Hamlet: Acts and scenes

Question 1

Act 1, Scene 1, summary.

Answer 1

Summary: Midnight on the battlements of Elsinore castle, Marcellus, Bernardo and Horatio take over guard from Francisco. The soldiers tell Horatio of the ghost they have seen the two previous nights Horatio thinks it their imagination: “Horatio says ‘tis but our fantasy,” (1,1,23)
The ghost of Old Hamlet (former king of denmark) appears, but stalks away without answering Horatio’s questions. After more conversation between the three men standing guard, the Ghost reappears, Horatio again addresses the Ghost but receives no response (some interpret Horatio provoking the Ghost with his questions) and the Ghost again disappears.
The three men who stand guard decide to tell Hamlet what they have seen.

Question 2

Act 1, Scene 1, analysis.

Answer 2

• Shakespeare establishes a cold, edgy atmosphere of a night watch immediately through the use of colloquial and fragmented conversation. Something to remember: this would not have been easy for Shakespeare to do, as the first showings of Hamlet were at roughly 2pm on summer afternoons.
• The verse does not flow. Broken rhythms and fragmented sentences generate a mood of unease, apprehension and confusion.
• To emphasise confusion and doubt the play begins with a question: “Who’s there?” In the next twenty lines comes six more questions, reinforcing the motif of confusion and not knowing.
• Some interpret the whole play to be characterized around sickness and disease, so when marcellus says he feels ‘sick at heart’ (line 9) it initiates a stream of imagery of mental and physical illness that will shape the whole play.

Question 3

Act 1, Scene 2, summary.

Answer 3

• The new king of Denmark, Claudius, adresses the court on his hasty marriage with Gertrude, and on the abrupt death of his brother King Hamlet.
• He deals with young Fortinbras’s threatened invasion with diplomacy.
• He gives Laertes permission to return to France, Laertes is son of Claudius’s chief minister, Polonius.
• Claudius and Gertrude accuse Hamlet of mourning excessively for his fathers death.
• Hamlet is denied permission to return to University in Wittenburg.
• After the court have exited the stage, Hamlet expresses his melancholy and contempt for the King and Queen, their marriage and juxtaposing attitude for his fathers death.
• After Hamlets soliloquy, Horatio, Bernardo and Marcellus enter the stage and tell Hamlet about the ghost they’ve seen up on the battlements the past three nights.

Question 4

Act 1, Scene 2, analysis.

Answer 4

• Juxtaposing the opening scene, this scene is filled with light, colour, with the whole danish court assembled in the mood of celebration. The dramatic contrast of the two scenes could not be stronger.
• Contrary to our expectations, we learn that young Fortinbras or young Hamlet have succeeded their fathers as king. In both Norway and Denmark, the old king is on the throne. Hamlet tells us later that the Claudius ‘popped in between th’electionand my hopes.’ (act 5, scene 2, line 65)
• The scene opens with a long rhetoric flourish from Claudius in which he seeks to ingratiate himself by creating an impression of confident control, propriety and security.
• Immediately there are false notes: Claudius has not just taken the thrown of old king Hamlet, but also takes his wife Gertrude. Shakespeare’s audience would regard this marriage as incestuous, and because the marriage and funeral were so close together it is inappropriately confused: “with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” (line 12)
• The king’s confident, carefully balanced antithetical are intended to convey reasonableness: ‘in equal scale weighing delight and dole’ (line 13) But although the fluent movement of the verse tries to carry the listener along with it, the oiliness of the speech is similar to the ‘glib and oily art’ that characterises the insincere gushings of Goneril and and Regan in the opening of ‘King Lear’.
• The court have freely gone along with Claudius, not keeping the memory of old Hamlet. Hamlet is the only one who is wearing mourning.
• Hamlet is offended by Claudius’s complacency, and his anger is much more provoked by Gertrudes behaviour, especially when she accuses him of acting: ‘seems madam? nay it is, I know not seems’ (line 76)
• ‘Common’ is used as wordplay between Hamlet and Gertrude: “Thou know’st ‘tis common, all that lives must die “ (Gertrude line 72) “Ay madam, it is common.” (Hamlet line 74) Gertrude means that is ‘common’ that men die everyday, whereas Hamlet means it in a much more sarcastic way to say he thinks his mothers behaviour is vulgar and uncommon of a queen.

Question 5

Act 1, Scene 2, analysis part 2. (Soliloquy)

Answer 5

-Shakespeares main artistic development is ‘Hamlet’ was the was developing the audience understanding of the protagonist inner life.
-Shakespeare uses soliloquies to dramatise the inner conflict of Hamlet as he wrestles to make sense of his life.
-Shakespeare uses disjointed rhythm and dislocated progress throughout the soliloquy which makes it sound improvised and unrehearsed, as well as really conveying Hamlet’s inner turmoil.
-Shakespeare’s use of juxtaposition is shown through the contrast between Claudius rhetoric in the opening of the scene which seems superficially fluent, whereas Hamlet’s soliloquy is very fragmented and uneven.
-Hamlets lack of energy and enthusiasm is shown through the uneven tempo of the words, conveying his excessive mourning and melancholy.
-Hamlet illustrates what a great man his father was in contrast to the new king: “Hyperion to a satyr,” (Line 140) which shows how Claudius and his father are at opposite ends of the human spectrum. Old Hamlet is suggested as superhuman as ‘Hyperion’ is one of the titans, frequently identified as the sun god.
-Hamlet also conveys his almost epic love for his mother: “that he might not beteem the winds of heaven/ Visit her face too roughly” (Line 141-2)
-Hamlet’s hissing sibilants convey the repulsion of his thoughts of Gertrude and Claudius together: “Oh most wicked speed, to post/ With such dexterity to incestuous sheets.”
-Hamlet feels he is bound to suffer in silence: “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” (line 158)
for the audience there is irony in Hamlet’s words as they know of the Ghost of his father and the unlikely situation of him suffering in silence.

Question 6

Act 1, Scene 3, summary

Answer 6

• Scene opens with Laertes and Ophelia having a conversation, in which Laertes warns his sister about Hamlet and her own sexuality.
• Polonius enters and gives his son advice on how to conduct himself, before he departs for Paris.
• Polonius commands Ophelia to reject Hamlet unless he offers her more, which she obeys: “do not believe his vows, for they are brokers,” (Line 127)

Question 7

Act 1, Scene 3, analysis

Answer 7

• Laertes is superficially caring when her warns Ophelia to be wary of Hamlet’s love since it may not last. - However when Laertes proceeds to talk about her sexuality his language becomes surprising: Desire is ‘danger’ (Line 35) ‘canker’ (Line 39) ‘contagious basements’ (Line 42)
• The vehemence imagery reminds the audience of Hamlet’s reaction to his mother’s marriage in the previous scene.
• This adds to the pervasive feeling that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” (Act 1, Scene 4)
• Ophelia never talks about her love for Hamlet, only Hamlet’s love for her.
• She has no trouble revealing the secret that was made the line before which Laertes have the ‘key’ (s) to Polonius, or denying Hamlet further audience as her father commands.

Feminist Criticism - Ophelia

• Feminists cite this scene as evidence of the powerlessness of women in a patriarchy.
• Ophelia (name means servant women) is dramatically different to many other Shakespearean women who can resist bullying fathers and even tyrannical Kings.
• A.C. Bradley suggest that Ophelias behaviour is limited by Shakespeare for the benefit of the plot.

