Hamlet A05 Flashcards
marxist perspective
‘A profound sickness afflicts the whole society’ - Alan
Gardiner
(psychoanalytical perspective)
‘Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is not just a device assumed for
protection, but a psychological necessity’ – Raman Selden
(feminist perspective)
‘Drowning…was associated with the feminine…clinically speaking, Ophelia’s behaviour is characteristic of the malady Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melancholy or erotomania’ - Elaine Showalter
(reader response perspective)
‘through his foolery, Hamlet does more than act as a moral and political commentator. He also breaks down a further distinction, that between player and audience’ – Kate Flint
(psychoanalytical perspective)
‘it is almost as if we were dealing with 2 different plays: one the interior drama of Hamlet’s mind…the other a drama of externals, in which a tragic hero is frustrated by physical circumstances’ – William Tydeman
Extract 1 – From David Scott Kastan, ‘“A rarity
most beloved”: Shakespeare and the Idea of
Tragedy’, 2003.
Kastan sees Shakespeare’s 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.
While Shakespeare did not have a fully worked-out theory
of tragedy, his coherent and powerful sense of tragedy
develops and deepens with each tragic play.
From Maynard Mack, ‘What Happens in
Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1993.
Mack notes how frequently Shakespearean tragic heroes suffer madness or are associated with it. Madness often seems to be a form of divine punishment, but also brings with it special insight and freedom to speak the truth. This resembles Shakespeare’s own use of art to reveal painful truths. Mack argues that art and madness both allow freedom of speech, but that their insights may be dismissed
as merely fiction or nonsense.
