Barbaric Shakespeare

In her ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet , Margreta de Grazia shows that Hamlet was not always considered a harbinger of modern subjectivity.   On the contrary, Restoration critics and playwrights considered Shakespeare and Hamlet to be retrograde and rude:

“In the ‘refined age’ of the Restoration, Hamlet , like all Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, belonged to the cruder previous period or ‘last age’ before the great interregnal divide separating Charles I from Charles II.  English letters during this period were deemed backward or even barbarous, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity.’  Shakespeare, according to David Hume, was the product of such benighted times: ‘born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction, either from the world or books.’”

Restoration writers considered Elizabethans backward because “the English stage had largely lacked the civilizing canons of Aristotle, Horace and their sixteenth-century Italian and seventeenth-century French redactors.”  Without these models, Elizabethan playwrights were “gothic.”  Plus, Shakespeare was writing plays for the masses, instead of refined poetry for the courtly elites.  Some believed Shakespeare could have written a classical Hamlet, had he not been driven by a base desire to satisfy popular tastes.