Question 8

Act 1, Scene 4, summary

Answer 8

• It is coming up to or just struck (with a silent mark) midnight on the Battlements of Elsinore castle where Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus wait for the ghost to reveal itself.
• The ghost ‘beckons’ Hamlet to follow it, but Marcellus and Horatio insist it doesn’t follow them as it might lead him to harm.
• Despite Horatio and Marcellus best efforts, Hamlet follows the ghost. (In most plays Hamlet tears free from both Horatio and Marcellus be threatening them with a weapon.)

Question 9

Act 1, Scene 5, summary

Answer 9

• Hamlet follows the Ghost, leaving Horatio and Marcellus.
• The Ghost tells Hamlet: “I am thy father’s spirit,” (Line 9)
• The Ghost describes his suffering in purgatory: ‘Condemned to fast in the fires.’ (Line 9)
• The Ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his murder by Claudius, and spare adulterous Gertrude.
• Horatio and Marcellus enter, and Hamlet swears them to secrecy on what he’s just learned. Hamlet informs them of his ‘antic disposition’ he might put on. (Line 172)

Question 10

Act 1, Scene 4-5, analysis

Answer 10

• Hamlet describes Claudius heavy drinking using alliteration and assonance: ‘doth wake…/ keeps wassail and the swaggering up spring reels,/…drains his draughts of Rhenish down…/This heavy-headed revel’ (1.4.8-17)
• Together, these effects and the trumpets ‘braying’ create and impression of vulgarity.
• It develops the theme of disease and introduces the related theme of poisoning.
• The Danes reputation is soiled by the habit of heavy drinking in the same way that one man’s fame can be tarnished by one single weakness. - Many critics see this interlude as typical of Shakespearean tragedy: Othello, Macbeth, Lear and Cornillius are all protagonists with one defect. (1.4.31)
  
  • It is up to the audience to interpret if Hamlet is also a protagonist who conforms to the conventions of shakespearean tragedy and has one defect.

-The third apperence of the Ghost, it finally has a voice.
-Hamlet’s first response is to call for protection: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (line 39)
-The Ghost’s presence confuses the distinctions between past, present and future; this world and the next; the living and the dead; heaven, earth and hell:
“Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned/ Bring with thee airs from heaven of blasts from hell.” (Line 40-41)
-Hamlet’s antithesis spells out Hamlet’s exactly ethical dilemma.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE GHOST

• Shakespeare explores what happens when someone has ‘more than mortal knowledge’ (Macbeth)
• Similarly, Hamlet is tempted by ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our soul.’ (1.4.56)
• The simplistic reading of the ghost would suggest it’s a wicked spirit intent on corrupting Hamlet’s soul.
• The ghosts truth have the potential to lead Hamlet to damnation.
• Hamlet’s words: ‘I do not set my life at a pin’s fee / and for my soul, what can it do to that…? (1.4.65-66) are ironic, for it is Hamlets soul at risk.

Contradictions

• The Ghost instructions are full of contradictions.
• He tells Hamlet about purgatory and his sufferings there before ordering him to avenge his murder by Claudius, even though (ironically) through doing so, he is Condemning Hamlet to the same fate.
• This scene introduces one of the ideologies that Hamlet must battle with throughout the play: Avenging his father, and taking the law into his own hands, or obeying God.

Poison

• Some critics argue that the Ghost is poisoning Hamlet’s mind. His orders are fell of double messages, should the Ghost be allowed to dictate if Hamlet goes to Hell or Heaven.
• The Ghost describes the murder so graphically, that it cannot be forgotten - but in describing the murder in this way, could the ghost be said to pour poison in Hamlet’s ear?

Quotation analysis- Goethe thinks these two lines are the key to Hamlet’s whole procedure… The effect of a great action laid upon the soul unfit for the performance.

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.” (1.5.89-90)

• Time itself has been disrupted by Old Hamlet’s murder.
• Hamlet wonders if he is equal to set the task right, it is a much larger task than just pure vengeance.
• Hamlet also feels it is his duty not to leave Gertrude to heaven, but to persuade her to acknowledge her sins and repent - Therefore ‘Set it right’ does not just refer to bloody revenge.

Question 11

Act 2, Scene 1, summary

Answer 11

• Polonius sends his servant Reynaldo to spy on his son, Laertes, whilst he is away in Paris.
• Ophelia enters and reports Hamlet’s strange behaviour and appearance to her father.
• Most critics assume this scene takes place a number of weeks after the first act.

Question 12

Act 2, Scene 1, analysis

Answer 12

• The reason the audience interpret that this scene takes place a number of weeks after the first act, is because Laertes has been there long enough to run out of money, as connoted by Polonius in line 1: “Give him this money, and these notes,”
• Before Reynaldo is to visit him, he is to ‘make inquire/ of his behaviour.’ (Line 3-4) Polonius asking Reynaldo to spy before giving him the money and notes.
• Some critics have suggested that Polonius is a satiric portrait of Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, he is said to have created a list of rules for his son and to have him spied upon whilst he’s in Paris.
• We see that Polonius has a tendency to lose his thread every now and again: ‘What was I about to say?’ (Line 49) It is up to the Director to interpret how much of a pedantic fool Polonius is.
• When Polonius refers to ‘tennis’ (Line 58) He means tennis which at the time was not at all a respectable past time.
• Critics interpret Hamlet’s dumbshow, as described by Ophelia, as one of the most puzzling parts of the play.
• The language Ophelia uses to describe Hamlet’s appearance and behaviour ‘Pale as a shirt…/As if he had been loosed out of hell/ To speak of horrors’ (Lines 79-82) conotes that Hamlet has just had the meeting with the Ghost, but all the other evidence in the scene suggests to this scene taking place weeks after the Ghost and Prince’s meeting. (Evidence being Reynaldo’s appearance and the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)
• This leads some critics to believe that Hamlet is doing what he anticipated doing in Act 1, Scene 5: ‘put an antic disposition on’ (Line 172)
• They interpret Hamlet’s disorderly appearance as Hamlet playing with Polonius and the King (as he knows Ophelia will report his behaviour to her father, and Polonius will report it to the king)
• They argue that Hamlet is buying time and scope for his revenge by appearing mad, and therefore harmless.

-It is important to remember Shakespeare was often careless about chronology: he might have written this scene unaware that some of the textual details connote it takes place several weeks after the encounter with the Ghost.

• When Hamlet receives the Ghost’s commandment to get revenge, Hamlet vowed he would pursue revenge single mindedly: “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records…” (1.5.99-106) This sentiment could be interpreted as Hamlet saying his Goodbyes to Ophelia.
• The way Polonius deals with Ophelia resembles how the Ghost treated Hamlet in the scene prior. Very one sided, no interest in how her daughter is really feeling.
• Feminist critics can again use this scene to show that Ophelia has no scope for following her own wishes.

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Question 13

Act 2, Scene 2, summary

Answer 13

• Claudius greets Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and asks them to spy on Hamlet for him.
• Polonius reports to the king of Hamlet’s ‘lunacy’ (Line 49) Gertrude offers her own interpretation of her son’s ‘distemper’ (line 57) that it is to do with Old Hamlet’s death.
• The ambassadors Claudius sent return from Norway.
• The king (acting of Polonius’s advice) sets up a meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia, in which he and Polonius will eavesdrop.
• Hamlet taunts Polonius after their first meeting and calls him a ‘fishmonger’ (line 172)
• Hamlet forces Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to confess that the King sent for them.
• The Players arrive, first Player delivers the Hecuba speech.
• In Hamlet’s soliloquy, Hamlet questions his delay on his task and shares with the audience the idea of ‘The Mousetrap’ (play within the play).

