I had the advantage of being completely obsessed with Hamlet from the age of around 15, and from my brother being similarly obsessed during that same time. He would come back in his holidays and repeat chunks of what his lecturers had said about Hamlet. Much more interesting than anything that Eliot wrote about Hamlet. I decided that as much as I liked Eliot's poetry, I didn't really think he understood Hamlet (I read that essay on the train to Durham for my first ever visit).
Also I really enjoyed revenge tragedy (especially the truly wonderful Duchess of Malfi - Simon Russell Beale as Ferdinand, Juliet Stevenson as the Duchess) and Greek tragedy (Diana Rigg as Medea).
And I've developed how I think about the play since then (I think)...

There's no direct Titus Groan link, but there are aspects of the story that are clearly (IMO) echoes of Hamlet.
Think of the way that Fuchsia dies for example, or his father's shadowy ghostly existence between his madness and his death, or think of Steerpike as Titus's alter-ego. There are obviously other things going on in Gormenghast but I see Castle Gormenghast as a monstrous Elsinore, seen through the lens of Otranto.

But hang on, The Duchess isn't a revenge tragedy.  Unless you argue her two ghastly brothers are revenging themselves on her.  In which case it is unique as a revenge tragedy in which all the sympathy is with the object of revenge.

Wonderful book!!!!!!

I understood Hamlet when I was 18. I don't now. I can recite a lot of it, though.

The two Hamlets I remember best were David Warner and......Rudolf Nureyev, in Helpmann's ballet to the Tchaik overture that A is going to play. The ballet was, as I remember it, largely mime, needing a really big personality.

    And Peggy Ashcroft's memorably ringing,  "I am the Duchess of Malfi still" at the RSC, Aldwych Theatre, in 1961.

    Apologies to our blessed Will for hi-jacking your thread but, in mitigation, it was possible to continue the discussion on the princely Dane by PM.               "The readiness is all".

t-i-n

I've come late to this thread, but Derrida on the work of mourning and the persistence of history in Spectres of Marx aside, try Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory which reads the play as haunted by the Reformation argument about the non-existence of Purgatory & the abandonment of the dead to death and the living to a condition where death & the dead are completely alien to them. There are some fraught texts by Sir Thomas More on the subject.

It's actually a disturbing book, and oddly ties in with Derrida - a world where "we" float after the so-called death of history.

My one contribution to Hamlet scholarship was a reading of the Ghost's line "Remember me" - where, surely, there is a corporeal pun: put me back together again. Make me a living body again.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hamlet-Purgatory-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0691102570/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226871433&sr=1-2

Jonathan

(Off topic - again  ), but thanks for recommending the Noseda Liszt CDs. I found Hunnenschlacht hard work, but Hamlet is an extraordinary thing. You are (of course) right - there's none of Gretchen's tender lyricism in Ophelia's music.

It's as is she's always/already a ghostly memory. Fascinating. And I've got 2 1/2 volumes to listen to yet

"It was originally written as an overture for the play." I wonder what he would have done with the dumb show, the play within the play?