Contextual Understanding (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Hamlet: contextual understanding

Context involves facts and details about the author’s life and the socio-, political, historical and cultural realities of a given time and place. In each of these realities, you can consider how culture and identity influence the author’s choices in how they produce their text and the audience’s perspective and interpretation of those texts. 

Knowing and understanding contextual details can also provide insight into the themes and purposes of texts and allow you to make informed and convincing analytical claims.

Authorial context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Readers, Writers, Texts asks you to reflect on how meaning is constructed and interpreted. In your Theory of Knowledge (ToK) class, you will likely have had discussions on how meaning in the Arts is formed through a dialogue between the artist and the audience. As such, it can be useful to know details of the author’s life to infer reasons for their artistic choices as readers interpret their work years after their death.

• William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England

• As a member of the theatre company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), Shakespeare spent much of his time in London:

  • Here, he earned acclaim as a leading playwright and poet of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras

• In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children:

  • Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died in 1596 aged eleven

  • It has been suggested that the loss may have contributed to the play Hamlet

• Throughout his life, England was ravaged by epidemics, like the bubonic plague:

  • These outbreaks regularly forced theatres to close

• Shakespeare’s plays explore universal themes:

  • He is considered a humanist due to his focus on the human condition

Social and historical context

The social and historical context is the events, changes, morals, and values of the time and place in which the text was written. Hamlet is thought to have been performed for the first time between 1599 and 1601, most likely in the Globe Theatre in London. Some key details of that time and place are explored below to help aid our analysis of how Shakespeare represented and challenged the society in which his audience lived.

Elizabethan societal norms

• Citizens of Elizabethan England were subject to strict social and hierarchical order: 

  • The Great Chain of Being claimed the monarch was chosen by God and held absolute power

  • Society was divided according to class, affording the highest status and agency to the nobility and the least status and agency to peasants

  • Sumptuary Laws dictated which fabrics, garments, and accessories could be worn by people based on social class:

    • In England, Elizabethan laws dictated strict clothing rules for different social statuses until 1604

• It was widely believed that the rigid Elizabethan social hierarchy prevented disorder:

  • Shakespeare’s Hamlet examines the consequences of regicide, reflecting the political instability in England and Denmark at the time

• An unstable Elizabethan England led to suspicion and uncertainty:

  • Unexplainable events such as disease, illness, untimely death, or even bad luck, were often attributed to the supernatural

  • For example, ghosts were considered to be manifestations of evil, prophets or messengers with ill omens

  • The Witchcraft Act (1542–1735) outlawed and made punishable by death anything deemed to be witchcraft, including anyone invoking spirits

Religion 

• When Hamlet was written, Queen Elizabeth I’s forty-four year reign coming to an end:

  • Without a direct heir to the throne, England was unsure who would succeed

• Even before this period of uncertainty, however, England was in a period of political and religious turmoil:

  • Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had broken with the Catholic Church

  • After the early death of his son (a direct heir), Mary took the throne

  • Not without violence, she reverted the country back to Catholicism

  • However, when Mary died, Elizabeth took the throne and reverted a turbulent England to Protestantism

• Shakespeare’s plays often reflect the religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants as a result of the Reformation:

  • In the play Hamlet, the Protestant protagonist (opens in a new tab) encounters a ghost who describes a typically Catholic purgatory:

    • The text establishes Hamlet’s Protestant background by repeatedly emphasising that he wishes to return to school in Wittenberg

    • Elizabethan audiences would recognise this as the famous university where Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation

  • As Protestantism denied the existence of purgatory, Hamlet’s experiences with the spirit bring him moral uncertainty

Gender

• Elizabethan and Jacobean England was a strictly patriarchal sociеty; gender roles were rigidly defined:

  • Ideals of masculinity centred on dominance, honour, and physical strength

  • Women were subject to the authority of their fathers and husbands; their identity and status was largely determined by marriage