Question 14

Act 2, Scene 2, analysis

Answer 14

• The first part of the scene show the isolation and victimisation of Hamlet (through the plotting against him by Claudius and Polonius) which makes it more likely for the audience to sympathise with him. However, it is up to each director to interpret when Hamlet comes in in this scene, if he hears their conversation. Some might argue if the audience know Hamlet is listening to the conversation he might be less of a victim (as he is also plotting, him listening gives him the upper hand). John Dover Wilson in ‘What Happens in Hamlet’ suggests Hamlet is listening to all this conversation.
• This is the longest scene of the play. Polonius comment ‘This is taking too long’ (line 456) could be drawing a parallel with the fact that this scene is so long (558 lines) It could also be recognised by critics as Shakespeare anticipating criticism of ‘Hamlet’. As the play itself is more than twice as long as ‘Macbeth’ and stands as Shakespeare’s longest play.
• Similarly to Ophelia, we see that Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no hesitation with allowing themselves to be used against their supposed friend.
• Like her son, Gertrude now views the marriage as ‘o’erhasty’ (line 57) which is the antithesis of the woman we saw in act 1, scene 2.
• There are connotations of maternal concern in Gertrude’s description of her ‘too much changed son’ (line 36) and later with her words: “look where sadly the poor wretch comes.” (line 166)
• Polonius is a Bawd: When Polonius proposes the use of his daughter for spying on Hamlet, his language ‘loos[ing] [his] daughter’ (line 160) like a caged bird develops the idea that polonius is a pimp (Bawd). ‘I’ll board him presently’ (line 168) puns on the word Bawd. Via talking about ‘loosing’, Ophelia’ Polonius implies that most of the time he keeps her locked up.
• Although when Hamlet calls Polonius a ‘fishmonger’ (line 172) and we’re fairly sure he means fishmonger, some critics interpret fishmonger as brothel keeper, which is entirely appropriate after the earlier events of the scene. This makes Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ more the freedom to voice uncomfortable truths than a pretence of insanity. This also links to John Dover Wilson’s understanding of Hamlet listening to the whole conversation, as he has never met Polonius, so how would he know what he was like? (bawd)
• In Claudius court, even Polonius thinks to be honest is ‘to be one man picked out of ten thousand’ (line 177). Madness can be defined as being in a minority of one.

Question 15

Act 2, Scene 2, analysis (Part 2)

Answer 15

Students from Wittenburg

• We get a glimpse of Hamlets intellectual energy as he instantly reads Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for what they really are.
• Hamlet’s famous line: “for there is nothing really good or bad but thinking makes it so.” (line 239-40) has many meanings. He probably does not believe that all truth is relative; rather, that people have duty to think and thus work out the difference between good or bad.
• In Hamlet’s conversation with his fellow students, they converse about Denmark being the good prison, introducing the theme that Elsinore is a prison - Beautifully illustrated in Kozinstev’s Hamlet, with it’s massive imagery of stone walls, bars, heavy portcullis and Ophelia’s controlled behaviour all connote to Elsinore being a prison.

Decedent Denmark

• Hamlet is instantly energised as the plan to stage ‘The Mousetrap’ comes to hand: ‘he that plays the king shall be welcome’ (line 298)
• At request of Hamlet, player 1 recites a poem from Hamlet’s favourite episode from the Trojan Virus. The focus is not upon the King, but the grief of the lyal queen, Hecuba.
• A moment of the speech is a curious foretaste of Hamlet’s next soliloquy in which he berates himself for delay: ‘seemed i’th ‘air to stick… did nothing.’ (lines 437-40) The image foreshadows the episode in the chapel where Hamlet’s impulse to kill Claudius clashes with his willingness to think things through.

Hamlet’s second Soliloquy

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-The soliloquy ends with a rhyming couplet in which Hamlet appears to have regained his momentum:”The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” (line 557-558)

Question 16

Act 3, Scene 1, summary

Answer 16

• This scene takes place the following day.
• Hamlet’s ‘crafty madness’ (line 8) is discussed; as Ophelia gets ready to act as a decoy, Claudius reveals his guilty conscience for the first time.
• Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy: ‘to be or not to be’ (line 56)
• Claudius and Polonius eavesdrop oh Hamlet and Ophelia’s bitter conversation. At some point Hamlet realises it’s set up: Often a noise makes Hamlet question where Polonius is (‘Where is your father?’) and he realises she’s spying.
• Ophelia expresses her dismay for Hamlet’s ‘ecstasy’ (line 154)
• Convinced that Hamlet in not mad but may be meditating revenge, Claudius decides with ‘quick determination’ (line 162) to send him to England.
• Polonius proposes spying on Hamlet again, this time in Gertrude’s room. Claudius agrees, pretending he thinks Hamlet is mad and therefore needs watching.

Question 17

Act 3, Scene 1, analysis

Answer 17

• Claudius concern that his spies will come up with something worse than Polonius predicted prepares us for his agonised soliloquy in Act 3, scene 3.
• He talks about Hamlet’s ‘turbulent and dangerous lunacy’ (line 4) although we’ve not seen any of it.
• Guildenstern deepens the kings suspicion that Hamlet’s antic is ‘put on’ (line 2) by accusing him of ‘crafty madness’ (line 8).
• The Ghost’s honesty is reinforced in lines 50-54, as Claudius appears as much more psychologically developed and interesting character than the smiling Villain in act 1, scene 2.
• Claudius imagining himself as a prostitute foreshadows the curious way that both Hamlet and Ophelia refer to him as a women in Act 4.

Question 18

Act 3, scene 1, analysis (to be or not to be)

Answer 18

‘To be or not to be’ - Soliloquy

• The thinking man’s soliloquy
• The purpose of this soliloquy is to establish Hamlet as characteristically detached, reflective and moral - and as someone completely unlike the active, simple minded hero figures.
• It is a calm philosophical consideration of the popular renaissance theme of whether our troublesome life is worth living.
• Defected tone and tempo, contrasting to the soliloquies we have seen in the previous scenes, which are filled with nervous energy and abrupt changes of direction.
• Alex Newell describes Hamlet’s soliloquy as ‘entirely motivated by reason, untouched by passion. In its academic method and style, the speech carries the stamp of Hamlet’s identity as a student, formally posing a “question” or topic for debate’, ‘The soliloquies in Hamlet’ (1991)
• The Prince seems to reflect on the human condition, before analysing his immediate situation; ‘fardels’ and ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary life,’ (lines 76-77)
• He never uses personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘me’; the ideas he explores are expressed more as general truths: ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ (line 83)
• No detail demonstrates how detached Hamlet’s mind is from everything that has happened to him than his statement that ‘no traveller returns’ (line 80)
• Hamlet and the audience contrast in the way that Hamlet appears to have forgotten the Ghost’s words ‘Remember me.’ (1.5.91) Whereas the audience have not..

Hamlet’s morality of suicide.

