Context Flashcards
Shakespearean Plot Structure
Structured in Freytag’s Pyramid:
- (act 1) Exposition: Sets up characters, setting and conflict
- (act 2) Rising action: Escalation through a series of actions
- (act 3) Climax: Most interesting Point or turning point (perhaps a decision which would change everything: for eg Hamlet does not kill Claudius and dooms himself and everyone)
- (act 4) Falling Action: Story begins to fall into its conclusion
- (act 5) Denouement/Resolution: Lose ends have been tied up
Origin of Hamlet
- Thomas Kyd’s Ur Hamlet
- Saxo Grammaticus’s “legend of Amleth: Gesta Danorum”:
The original story of Amleth is very similar to Shakespeare’s play in broad outline: Feng murders his brother out of jealousy and marries Gerutha (Amleth’s mother); Amleth pretends to be witless to save himself; his sanity is tested by the suspicious Feng; he is sent to England guarded by two of Feng’s retainers, who carry a death letter; Amleth alters the letter to order the deaths of the retainers and his own marriage to the King’s daughter; he returns to Jutland and, after a celebratory feast, burns the Great Hall full of drunken nobles and murders his uncle, avenging his father. - Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques
The murdered Horvendil’s ghost or shade makes an appearance on the battlements to his son, as in Shakespeare. The son’s name is now spelled Hamlet. His adopting madness as a disguise is taken from Saxo, but Belleforest adds the information that Hamlet also suffers from the genuine melancholy that we find in Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet’s mother Geruth is now described as having entered into an adulterous relationship with Fengon before the murder of Hamlet’s father. Belleforest calls attention to the excessive drinking of the Danes. His setting is, anachronistically, more a Renaissance court than a Scandinavian abode. Its elegant flooring is more suited to the French sixteenth century than to the Danish twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Belleforest sees a Christian justification in Hamlet’s killing of his uncle, since Fengon’s abominable guilt embraces the twofold impiety of incestuous adultery and parricide murder.
Cain and Abel
Stories based on the idea of fratricide—the killing of one’s brother—for personal gain easily bring to mind the biblical tale of Cain and Abel: these themes have been incorporated into tales for thousands of years. Shakespeare, however, masterfully captured these universal tales and put his unique spin on them.
Mary Queen of Scots
Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots, was murdered at Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh in 1567. Shockingly soon afterwards, Mary married Lord Bothwell, the chief suspect in the murder. This was part of the reason for Mary’s deposition from the Scottish throne and the accession of her one-year old son James V.
Polonius is arguably based on Lord Burghley, the queens chief minister who often spied on his children
Key elements of Seneca’s revenge tragedies?
- Principle character trying to get revenge on someone, avenging an event or a death.
- A ghost will reveal its gruesome death
- Calls on a hero to take revenge
- Vengeance is delayed
- Hero pretends to be mad
- Before revenge, the protagonist (avenger) will die.
An anti-Christian lust for for revenge, inspired by a ghost, is central to the tragedies of the ancient Roman author Seneca. His works were taught in Elezabethan schools amd colleges.
Senecan images and themes were key parts of the intellectual and imaginative context in which Hamlet was fashioned.
Seneca
He profoundly influenced not only Shakespeare, but the entire English Renaissance.
In general, the literature of the English Renaissance was influenced more heavily by the Romans than the Greeks, so the mythological knowledge especially was passed down by Seneca, who had translated and reworked Greek plays. Seneca also wrote closet dramas not really meant to be acted on a stage, filled with rhetorical bombast and wanton cruelty (happening off-stage).
Put very simply, the English Renaissance dragged the sensationalist violence onto the stage, while keeping the rhetoric. The genre of revenge tragedy especially was influenced by Seneca, both in the attempts to remain stoic, the violence and the speeches.
In the Shakespeare canon, the plays probably most heavily influenced by Seneca are Hamlet (via Kyd) and Titus Andronicus, an early revenge tragedy, whose infamous meat-pie scene harkens back to the Thyestes.
Also, as a side-note, Shakespeare (as well as the other dramatists of the English Renaissance stage) didn’t really invent any plots - they used classical sources (Shakespeare taking heavily from Plutarch), folk ballads and the like; the interest was less in the tale than in the telling, so to speak. (The idea of originality arguably enters only in the 18th century, with the rise of the novel).
Senecan ghost and christian ideology
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy has a lot in common with both Hamlet and Seneca; it makes explicit the conflict between Christian and pagan ideas. Kyd’s plays opens with a long speech by the Ghost of Andrea, describing how he has been eceived into Hades, the pagan underworld of the dead. He is assigned there to watch the action of the play: see himself avenged.
