Dialogic of War and Revenge in Hamlet

Pages:168-172
Priyanka Meel and Ghazala Anjum (Department of English, CMJ University, Shilling)

Shakespeare’s plays present us with a “universe of dialogues” (“ein Universum der Dialoge”1), and the immense variety of dramatic dialogues in his works is indeed astonishing. Within this universe, the persuasive dialogue is but one form, which, though it represents but a small number of Shakespeare’s dialogues, provides some of his most memorable scenes. Despite his indisputably exceptional position as a playwright, Shakespeare is also symptomatic of his time which has frequently been characterized as a dialogic period or, more specifically, as an age “giving priority to the mode of dialogic scepticism over monological dogmatism”2.Since dialogue is a constitutive element of drama, and drama is “the outstanding literary genre of the age”3, Shakespeare’s universe of dialogues might be seen as one indication of the priority which dialogue had over monologue in the Renaissance. The ‘dialogic skepticism’ achieving pre-eminence in the Renaissance is unquestionably related to the developing focus on the individual which is also highly characteristic of the age. Surely, it is quite significant in this context that Bloom ascribes the invention of the “inner self” and of “the human as we know it” to Shakespeare’s dramatic art.4