• The problem of the Ghost shapes direction for this soliloquy.
• What Hamlet initially addresses is whether, in the face of suffering, he is morally right to contemplate suicide, something he has longed for (although he knows that at the time it was heavily frowned upon) since his first soliloquy.
• The metaphor, ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing end them’ (lines 59-60) is perhaps deliberately confused. Some argue that it captures Hamlet’s feelings that he is unequal to the task that has been assigned to him. He thinks that trying to set things right would be like committing suicide. But in the rest of the speech, the argument against suicide is explored not so much as an ethical as a psychological issue. If death were like a deep sleep, suicide would be a very attractive alternative to the ‘thousand natural shocks (line 62) we all suffer. But when we sleep, we dream, suggesting that death is not simply oblivion; what we all suffer in life may be less awful than what we suffer in the afterlife: The Ghost has shown this to be true. “And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is slicked o’er with the pale cast of thought’ (lines 84-85).
• Suddenly we see how this reflection is linked with Hamlet’s thinking about the Ghost’s ‘commandment’ and his reluctance to commit murder.

Question 19

Act 3, scene 1, analysis, The Nunnery episode

Answer 19

• Although Gertrude is on stage for the planning of the spying, she takes no part in it. This helps the audience focus on Claudius as Hamlet’s enemy and prepares us for Gertrude to become loyal to Hamlet in the second half of the play.
• Ophelia has distanced herself from Hamlet, and allowed herself to be used by Hamlet.
• This episode has striking similarities with act 3, scene 4, where Gertrude is confronted by Hamlet. Hamlet’s need to confront women in his life who he feels have betrayed him is explosive.
• The progress of the two episodes differs because of the two eavesdroppers in the nunnery episode.
• When Hamlet advises Ophelia to enter a ‘nunnery’ (lines 119-26)
• Whether he is suggesting she enter a convent to escape the corrupt world of Elsinore or, believing that she has sold herself already, is suggesting she work in a brothel is a matter for debate: in Elizabethan times, the word ‘nunnery’ could be either.
• Hamlet’s immediate reaction to coming across Ophelia is affectionate. The very sounds of his words ‘soft… fair ophelia… orisons’ (lines 88-9) convey a tender reaction.
• ‘Fair’ is a very complex word; It implies beauty, honesty, gentleness, loyalty and honesty. Ophelia may superficially appear fair, but is not.
• When Ophelia tells a direct lie, Hamlet explodes with fury, partly directed at her, partly directed towards the eavesdroppers: ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious’ (line 122) is obviously intended for Claudius ears.
• Hamlet sees Ophelia as frailty and deceptiveness personified: ‘I have heard of your paintings… you jig, you amble… and make your wantonness your ignorance.’ (lines 137-40)
• It is unclear as what point Hamlet realises he’s being listened to, certainly when Ophelia lies her father is ‘at home’ he knows he’s being eavesdropped on. It is up to the director to show just when Hamlet finds out that there are people listening to his conversation with Ophelia.
• When Ophelia interprets Hamlet’s behaviour as madness she avoids any examination of the part she may have played in causing Hamlet’s distress or causing his criticism -We can blame Ophelia for the lack of honesty, or Shakespeare for not debating the character.

-As far as Claudius is concerned, this trap has worked. Thinking that Claudius’s hypothesis of love sickness being incorrect, and questioning whether Hamlet is indeed meditating revenge, he decides with ‘quick determination’ (line 162) to send him to England.

Question 20

Act 3, scene 2, summary

Answer 20

• Hours later than the scene prior, Hamlet coaches the actors.
• He declares his love and admiration to Horatio; and talks crudely and bitterly to Ophelia.
• The play within a play.
• Hamlet and Horatio monitor Claudius’s reaction to the play. The dumbshow represents the events described by the Ghost but also show Gertrude’s seduction after the murder.
• The first scene of the play focuses on the Queen’s vows of monogamy. Gertrude thinks ‘the lady doth protest to much.’ (line 211)
• The second scene focuses on the poisoning of the King.
• Claudius leaves ‘marvellous distempered’ (line 273)
• Hamlet is convinced that the Ghost has been proven right; Horatio reserves judgement.
• Hamlet mocks Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Polonius.
• Preparing to visit his mother, he delivers a short soliloquy.

Question 21

Act 3, scene 2, analysis

Answer 21

-Hamlet’s advice to the players for the play within the play displays a professional man of the theatre’s insight and experience.
-‘The Murder of Gonzago’ is written in rhyming couplets to sound quaint.
-When Hamlet coaches the players he speaks of overacting that ‘out Herods Herod’ (line 11). In medieval mystery plays, Herod was presented as a loud-mouthed tyrant.
-Hamlet expresses his true love and admiration for Horatio, after the distressing exchanges with Ophelia.
-Hamlet admires the composure of the scholar who ‘ suffering all… suffers nothing’ (line 56) who is not ‘passion’s slave’ (line 62).
-Horatio’s love for Hamlet unconditionally emerges and is shown through his attempt at suicide at Hamlet’s death.
-Hamlet asks Horatio to help him judge Claudius’s reaction to the play: In a conversation we have not seen, Hamlet tells horatio about the Ghost’s story.
-Hamlet speaks to Claudius more coarsely than to Ophelia in the previous scene.
-Hamlet’s exchange (lines 86-94) Polonius is a moment of dark comedy.
-The Queens Conscience
-Although at first, Hamlet said that ‘The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’ (act 2, scene 2) his production is first used to catch the conscience of his mother. Hamlet names the play ‘The Mousetrap’ (line 216) later he will imagine Claudius in bed with Gertrude calling her ‘his mouse’ (3.4.184). When he kills Polonius believing it is the king he calls him not a mouse but ‘a rat’ (3.4.24).
-The Player queen gives dramatic expression to the idea ‘frailty, thy name is woman; (1.2.146). Suggested when Gertrude states ‘the lady doth protest too much’ (line 211)
Exposing Claudius.
-Hamlet announces that the murderer, Lucianus, is the King’s nephew, not brother.
-Hamlet becomes increasingly agitated in as this scene goes on, as Claudius shows no obvious reaction. This is shown through the repeated outbursts and interruptions of Hamlet, until his final outburst, which is most often interpreted as a desperate attempt to provoke a response from a man who has his conscience under control.

-Exhilaration gives way to a melodramatic language mimicking of Lucianus. The nephew about to murder his uncle. Yet his next move isn’t to hunt Claudius, but Gertrude: ‘I will speak daggers to her but use none’ (line 357) - An irony as in his mother’s room he will kill Polonius and set in line a train of events out of his control.

Question 22

Act 3, scene 3, summary

Answer 22

• Claudius accelerates his plan to ship Hamlet to England.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern justify the kings decisive action.
• In soliloquy, we hear Claudius struggling with his guilty conscience.
• With Claudius at his mercy, Hamlet explores why he is unable to kill the king in his sixth soliloquy.

Question 23

Act 3, scene 3, analysis

Answer 23

Multiple interpretations of Claudius - A Tragic Hero?
-Shakespeare allows us to explore a character utterly different from Hamlet in Claudius’s soliloquy.
-In a play longer than any other Shakespeare, it is important to note the he barely has the scope to develop the Claudius’s inner self in Acts 4 and 5.
-But the dramatisation gives us insight into the man who had appeared to be a one dimensional smiling villain. Nothing comparable in any other revenge tragedy.
-Claudius is clear and frank, his confession is comprehensive and unflinching. He confirms the Ghost’s account, identifies his own weakness, but is still unable to repent.
-He testifies to the nature of the moral universe in which we must read the play: ‘In the corrupted currents of this world/Offence’s gilded hand must shove my justice,/… But
‘tis not so above’ (lines 57-60) - The man who appeared to be the machiavellian pragmatist is revealed as a christian trembling at the prospect of divine Judgement.
-He conveys vividly his position in the imagery of a bird trapped on a sticky branch: ‘Oh limed soul that struggling to be free/Art more engaged’ (lines 68-9)
-His flued sentences give way to anguished exclamation in the final sentences - the audience see the man who they think Claudius really is.