Despite this classical framework, the play takes place in Christian Spain and Portugal. Hieronimo ponders the justice of his cause (like Hamlet). Biblical and classical contexts clash again when Hieronimo claims that he and heaven are collborating in avenging his son:
“Why then I see that heaven applies our drift,
And all the saints do sit soliciting
For vengeance on those cursed murderers.”
These contemporary writings point to the explicit dispute sand embarassments of the time, they mark out the boundaries of the thinkable. It helps us understand Shakespeares choices better: the neatest way of amalgamating the Senecan ghost and Christian imagery is to place him in purgatory.
While the genral tone of the play appears to align it with Senecan attitudes, the language and themes of the Players are even more Senecan- violent and bloody in theme, and ponderous and ranting in expression.
Stoicism
senecan philosophy
Seneca’s Moral Essays argue for a calm, rationalist attitude towards human affairs. His outlook there is stoic: one must accept with tranquility those forces one cannot control. An active theme in Hamlet.
Calvinism
Hamlet is heavily implied to be a calvinist. He believes that God has decided his fate in detail, especially after his return to Denmark after the pirate intervention.
John Calvin writes, ‘God is a Governor and Preserver, and that, not by producing a kind of general motion inthe machine of the globe as well as in each of its parts, but by a special Providence sustaining, cherishing, superintending, all things which he has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow’.
In fact, in the fist version of the play to be printed, the Quarto of 1603, Hamlet says at this point (before his battle with Laertes) ‘theres a predestivate providence in the fall of a sparrow’. The first Quarto is usually taken to be a faulty reconstruction, perhaps by an actor from memory, but it shows how on well placed contemporary read the Prince’s thought: it sounds Calvinist.
However a better understanding would be that he is inspired by calvinist thought than being a calvinist. He is unlike the Protestants who celebrate and eagerly try to ‘fulfil’ destiny, Hamlet dispassionately acknowledges that the universe has already selected his stars. In this view, Hamlet’s delay is philosophical, not personal; the universe is not worth his collaboration.
Denmark as the setting
Shakespeare’s intention?
Allowed him to critique the monarchy and corrupt systems in England without risk of consequences. This is a trick he used often, the political state as well as figures were often reflective of english poltics and its leaders.
Queen Elizabeth’s reign
Socially she was deemed unfit for the throne, they doubted she could rule effectively.
Written near the end of her reign, there was alot of anxiety about the succession of the throne as she bore no heir.
As a Protestant Queen, Elizabeth was forced to live with the threat of assassination from Catholics throughout her reign. But there was an army of men working in secret to protect the Queen.
The Elizabethans believed that God had set out an order for everything, known as the Great Chain of Being. This also included the order of society and your place in it. The queen was at the top and controlled wealth and life chances, and inequalities further down the chain were accepted.
Protestant Christianity
Protestants believed ghosts to be an evil force that work on behalf of Satan to convince people to do evil deeds, interestingly the Catholic understanding contrastingly saw Ghosts as purgatorial, visiting earth to do good deeds to gain entry to heaven.
(there also existed a belief of a purely subjective ghost-one which was only seen by one mind)
There were ambiguous beliefs surrounding ghost represent religious uncertainty in England, almost as an omen.
For Judaeo-Christians marrying your brother’s widow was viewed as a sin.
Suicide is regarded generally within the Eastern Orthodoxy tradition as a rejection of God’s gift of physical life, a failure of stewardship, an act of despair, and a transgression of the sixth commandment. People believed it was due to an excess of pride as sufferer did not believe God could not save them.
Catholic influence on revenge tragedies would often be in the form of Allusions (religious imagery), characters presented as martyrs or saints.
The Protestant influence on revenge tragedies on the other hand was about individualism and self-reliance, focus on personal responsibility and the consequences of individual actions.
Madonna-Whore complex
Freud
Wherein men can only perceive women as pure maternal figures (e.g., Virgin Mary) or sexual temptresses (e.g., Eve)
Freud theorized that men with the Madonna-Whore Complex are unable to sustain feelings of sexual arousal for their partner because they cannot separate their romantic emotions for their partner and their loving feelings for their mother.
Freud theorized that men honor and respect their wives or girlfriends but ultimately lose sexual attraction to them because they associate sexual desire with promiscuous women who they can debase, objectify, and treat with disrespect.
Oedipus complex
Freud
Wherein a child would have an unconscious sexual desire for parent of opposite sex and wish to exclude the parent of the same sex
Melancholia
Hamlet’sextreme grief was seen as melancholia or clinical depression, this was deemed curable but it was socially unacceptable.
Elizabethans believed the human body was made up of four basic elements, called humors: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. Hamlet seems to be suffering from what Elizabethans referred to as “melancholy,” which was associated with too much “black bile” in the body.
