critical anthology- section A tragedy

Question 1

summary and source of David Scott Kastan on Shakespearean tragedy

Answer 1

Kastan see Shakespeare tragedies as intense treatments of age old questions about whether the causes of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution or arbitrary fate. He asserts that the absence of clear answers to these questions is central to Shakespearean tragedy

Question 2

critical quote from Kastan on the key feature of Shakespearean tragedy

Answer 2

‘for Shakespeare the uncertainty is the point’’
‘Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of pain and loss… and in the refusal to any answers starkly present any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering’

Question 3

Kastan: how do the characters in shakespeares plays react to the tragic world they inhabit

Answer 3

‘characters may commit themselves to a confident sense of the tragic world they inhabit; but the plays inevitably render that preliminary understanding inadequate’

Question 4

how can you link Kastans argumnet to hamlet (3)

Answer 4

1) Ophelia- never truly understand her decent into madness and her suicide- also never see the process of the deterioration of the human mind
2) The frequency of soliloquies- encapsulate the divided mind trying to grapple with this suffering and through their inquisitive nature invite the audience into the conversation
3) The real stimulus of Hamlets suffering (in first soliloquy before the ghost has told him about the murder) is it the loss of his father or Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius

Question 5

Kenneth Muir on Shakespearean tragedy and how could you link that to Hamlet

Answer 5

‘there is no such thing as Shakespearian tradegy; there are only Shakespearian tradgies’
-Shakespeare’s failure to confirm to classical definitions of the tragic genre (e.g. artistoles unities as defined in poetics)

Question 6

Summary in Nuttall on the pleasures of tragedy

Answer 6

Nuttall considers the tension between pleasure and pain in the tragic drama. Early critical responses to tragedy considered audience pleasure in relation to the pain they were witnessing on stage. Contemporary reviewers praise the playwrights ability to disturb the emotions of an audience

Question 7

Role of drama for Dr Johnson

Answer 7

it was self evident that poetry and drama must please

Question 8

Quote: Nuttall on relationship between pain and pleasure in tragedy and how this can be linked to hamlet and source

Answer 8

‘if you like the distrubing kind of play then this distrubance you like, must itself be a further node of pleasure’- Aristotle and after

• the dramatic irony created by the tableu of Hamlet standing about Claudius
• the fustration taht the audiemnce feels towards hamlets delay

Question 9

Jeremy Bentham on pleaure of tradgey

Answer 9

quantity of pleasure being equal, push pin is as good as poetry

Question 10

AC Bradley- summary of the Shakespearean tragic hero and source

Answer 10

Bradley proposed the idea of a tragic flaw in the psychological make up of the protagonist- unlike Aristotle idea of Hamartia (Shakesperean tragedy 1904)

Question 11

What did Bradley draw upon when developing his thesis of the tragic flaw? (McEvoy)

Answer 11

• Ideas from German philosopher Hegel about how social progress is by the synthesis of opposing and conflicting forces
• according to Bradley the protagonist embodies a conflict between greatness and evil- this means that the protagonist is noble but possessed a flaw which means that their down fall is inevitable

Question 12

summary of John Kerrigan revenge tragedy from Aeschylus to Armageddon 1996

Answer 12

-Kerrigan highlights the prominence of memory and acts of remembrance of various kinds. these centre on the figure of Hamlets dead father whose ghost is a personification of the past creating in Hamlet feelings of loss and of a duty to commemorate

Question 13

Kerrigan on memory/ revenge

Answer 13

‘hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember’

Question 14

kerrigan on remembrace and madness

Answer 14

‘remebrance haunts him, even to the stage of madness’

Question 15

According to Kerrigan what causes Hamlet to have the hyperbollically positive regard of his father?

Answer 15

’ the princes anguish and loss produces an exaggerated estimate of the ‘lost figure’. Old hamlet becomes ‘so excellent a king’’

Question 16

According to Kerrigan why has Hamlet ‘made tenders… of late’ to Ophelia?

Answer 16

the prince is attempting to replace a dead love object with a living one

Question 17

Summary of Janet Adleman’s arguement (include date and source)

Answer 17

-Hamlets principal concern is not the revenge of his father but complex feelings towards his mother
-his fears about her sexuality and maternal power create a desire to purify her and convert her from sin
- This accounts for the delays in the play
-one of the major puzzles of the play is to understand to what extent she is involved with the murder of her husband
SOURCE: ‘Man and Wife is one flesh: Hamlet and the confrontation with the maternal body’

Question 18

Adleman on the effect of Gertrude’s sexuality on Old Hamlet

Answer 18

‘she plays out the role of the missing Eve: her body is in the garden in which her husband dies, her sexuality the poisonous weed that kills him’

Question 19

delay in hamelt due to Adleman

Answer 19

‘it is the specter of his mother, not his uncle father, who paralyses his will’

Question 20

Task of Revenge in Hamlet according to Adleman

Answer 20

‘if Gertrude rather than Claudius is to blame, then Hamlets fundamental task shifts, simple revenge is no longer the issue… but [Hamlet’s]… main… task is not to avenge his father’s death but to remake his mother… in the image of the Virgin Mother, who could guarantee his father’s purity and his own’

Question 21

which ‘peculiarities’ of the play does adleman suggest that her thesis explains?

Answer 21

1) when describing the murder to Horation ‘Hamlet seems motivated more by his mother than by his father’
2) ‘why [does] the confrontation of Hamlet with Gerturde in the closet scene seem much more central, much more vivid than any confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius’
3) ‘why [is] the murderer given so little attention in the device ostensibly designed to catch his conscience’

Question 22

Adleman on the true purpose of the play within a play

Answer 22

‘it becomes clear that the playlet is in fact designed to catch the conscience of the Queen

Question 23

Adleman on Hamlets encounter with claudius in 3,3

Answer 23

‘Hamlets unexpected meeting with Clauduis meeting with Claudius feels to us like an interruption of a more fundamental purpose…this moment that should be the apex of teh revenge plot- the potential confrontation alone of the avenger and his prey- becomes for the audience and the avenger himself a lapse… that must be gotten over before the real business can be attended to’

Question 24

summary of William Hazlitt’s argument and source

Answer 24

-we are all Hamlets because in that character Shakespeare created someone who has felt, and lived through, the whole range of human emotions.
-Hamlet is the character that embodies humanity in all its complexity, and thereby reflects the full breadth of Shakespeare’s concerns
-Hamlet examines his own thoughts and actions in a way that we cannot help but identify with
SOURCE: ‘hamlet’ 1817

Question 25

Hazlitt on Hamlets relationship to action

Answer 25

[Hamlet] ‘seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities when he has no time to relfect, as in the scene where he kills polonius and… Rosencranz and Guildernstern’

Question 26

Hamlet and herosim (Hazlitt)

Answer 26

Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be

Question 27

according to Hazlitt why does Hamlet put on the play within a play?

Answer 27

he scruples to trust the suggestions of a ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have surer proof of his uncles guilt