Hamlet’s sixth soliloquy

• Shakespeare juxtaposes Claudius’s anguished soliloquy with another one of Hamlet’s. (Unparalleled dramatic contrast)
• Although both men are thinking about crime and punishment, heaven and damnation, Old Hamlet and Gertrude, Shakespeare makes Hamlet and Claudius sound completely different through characteristic thought pattern, tone and rhythms,
• Sixth soliloquy is superficially straight forward. It begins with tripping monosyllables: ‘Now might I do it pat’ (line 73) and presents Hamlet, who was focused on going to see Gertrude, momentarily distracted by this unexpected opportunity to carry out the Ghost’s order.
• Hamlet toys with the idea of killing Claudius here, but opts against it, even though in act 3 scene 4, he has no hesitation in killing who he thinks is Claudius (actually Polonius) behind the arras. Opting out of killing Claudius here will have catastrophic consequences.
• Dr Johnson (A critic much closer to Shakespeare’s time) was dismayed by the callousness in this speech. Hamlets desire to send Claudius to hell was ‘too horrible to be read’, Dr Johnson’s notes on plays.

DIVINE JUDGEMENT

• Claudius talk of heaven and hell makes the audience understand that in elizabethan times, the life to come is intensely perceived as the current one. When Hamlet weighs up whether to go to heaven or hell, he is intensely serious, he has no doubt that such places do exist.
• Many critics argue that what we hear is Hamlet rationalising: satisfying his obligation to his father in the very act of refusing to do the Ghost’s bidding, he believes that killing Claudius now would be ‘hire at salary, not revenge.’ (line 79)
• But as a sincere christian, Hamlet can surely not kill a man at prayer.

There are many parallels to ‘The Revengers Tragedy’ in Hamlet. Linking to superficiality and Hamlets inability to perform the ghosts command, Vindice is able to carry out his revenge in Act 3 of ‘TRT’. It is arguable that Vindice is a far more superficial Revenger, he knows his task and there is no inner struggle for him to come to terms with. Critics argue that as we don’t know when Vindice lost his love a long time before the play takes place, allowing him to become the weapon he is, where as Hamlet, with his father only ‘two months dead’ (1.2.138) still has the ability to be the rational thinker.

Question 24

Act 3, scene 4, summary

Answer 24

• Polonius urges Gertrude to ‘lay home’ to Hamlet and eavesdrops on their conversation.
• Gertrude attempts to reprimand Hamlet, but he angrily admonishes her. Her fearful cry is taken up by Polonius; Hamlet kills him, thinking he has killed the king.
• Discovering his error, he expresses contempt for Polonius and his interfering.
• Hamlet accuses his mother of involvement of Old Hamlet’s murder and incest. Gertrude’s response suggests she knew nothing of the assassination; Hamlet chastises what he sees as her sexual depravity.
• The Ghost reappears to wet Hamlet’s ‘almost blunted purpose’ (line 110) and to entreat him to support the queen.
• Gertrude doesn’t see the Ghost and thinks Hamlet is mad.
• Hamlet convinces her of his sanity and urges her to stay away from Claudius’s bed. He then play’s devil’s advocate, telling her to reveal his plans to the King.
• Gertrude promises not to reveal Hamlet’s secrets.

Question 25

Act 3, scene 4, analysis

Answer 25

-An elizabethan world understood ‘closet’ as ‘private room’. In the twentieth century, prompted by Freudian readings, of ‘Hamlet’, notably Ernest Jones’s notorious essay ‘Hamlet and Oedipus’, there was a fashion for playing this episode as a bedroom scene, suggesting that Hamlet’s feelings for his mother had sexual overtones.
-This is interpreted as the most dramatic turning point of the play, it is the only time we see Hamlet and his mother alone together, and apart from their brief exchange in during the mousetrap, is the only time they have spoken since act 1, scene 2.
-Although Hamlet seems surprisingly calm by his murder of Polonius, the consequences are disastrous and set in store a second revenge tragedy in which Laertes is the protagonist, and will bring the death of Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet himself.
-Whatever motivation Gertrude has in rebuking her son, control of the interview is instantly seized by Hamlet. The stichomythia between characters instantly turns the finger from an accusation of Hamlet’s behaviour to Gertrude’s.
Polonius Death
-The interruption of the interview with Polonius death is curious, Hamlet spontaneous reaction to kill whoever (‘is it the king?’ (line 26) is a dramatic contrast to his declining to take Claudius life in the previous scene.
-After Gertrude blaming him for a ‘rash and bloody deed’ (line 27), he turns and blames Polonius for being a rash, intruding fool (line 31). Just how little respect Hamlet has for Polonius can be seen from him ‘lug[ing] the guts into the neighbour room’ (line 213). Most interpret this to echo the story found in Saxo Grammaticus tale where the eavesdroppers body is fed to the pigs. (Story of Amleth)
-Accused of a ‘bloody deed’ (line 27), Hamlet throws back at his mother with the jeering rhyming couplet: ‘A bloody deed? Almost as bad, good mother/ As kill a king and marry his brother’ (lines 28-29) Gertrude’s reaction is really what determines her innocence to the audience, her echo ‘to kill a king?’ whilst the ‘wringing of [her] hands’ (line 34) signal not only her innocence, but the shock of receiving the information that her old husband was killed by the contemporary one.
-Note that The Book Of Common Prayer forbids a woman being her ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ (line 15).
Two Brothers, Two Husbands
-The words ‘this picture and… this’ (line 53) are stage directions. In many productions Hamlet and his mother both have miniature portraits of the ‘two brothers’ (line 54), King Hamlet and Claudius, worn respectively around their necks.
-The juxtaposition of the two brothers pictures is presented in vivid language: we seem to see the pictures as they are described.
-It is an elaboration of Hamlet’s comparing them as a ‘hyperion to a satyr’ in his first soliloquy.
-Old Hamlet is a superhero in his sons eyes, meanwhile Claudius is seen as a ‘moor’ (line 67) ‘a paddock… a bat, a gib’ (line 191) - The primary image of ‘batten on this moor’ id of Gertrude, having grazed on the pastures of a beautiful mountain, symbolically descending to feed on a baron stretch of moor land. A secondary image suggested of her clasping a Claudius who is like a lecharous ‘blackmoore’ (an offensive term for a black person) one of the racial stereotypes explored in Shakespeare’s next tragedy, ‘Othello’.
-He is also an infectious ‘mildewed ear/Blasting his wholesome brother’ (lines 64-5). This disease metaphor reminds us of the gruesome poisoning.
-Hamlet sees Gertrude’s adultery and incest as ‘apoplex[y]’ (paralysis and stroke, line 73): the source of infection and corruption in Denmark (lines 40-51).

-Paralleling the nunnery episode, we see a false cadence; Hamlet finishes chastising Gertrude before embarking on fresh insults.

