Space in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Abstract

The paper deals with the concept of space in William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”. Not only is the play the most popular and the most internationally known creation of William Shakespeare, but it also attracts readers and critics for its complexity and up-to-datedness. We chose to analyse various aspects of space in this tragedy to underline their influence on different characters. The paper aims at proving that there is a relation between each character and a particular space whose features are partly reflected in the characters’ personality or/and actions. Therefore, the main characters were analysed in connection with the spaces they appear in throughout the play. We were also interested in analysing whether the characters have the necessary power and/or ability to change these spaces, or not. We noticed that some of the characters had their spaces invaded by perpetrators, while other characters became perpetrators themselves. Observing the link between spaces and the characters' personality, we tried to scrutinize their deeds based on the features of certain spaces emphasizing aspects such as: private vs. public, natural vs. artificial.