AO2 Flashcards
Opening
“Who’s there?” - Barnardo
“Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart”
- Francisco
Horatio about the Ghost
“This bodes some strange eruption to our state”
Claudius’s First Speech: Skill as an Orator
“Have we, as t’were with a defeated joy/ With one auspicious and one dropping eye…mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage…in equal scale weighing delight and dole/ Taken to wife”
Chaos in the Court: 1.2
Claudius moves from issues affecting the whole “warlike state” to personally dealing with Laertes - conflation of family and state, chaos, England in the control of splintered families
Hamlet’s First Words
“(aside) A little more than kin, and less than kind”
Gertrude trying to comfort Hamlet: 1.2
“Do not forever with thy vailèd lids/ Seek for thy noble father in the dust”
1.2: Hamlet on duplicity in the court
“Seems madam? Nay it is, I know not seems”
Hamlet’s heroic couplet after mourning positions him with motivation for revenge
“But I have that within which passes show/ These but the trappings and the suits of woe”
Hamlet is chastised by Claudius for his grief
“‘tis unmanly grief/ It shows a will most incorrect to heaven/ A heart unfortified, a mind impatient/ An understanding simple and unschooled”
This is a public scene, embarrassing!
The beginning of Hamlet’s first soliloquy
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt/ Thaw and resolve itself into a dew”
Soliloquy 1: Hamlet on the state of Denmark
“tis an unweeded garden/ That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely”
Soliloquy 1: Hamlet idealising his father
“But two months dead - nay, not so much, not two - So excellent a king that was to this Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother”
Soliloquy 1: Hamlet’s disgust at Gertrude’s sexuality
“why, she would hang on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on”
Soliloquy 1: Hamlet’s disgust at the speed of Gertrude’s remarriage
“Oh most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets”
Henry VIII’s attempted marriage to Catherine of Aragon, leading to the Reformation!
Soliloquy 1: Hamlet’s ‘resolution’
“But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”
1.2: Hamlet’s confusion of the real and imaginary with regards to his father
“Methinks I see my father…in my mind’s eye, Horatio”
1.3: Laertes on Hamlet’s position
“his choice be circumscribed unto the voice and yielding of that body whereof he is the head”
1.3: Laertes warning Ophelia
“Fear it Ophelia, fear it my dear sister, and keep you…out of the shot and danger of desire…in the morn and liquid dew of youth contagious blastments are most imminent”
1.3: Ophelia asserting herself to Laertes
“do not as some ungracious pastors do show my the steep and thorny way to heaven, whiles like a puffed and reckless libertine…recks not his own rede”
Laertes is positioned as a ‘pastor’ - strength of family unit in post-Reformation England,.no monasteries for guidance
1.3: Polonius to Laertes
“Give thy thoughts no tongue…Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar…Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee”
Imperatives! Contrast w Hamlet’s indecision, lack of a father figure, BUT Polonius is also positioned as rambling here….
1.3: Laertes’ final farewell and parallel with the Ghost
“Farewell Ophelia, and remember well what I have said to you”
“Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key of it”
Ophelia even refers to her own memory as being possessed by Laertes here: without him she goes mad!
1.3: Polonius lecturing Ophelia
“Affection? Puh! You speak like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance…Tender yourself more dearly, or you’ll tender me a fool”
1.4: Hamlet’s first address to the Ghost
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
“King, father, royal Dane”
“Tell why thy canonised bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws”
PASSIVE - Hamlet, aware of the conventions of RT, sees the ghost as a symptom of something else
1.4: Hamlet talking about the Ghost to Horatio
“What if it tempt you toward the flood my lord”
“My fate cries out, and makes each petty arture in this body as hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve”
Biblical vs Classical allusion
1.4: The problems in Denmark are noticed by a relative commoner, Marcellus
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”
1.5: The Ghost on Purgatory
“for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away”
1.5: Hamlet’s decisive nature with the Ghost
“Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge”
1.5: The Ghost on his poisoning
“Swift as quicksilver it courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body…barked about, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, all my smooth body”
1.5: The Ghost on Gertrude
“So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage”
Gertrude as Elizabeth: it is possible for even the most virtuous to be corrupted, vivid contrast and following description of poisoning
1.5: The Ghost instructs to “swear”
Ghost cries under the stage
“Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage, consent to swear”
Interesting that H’s motivation is quite literally coming from below as opposed to above? How far is revenge compatible with contemporary religion?
2.1 Polonius instructing Reynaldo
“Your bait of falsehood takes the carp of truth”
Parallels to Hamlet’s “antic disposition”
2.1 Hamlet becomes a revenger (Ophelia’s account)
“He raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.”
Ophelia exists only to develop Hamlet’s character!
2.2 Polonius declaring Hamlet’s madness
“This business is well ended…since brevity is the soul of wit(!)…I will be brief. Your son is mad”
Polonius typically gets everything wrong, and dismisses the much greater threat to the state out of hand
2.2 Polonius gets caught up in himself instructing the King
Harsh imperative “perpend”
Anadiplosis for comedic effect “tis true, tis true, tis pity, and pity tis tis true”
