Young Hamlet

These essays attempt to offer new ideas about Shakespeare's tragedies. The author argues for the primacy of patterns drawn from the most common human experience. Asking why Shakespeare makes Hamlet a student, the first essay, "Growing", proposes a new reading which aims to recover a forgotten older view of the place of the young within the social order. The essays on "Macbeth", "Othello" and "King Lear" give a comparably acute sense of the bearing of these works on ordinary human life, and suggest why they continue to have such a unique psychological appeal. Four of these studies were first delivered as the Lord Northcliffe Lectures for 1988 at University College, London.