Father, Mother and Son.

• Many productions presented the encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude with Freudian overtones, but critics argue Hamlet is more zealous preacher than a would be Oedipus: the scene is another take on Claudius’s failure to repent.
• Hamlet sees himself as heaven’s ‘scourge and minister’ (line 176) and his speeches are peppered with the terms a confessor might use: ‘for love of grace… trespass… Confess yourself to heaven … repent… virtue… vice… devil… angel… refrain… abstinence… And when you are desirous to be blessed/ I’ll blessing beg of you.’ (lines 145-73). Hamlet is desperate to save his mother’s soul by forcing her to acknowledge her sins, repent and refrain from further wickedness.
• The passage contains the most disturbing of the play’s images: pretending Hamlet’s criticism of her conduct is ‘madness’ (line 142) will ‘skin and film the ulcerous place,/ Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,/Infects unseen’ (Lines 148-150). Failure to repent will ‘spread the compost on the weeds/ To make them ranker’ (lines 152-3). This metaphor recalls Hamlet’s description of Denmark as ‘an unweeded garden’ in his first soliloquy.
• When the Ghost intervenes, not this time ‘In complete steel’ but ‘in his habit as he lived’ (line 136), Hamlet confesses he has let time slip. Gertrude’s description of her son’s terror is full of maternal concern and tenderness. Presenting Hamlet’s family together in stage at this critical point in time makes for a memorable dramatic moment.
• Shakespeare might of given Gertrude a soliloquy here. It It would help us gauge exactly the effect the traumatic experiences in the closet scene have had on her. We have very little sense of Gertrude as an individual before this point. Lacking a soliloquy means we can only judge her on her behaviour. Using Claudius as a frame, think what Gertrude might say at this turning point.
• The obscure image ‘unpeg the basket…’ (lines 194-7) seems to be an allusion to a story about an ape that stole a basket full of birds, took them to the roof, opened the basket and the birds flew away free, the ape climbed into the basket and tried to copy the birds, only to fall and break his neck. Hamlet is warning Gertrude not to let his secret out the bag or she will suffer the ape’s fate.

Question 26

Act 4, scene 1, summary

Answer 26

• This scene follows straight on from the last. (Act and Scene divisions in modern editions are not Shakespeare’s own)
• Distraught Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet has murdered Polonius.
• Claudius declares to everyone how dangerous Hamlet is to everyone and must be sent away to England immediately. He hopes this will prevent people blaming him for the murder.
• He dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to fetch Polonius’s body and take it to the chapel.

Question 27

Act 4, scene 1, analysis

Answer 27

• This scene follows the two powerful episodes in which we have seen the king and the queen acknowledge their sins reveal their tormented struggles underneath their bland exteriors.
• Gertrude’s distress is a complex response to her discovery that her new husband killed her old one, and to her son’s forceful reprimand of her sexual conduct. She is also puzzled at Hamlet’s claim that he is talking to the ghost of Old Hamlet.
• The end of scene 3 established a new intimacy between Hamlet and Gertrude. In this scene, we see her distancing herself from Claudius, using Polonius death as a means to conceal the true nature of her distress.
• ‘Although Gertrude is still nominally the wife of Claudius, she is no longer, psychically or sexually, in… union with him. She has… consented to join Hamlet in the paternal triangle, thus re-establishing the family configuration in its original form.’ John Russel, Hamlet and Narcissus. (1995) p. 138
• In his Eight Tragedies or Shakespeare, A marxist study (1996) p.68 Victor Kiernen maintains that ‘Gertrude see,s tp colourless a woman to be connected with anything as positive as a murder.’

Question 28

Act 4, scenes 2-3, summary

Answer 28

• Hamlet has hidden Polonius body; he toys with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
• Claudius reflects on his situation; Hamlet’s popularity means he must proceed cautiously.
• Hamlet’s abusive manner continues in his exchanges with Claudius.
• In a second and brief soliloquy, Claudius reveals his plans to kill the prince.

Question 29

Act 4, scenes 2-3, analysis

Answer 29

Plot and Counterplot.

• Shakespeare lightens the mood now and quickens the pace, presenting Hamlet in a scurrilous, satiric mode, a development of his flippant attitude to Polonius death in Act 3, scene 4.
• Hamlet leads Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on a wild goose chase: ‘Hide fox, and all after!’ (Act 4, Scene 2, line 27) as they search for the body and riddles them in hostile contempt for one time friends who have sold themselves for to his enemy.

The Things to Come.

• Our expectations are being shaped for a new stage in the drama; Shakespeare separates the virtuous from the vicious characters as he moves towards the denouement.
• He simplifies Claudius as the villain, and Hamlet as the popular hero, so when the climax comes there is no question where our sympathies lie.
• Public opinions are becoming agitated; Claudius cannot put Hamlet on trial.
• The king’s position is shown to be less secure than it used to be: In two soliloquies we hear Claudius becoming more nervous and ruthless; he acts characteristically ‘with fiery quickness’ (Act 4, Scene 3, line 40).
• He makes use of the central image of the play, describing Hamlet as a ‘disease’ (act 4, scene 3, line 9):’ For like the hectic in my blood he rages,/And England must cure me’ (Act 4, Scene 3, line 62-3).
• Talk of worms and and beggars anticipates the momento mori reflections in the graveyard scene.

Question 30

Act 4, scene 4, summary

Answer 30

• We meet young Fortinbras for the first time leading his army across Denmark on its way to fight for ‘a little patch of ground’ (line 18) in Poland.
• Hamlet is perturbed by the situation.
• Hamlet gives his final soliloquy in which he appears to revise his judgement.

Question 31

Act 4, scene 4, analysis

Answer 31

The other prince

• Young Fortinbras is nothing special. Just like his father, ‘pricked on by the most emulate pride’ (Act 1, Scene 1, line 83), risking and losing his life and land in a fight with Hamlet, so now his son risks the lives of ‘two thousand souls’ (line 25) to fight for a worthless patch of ground in Poland. Like father, he fights simply for fame, the soldiers religion.
• Hamlet’s immediate response is is an expression of contempt.
• He diagnoses such a reckless waste as yet another example of corruption in the world: ‘This is th’imposthume of much wealth and peace,/ That inward breaks, and shows no cause without/ Why the man dies’ (line 27-9)

Hamlet’s final soliloquy.

• The soliloquy that is more often than not, cut out of productions.
• Shakespeare’s longest play, the most interesting soliloquy puts an incredible amount of strain on the actor playing Hamlet.
• Alex Newell: The soliloquies in Hamlet - ‘Shakespeare has been remarkably skillful in his management of tone in the soliloquy as a means on the one hand of stressing again that Hamlet is a man of considerable intellect… and on the other of revealing… the turbulent desire for revenge in him.’

Question 32

Act 4, scene 6, summary

Answer 32

• We find out Hamlet has escaped from the ship that was taking him to England.
• He warns Horatio to join him as quickly as he would ‘fly death’ (line 20).

Question 33

Act 4, scene 6, analysis

Answer 33

• Shakespeare now speeds everything up. Hamlet’s letter read by Horatio describes the sequence of events that would otherwise occupy too much stage time.
• Hamlet is now the only major character seen with common touch. He talks easily to actor, the pirates, the sailors and the gravedigger. It is likely that, as Claudius says in the next scene, ‘the general gender’ love him. (4.7.18)
• Hamlet managed to jump ship ‘in the grapple’ (line 15). To make hand-to-hand combat possible between ships, grappling irons were thrown to haul the boats along side on and other.
• In Shakespeare’s romance ‘The Tempest’ written at the end of his career, he uses the sea storm symbolically as a kind of baptism. Character’s old selves due and emerge sea-changed - the better their immersion, their symbolic drowning.

