Arthur McGee

The Elizabethan Hamlet Arthur McGee

This original and provocative reinterpretation of Hamlet presents the play as the original audiences would have viewed it-a much bleaker, stronger, and more deeply religious play than it has usually been assumed to be. Arthur McGee draws a picture of a Devil controlled Hamlet in the damnable Catholic court of Elsinore, and he shows that the evil natures of the Ghost and of Hamlet himself were understood and accepted by the Protestant audiences of the day. In an epilogue, McGee sums up the history of criticism of Hamlet, demonstrating the process by which the play gradually lost its Elizabethan bite.