Garrick's Hamlet Creating a National Consciousness of Political Stability
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Abstract
Prior to the English Civil War (1648-1651), the audience of Hamlet would have found Hamlet's consideration of killing the king to restore the proper man to the throne justified and his relative inaction a frustrating sign of mental instability or cowardice. But the trial and assassination of Charles I triggered a new age of political thought and instability in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain. The Scientific Enlightenment brought forth an age that believed introspection could provide a man with the ability to control their impulses through rational thought and determine whether or not to act. In the post-Civil War political instability and with this changing philosophy of the will, David Garrick's new style of acting, one that illuminated the interiority of a character, transformed Hamelet's character into a beacon of a rationality that could restore stability to a fractured nation.
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