Question 34

Act 4, scene 5, summary

Answer 34

• We hear of a pitifully distracted girl whose ramblings are unsettling Claudius’s subjects; Horatio advises the reluctant Gertrude to speak with her.
• In a brief soliloquy, the queen reveals that her sinful state makes her apprehensive of ‘some great amiss’ (line 18).
• Mad Ophelia appears ‘playing on a lute, her hair down, singing’
• Laertes returns, leading a revolt, to avenge the murder of his father.
• Claudius promises to satisfy Laertes that he, Claudius, is not to blame.

Question 35

Act 4, scene 5, summary

Answer 35

Revenge Tragedy in Revenge Tragedies
-Shakespeare in this scene presents us with the second (some interpret third, Young Fortinbras can be seen as the second) which is Laertes to avenge the murder of his father.
A second exposition
-The parody exposition: Another father has been murdered and we look forward to seeing his childrens responses.
-In Hamlet’s absence, Shakespeare develops Polonius’s children as foils to two aspects of the prince’s personality. Ophelia is largely passive, Laertes’s a rashly active response to the death of a father.
-Where Hamlet was alternately melancholy and elated, and contemplated suicide, Hamlet goes mad and kills herself.
-Where Hamlet was instructed to take revenge, Laertes without question plays the revenge hero.
-Showing aspects of Hamlet through two people shoes his intellect, and emphasises to the audience how much more developed he is than two characters put together.
-The idea that this revenge tragedy is a much more tame, satiric version of our last revenge tragedy is shown through the contrast between Polonius and Old Hamlet.
-Old Hamlet murdered by Claudius, Polonius murdered by accident, Old Hamlet buried with great ceremony, Polonius is buried ‘hugger-mugger’, Hamlet visited by a ghost, Laertes heard of his father’s death through ‘buzzers’ (gossip on a ship).
-Both believe it is their duty to revenge, Hamlet though is paralysed in contradictions, whereas Laertes is impulsive and must act immediately. In ways Laertes is the superficial Hamlet.
Gertrude
-Gertrude refuses to speak to Ophelia until Horatio advises her that it may prevent political instability.
-Although supporting Claudius when Laertes bursts in, she takes no part in planning her son’s murder.
-In her own brief soliloquy, consisting of two rhyming couplets (lines 17-20), Gertrude is shown to be very different from the contended adulteress of Act 1, Scene 2.; burdened by guilt, she foresees ‘some great amiss’ (line 18). The closet scene has transformed her.

Mad Ophelia
-Most or her lines in Act 4 are sung in a melancholy manner, and the plangent beauty of her songs is an important part of the theatrical effect. The response of those on stage suggest that she is meant to arouse pathos, an emotion that has not been of the dramatic effect hitherto.
-The plants Ophelia mentions are symbolic: fennel = flattery’ columbine = adultery, rue = repentance, daisy = broken hearts, violets = fidelity.
-Critics argue that one of her questions: ‘Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?’ is the most searching questions in the play, even though it is immediately aimed at Gertrude.
Reason in Madness
-Ophelia tells Gertrude twice to ‘mark’ her words. Ophelia’s ominous warning: ‘We know what we are, but know not what we may be’ (line 43) echoes Hamlet’s urging Gertrude to ‘avoid what is to come’ (3.4.151) by repenting and turning away from the king.

Insurrection
-Claudius’s hypocrisy in voicing the ideology of the divinity of kings when he himself when he himself has slaughtered the Lord’s anointed marks him as the most Machiavellian of all Shakespearean monarchs. And for the moment, the bluster works.
-In 30 lines (lines 74-95 and 99-108) Shakespeare telescopes the action so that when Laertes appears, we have a sense of the kingdom falling apart, calling the ‘post-haste and romage in the land’ of Act 1 Scene 1 line 107.
-Like Old Hamlet, and young Hamlet, Claudius tells is that Laertes ear has been infected (line 89) by rumours and ‘pestilent speeches’ (line 90) arising from the murder and his ill-advised secret burial of Polonius. Shakespeare presents both Revenge heroes in this way.
-Shakespeare presents Laertes as an epic simile moving like an unstoppable force: ‘The ocean, overpeering of his list,/Eats not the flats with more impitious haste/ Than young Laertes in a riotous head/ O’erbears your officers.’ (line 99-102).
Different Revenge Hero
-Laertes is Hamlet simplified.
-He confronts Claudius Claudius boldly and clearly, not concealing his fury in riddles: ‘O thou vile king,/ Give me my father… That drop of blood that is calm proclaims me bastard’ (lines 116-118).
-We never hear a word of Laertes mother, but Shakespeare makes a parallel: restraint, delay, pausing, to reflect all cry ‘cuckold to my father, brands the Harlot…/between the chaste unsmirched brow/ Of my true mother’ (lines 118-21).
-The branding image Laertes uses is exactly the one Hamlet used to his mother in the closet scene.

Question 36

Act 4, scene 7, summary

Answer 36

• Claudius has been describing to Laertes the circumstances of Polonius’s death.
• He explains how he can not hold the prince to account in public because of the Queen’s love for her son and Hamlet’s popularity with the Danish people.
• Claudius is about to reveal what action he did take, when a letter arrives from Hamlet informing Claudius of his return ‘naked’ and ‘alone’.
• Claudius and Laertes plot Hamlet’s death, Claudius testing Laertes resolve to avenge his father.
• Gertrude enters and in a poetic set piece describes Ophelia’s death by drowning.
• Claudius tells Gertrude that he has been placating Laertes, when in reality he has been stirring him up.

Question 37

Act 4, scene 7, analysis

Answer 37

-The first part of this scene acts as a parallel to the temptation scene in which Hamlet receives his orders from the Ghost. Shakespeare has scope to briefly develop the antagonists.
-Claudius uses astrological imagery to describe the relationship with Gertrude: ‘as the star moves not but in his sphere,/I could not but buy her’ (lines 15-16). The medieval astronomers believed that each planet was moved by its pwm spherical forcefield.
Plotting
-Although he is not physically present, Hamlet’s letter proceeds him. His language ‘naked’ and ‘alone’ (lines 43 and 51) sound like a provocation for Claudius to move against him.
-Claudius no sooner registers this set back to his plans no sooner than another is ‘ripe in [his] device’ (line 63); the king remains decisive and practical.
-Although Claudius knows it will be hard to trick the queen into thinking Hamlet’s death was an accident, he plans to exploit Laertes’s desire for revenge to secure his own position.
-Parallel with revenge heroes: Hamlet has longed to fight Laertes, ‘envenom[ed]’ with a kind of ‘emulate pride’ (1.1.83) which animated his father. Laertes will use an envenomed sword to kill Hamlet.

