AO5 Flashcards
Foakes on tension
Tension in the play between Roman revenge tragedy and Christian morality
Laury Magnus on Laertes
Laertes has the “ready tongue and worldly-wise manner of the courtier”
Kittredge on Laertes
“I do receive your offered love like a brother and will not wrong it”
“monstrous hypocrisy…the blind ruthlessness of the doctrine of revenge”
Helen Cooper on Hamlet the Serial Killer
“The key tragic action is relocated in the mind of the hero”
- Innovative use of soliloquies to describe H’s mind as opposed to just giving information
James Shapiro on Hamlet Old and New
“there’s a sense in Hamlet of a sea change, of a world that is dead but not yet buried”
Richard Wheeler on family driving Hamlet’s motivation
Hamlet’s indecision comes from “efforts to cope with the desecration of his heritage”
Alvin Kernan on Claudius
“Usurpation and murder are concealed by a carefully fostered ideology of divine right”
Camille Paglia on Claudius
“Claudius is prima facie unmanly…murder by ear is so esoteric that it makes the body seem hideously vulnerable”
Jan Kott on Hamlet’s performance
“one can only perform one of several Hamlets existing in this arch play”
20th century performance in Soviet Krakow, surveillance, Hamlet as “wild and drunk with indignation”
Hazlitt on Hamlet’s appeal to audiences
Hamlet’s “powers have been eaten up by thought”
Emma Smith on Hamlet looking backwards
“Hamlet is, at its core, a nostalgic play”
Kerrigan on Hamlet in court in Act 1
He is a “near personification of night”
Brian Cummings on Hamlet’s soliloquies
They are the “fragmentary repository of alternative selves”
