How Does Shakespeare Create Tension In Hamlet

Why is Shakespeare considered to be one of the greatest playwrights of his time? Shakespeare lived in the Elizabethan era and had to write for an Elizabethan audience and theater. By today's standards, this was no picnic in the park. Under those circumstances, he wrote some of the greatest works in history. These works, still popular today, prove him to be a consummate dramatist.

Shakespeare knew how to craft dramatic scenes full of external and internal conflict and emotion, something the Elizabethan audience delighted in; he also intertwined superstitions of this era and pageantry, which the Elizabethans also loved.

Shakespeare creates external conflict between opposing characters to build tension onstage. When Hamlet and King Claudius
And now I'll do it. And so he goes to heaven; And so I am revenged. That would be scanned: A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge." (3.3.76-83).

Shakespeare whips up the emotion onstage by incorporating the conflict and tension between Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, his mother, and King Claudius, his unclestepfather. Kinship and inheritance are very strong themes in Hamlet. "Hamlet's excessive emotion is focused on Gertrude's sexual relations with Claudius"…. Because their marriage is "unlawful" according to the era and it deprives Hamlet of his rightful succession (Jardine 39).

According to the table of affinity, "unlawful" marriages that would conflict with possible inheritance would be, a man's marriage to his father's wife, his uncle's wife, his father's wife's daughter (his sister), his brother's wife (i.e. Claudius and Gertrude), or his wife's sister ( Jardine 40). Although none of these are blood ties, each creates questions over inheritance. In Hamlet's case, his uncle Claudius' marriage to his mother threatens his claim to inheritance. Hamlet, when talking alone with his mother, exclaims: "Nay but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty!"
To Shakespeare, these types of scenes made no difference, they were just numbers of different groupings of "….people carrying on the actions of the play" (Lamb 13).

The exact origins of Hamlet are unknown, but it is believed that Shakespeare "cut, pasted, and edited" tales before his time that resembled Hamlet. One story can be traced back to the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus (thirteenth century). This account was printed in Latin in 1514 (Lamb 14-15). Another version of Hamlet is Belleforest's Historie Tragiques of 1582; this version is based on Saxo with a few minor changes. It was translated into English in 1608 as The Historie of Hamlet (Lamb 15).

It is believed that Shakespeare was familiar with both Saxo and Bellforest's tale of Hamlet; his only son was christened Hamnet in 1585 (Hamnet is one spelling of Hamlet) (Lamb 15). Another origin of the name Hamlet is believed to be from a young girl, Katherine Hamlett, who drowned near Stratford when Shakespeare was sixteen. Her drowning occurred under circumstances very similar to those of Ophelia (Bloom 96).

Similarities between the Earl of Essex (Shakespeare's supposed "lover") and Hamlet have also been commonly pointed out (Bloom