If everything in Hamlet is as straightforward as Rhoda Koenig seems to think (Letters, 13 February), why does Hamlet agonise over the reasons for his “dull revenge” in his soliloquy at the end of act 4, scene 4? He coolly sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths but lets “all sleep” with regard to his father’s murderer – to his own bafflement and frustration.
There will always be people who think that critics are serving their own interests by making things unnecessarily complicated. But the reason Hamlet has generated so many theories over the past 400 years is that it is genuinely a complex play that resists easy explanation.
Robin Jarvis
Emeritus professor of English literature, University of the West of England
• From the many thousands of books and academic articles that have been written about the “real meaning” of Hamlet, Rhoda Koenig chooses as “definitive” the late Bernard Grebanier’s The Heart of Hamlet, and claims not to have known of any reader who has disagreed with its central thesis.
Perhaps she has not come across the review by Julian Markels in Shakespeare Quarterly (1 April 1961), in which Markels dismisses Grebanier’s book as “garrulous and incoherent”, characterises its methodology as “irresponsible” and goes on to imply that Grebanier has, in any case, merely rewritten the work of an academic predecessor.
Michael Pyke
Shenstone, Staffordshire
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