Ahmad-+Background+and+contextualization+of+Hamlet+and+Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, arguably the most influential writer in all of English Literature, was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon England. The only formal education he received was grammar school but despite this he traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright in 1590. He became successful very soon and his works were also admired by the two monarchs that ruled during the period in which he wrote, Elizabeth I (1558 – 1603) and James I (1603 – 1625). King James even bestowed the title of King’s men upon Shakespeare’s company. The content of Shakespeare’s works was often borrowed from earlier tales and stories. Two possible sources of where Shakespeare could have borrowed Hamlet from are a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a prose work by the French writer François Belleforest called Histoires Tragiques. The actual story of Hamlet involved was about a Prince whose Uncle murders his father and marries his mother. Here, the Prince feigns feeble-mindedness, and then kills his uncle in revenge. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Prince is philosophically minded who delays his actions due to an uncertainty over what has happened. This allows Shakespeare to tie in his book with the themes of the Renaissance, which was an intellectual movement occurring in Europe at the time. The Renaissance had generated a new interest in human experience, and had generated optimism about the potential scope of human understanding. One of the themes if Hamlet that serves as an example of this is whether Hamlet is morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle. Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/context.html