, and then participates in his revenge by killing one of his enemies with exactly the same tortures and hanging him. him chained next to his father's skeleton. In doing so, the original religious symbolism of death imagery, particularly the skeleton and skull, is perverted into simple eye-catching symbols of vengeance (Jacobs 1993). The classic revenge tragedy is therefore a fairly simple affair: there is an offense, and it is followed quite mechanically by revenge, preferably bloody and prolonged. However, as Delville and Michel (1998) point out, this structure is undermined by Shakespeare in the person of Hamlet. Unlike Shakespeare's own creations, Brutus, Macbeth and Othello, Hamlet is unpredictable. In an earlier version of the play, called Ur-Hamlet, and attributed to Thomas Kyd, the only reason for...... middle of paper ......rd and poisoned cup. In the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia, and even in his own, he learns that the means cannot be separated from the end, and that the consequences of his own choice of means – his madness – will come back to haunt him. It is in this sense that Hamlet can be read as a journey of self-discovery, even if the journey only ends in the grave. Works cited Delville, Michel and Pierre Michel. “Introducing Hamlet.” Tr. Eriks Uskalis. University of Liège, 1998. April 20, 2001. Jacobs, Henry E. “Shakespeare, the tragedy of revenge and the ideology of Memento Mori”. Shakespeare Studies 21, 1993: 96-108. Electronic. EBSCO MasterFILE Premier, June 14, 2001. Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London: Spring Books, nd.: 945-980.