• Queen Elizabeth defied social norms by refusing to marry, arguably to maintain personal autonomy:

  • Carefully navigating her position, she asserted her right to rule by claiming that her female body was distinct from her body politic

  • Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents a female monarch who is presented as a pawn in the political machinations of the court

• Set in Denmark, Hamlet reflects gender norms in Elizabethan England and Europe:

  • The play portrays female characters with limited agency, such as Ophelia

Literary context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Intertextuality asks us to think about how texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types and how conventions evolve. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an interesting text with which to think about these questions. Interpretations of the play have evolved significantly over time, which reflect shifts in cultural and literary perspectives  It can be interpreted as a revenge tragedy that explores humanist, Machiavellian, and Freudian concepts. The tables below explore these ideas.

Humanism 

Machiavellian

Freudian

Context of reception

In the AoE Time and Space, questions revolve around how audiences “then and now” or “there and here” might read/interpret texts differently. Paper 2 questions may ask you to compare texts that make you think about this, and in the IO, you might compare how two different texts in different contexts explore the same Global Issue; therefore, it is useful to know and understand how the audience of the time reacted to Shakespeare’s work. 

Audience reception

• Written during the Renaissance, the play examines human reason, individual agency, and complex emotions, predominantly via Hamlet’s soliloquies

• In thе 17th century, Hamlet was primarily viewed as a revenge tragedy:

  • This genre of drama, popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, typically featured a protagonist seeking vengeance for a wrongful act

• Early interpretations of the play often explored moral and political themes:

  • Themes of usurpation, regicide, succession, and the moral responsibilities of leaders resonated with the political climate of the time

Exploring critics

Below are two notable critics who have commented on Hamlet:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an influential English poet, literary critic and philosopher who co-founded the Romantic Movement

• Coleridge argued that Hamlet suffers from a profound internal imbalance, meaning that his thoughts and imagination are more vivid than the physical world around him:

  • He is so lost in his internal world that he delays taking action until it is completely useless

• Because he is paralysed by his own inaction, he cannot act deliberately:

  • He only acts by accident or in a fit of passion

  • Consequently, he ultimately dies as the victim of circumstance and accident rather than as the master of his own fate

• He also argued that Hamlet plays a psychological trick, pretending to act mad only when he is dangerously close to actually becoming the thing he is acting

A.C. Bradley (1851-1935)

• Bradley was a prominent Shakespearean scholar and his 1904 work, Shakespearean Tragedy, is considered a classic in literary criticism:

  • This study considered Hamlet’s intense melancholy as the primary cause of his paralysing delay in taking action

• Bradley considered Hamlet’s “swings in temperament”, exhibiting extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he would be disposed to be completely taken up, for a time, in the feeling or mood that currently possessed him

• For Bradley, it is Hamlet’s “disgust at life and everything in it, himself included” which explains everything:

  • This also accounts for the fact he does not understand why he cannot take action, and reproaches himself over his unwillingness to avenge his father

Sources:

Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Penguin Publishing Group, 1991.

Mills, Howard, and David Ellis. “Coleridge's Hamlet:The Notes versus the Lectures.” Essays in Criticism, vol. Volume XXIX, no. Issue 3, July 1979, Pages 244–253.

“Case Studies in Political Leadership.” Elgar Online, https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781035328918/book-part-9781035328918-28.xml (opens in a new tab).

Herbrechter, Stefan. “Hamlet, Shakespeare and Posthumanism – Critical Posthumanism Network.” Critical Posthumanism Network, 8 May 2020, https://criticalposthumanism.net/hamlet-shakespeare-and-posthumanism/ (opens in a new tab). Accessed 1 April 2026.

Olivas, Tynelle Ann. “Who is Ophelia? An examination of the Objectification and Subjectivity of Shakespeare's Ophelia.” OAsis: UNLV's, https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3404&context=thesesdissertations (opens in a new tab). Accessed 1 April 2026.