Ophelia’s suicide

• The lyrical, eighteen-line poem which Gertrude represents Ophelia’s death is another instant anthology that could have been written earlier than the play.
• Its lyrical beauty is consistent with the way that Ophelia has been presented, mainly in song, in act 4.
• Many critics have commented on the speech’s ‘unreality’: It does not sound like Gertrude talking, and what she says she observed raises problem after problem. Her account and register is too sweet, too rich, too utterly improbable to fit either the situation of the narrator.
• We have noted already Shakespeare’s stylisation of Ophelia’s response to her father’s death, and given Gertrude’s stated loyalty to her son, it could be interpreted as Shakespeare sanitising Ophelia’s suicide to spare Laertes feelings and thus not to add to Hamlet’s danger. Gertrude blames everything in Ophelia’s surroundings instead of her for her death.
• There are many paintings of this scene, the most famous of Ophelia’s death scene which are by the Victorian painter Millais and the French nineteenth century artist, Alexandre Cabanel. The English composer Frank Bridge re-presented is as a tone poem (a one-movement symphonic work on a literary theme).
• This moment of Pathos is followed immediately by the King’s crude lie to his wife: ‘How much I had to do to calm his rage’ (line 192). It completes the audience’s alienation from the scheming Claudius and prepares for the pathos of Hamlet’s death by treachery.
• Claudius questions Laertes to make sure his desire for vengeance is robust or whether in his grief is ‘like the painting of a sorrow,/ A face without a heart’ (lines 107-8): the phrase recalls Gertrude accusing Hamlet of pretend grief in Act 1, Scene 2.
• Claudius asks Laertes what he would do to prove a loyal son, and Laertes responds without hesitation: ‘To cut his throat i’th’church’ (line 125) as if he too had been watching the play and scene Hamlet unable to kill Claudius at prayer.
• In many ways this scene shows a very brief summary of Hamlet’s whole part in the play, portrayed through Laertes - adding to the idea that Laertes is a in developed Hamlet/ Revenge hero.
• Non of the scruples that inhabited Hamlet’s revenge seem to affect Laertes; he is the only Character in the play who does not seem to live in a Christian universe.
• Shocked by Laertes’s atheism, Claudius proceeds to engineer a plot with him.
• This scene completes the polarisation of characters.

Question 38

Act 5, scene 1, summary

Answer 38

• Two gravediggers discuss Ophelia’s suicide and the way it has been hushed up.
• Hamlet and Horatio contemplate the inconsistency of all things. Contemplating a skull thrown up by the gravedigger, Hamlet learns that it is Yorrick’s skull, Old Hamlet’s fool. Reflecting on the fate of the man who was dear to him is his childhood lends poignancy to Hamlet’s meditations.
• Ophelia’s funeral procession arrives; Laertes ranting display of grief enrages Hamlet who proclaims he loved her and the two men fight by her graveside.

Question 39

Act 5, scene 1, analysis

Answer 39

The Skull
-Hamlet holding the skull of Yorrick is the most widely recognised tableau in the whole of drama and is also the best known memento mori sene in literature.
-memento mori is Latin for ‘remember you are mortal’, ‘don’t forget that you too will die’. Remembering we too die helps us to see what is and is not important.
-Amidst skulls and gravestones, we encounter two comic gravediggers: they are at the same time characters in the play and universal gravediggers who are symbols of death who are symbols of death.
-This scene, like all before, has a very Christian context.
-Throughout the play we have learnt that all characters, apart from Laertes, believe in an afterlife where they will be judged on their conduct on earth, and sent to heaven or hell. This scene crystallises the debate which Hamlet has been having since his first appearance, about how a man should behave in the world answerable to God.
The Gravedigger
-The first half of this scene, written in colloquial prose, is the longest comic sequence in Hamlet and acts as a dramatic juxtaposition to what follows.
It provides a welcomed change of tone or pace 3 or more hours into the play.
-The humour is profoundly serious as well as funny: it represents a different way of exploring the themes of suicide, appearance and reality, disease and corruption, fame and thinking, which have now been the subject of more sophisticated debate.
-Shakespeare gives half the lines to the gravedigger and half to a Hamlet with no ‘antic disposition’.
-Hamlet adopts the stance of the clown, the impartial observer, the outsider who sees the unvarnished essence of things, what T.S. Elliot calls ‘the skull beneath the skin’ and speaks his mind with no fear or hesitation.
-The comic gravedigger was probably played by Robert Armin. He almost certainly played a similar role in Macbeth: the Porter of Macbeth’s castle who also represents the porter of the gates of Hell. A comparison can be made between the behaviour and impact of the two roles. Both figures deal with all classes if people and are especially hard on ‘equivocators’.
Illiterate, rude and working class, the gravedigger is an ‘ancient gentlem[a]n’ (line 25) tracing his profession back to Adam.
-The singing sexton is a figure who is timeless and unchanging; like the porter in Macbeth, the grave digger in Hamlet is the great leveller: ‘knock[ing]… about the sconce with a dirty shovel’ (lines 85-6) all classes of men and women.
-His song is about the stages of human life that lead everyone to his rough, indiscriminate care. He refers familiarly to Adam and to the day of judgement.
-The gravedigger reminds Hamlet of his father, and of the temporary heroic glory which the name Hamlet stood for.
-He began his job ‘that day that our last king Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras’ (lines 120-1). The gravedigger will outlive both of them, his career began the day of Hamlet’s birth and he will take care of Hamlet after he dies.

-Gertrude’s pretty narrative of Ophelia’s drowning is discredited by the first grave digger who is in no doubt that ‘she drowned herself wittingly’ (lines 10-11).
-Lines 1-50 is peppered by such terms as ‘Christian burial’, ‘salvation’, ‘scripture’, ‘church’ and ‘doomsday’ which asserts the plays religious context.
-Hamlet’s first extended speech refers to Abel’s murder and the politician ‘that would circumvent God’ (line 67) reminding us of Claudius’s crime and his agonising attempt to pray.
-The church forbade suicides Christian Christian funeral rites and burial in consecrated (sacred) ground until the nineteenth century. They were usually buried at a crossroads with a stake through their body.
Hamlet’s return from sea
-There is a dramatic change between the Hamlet who left Elsinore and the Hamlet who returns from his voyage to England that was interrupted.
-Hamlet has no more soliloquies, he is no longer crippled by indecision; he can share his most intimate thoughts with with Horatio. He sees things with such clarity and definition that his death by treachery feel like a tragic waste.
-The skull of Yorrick, perhaps who Hamlet models his fooling off, prompts him to meditate the famous figures even greater than his father. If Alexander and Caesar, warriors far greater than his father, end up no more than ‘quintessence of dust’ (2.2.290) perhaps his father has also diminished in terms of eternity.
-Noticeably the Ghost’s ‘commandment’ does not figure in Hamlet’s thinking.
-In contemplating the fact that Alexander and Caesar, greater warriors than his father, are now no more than in the dust, Hamlet is exorcising the Ghost’s hold over him.
-His irreverent song marks the release a release from his awesome hero who’s ‘commandment’ he felt obliged to carry out.
-The insignificance of such greats makes old Hamlet invisible.
-Hamlet celebrates his freedom in the scene: ‘This is I,/ Hamlet the Dane’ (line 224-5). He appreciates the insignificance of the man who at the beginning of the play he compared to a God.

-The entry of Ophelia’s funeral procession marks the point in which prose turns to verse, the tone from comic to tragic.

Laertes Rant

• A major theme in Hamlet is the immortality of pretence, ‘seeming’, hypocrisy and deception.
• Laertes language is full of hyperbole: we sense that he is trying to create an effect of wild grief with a ‘phrase of sorrow’ (line 222) rather than feeling it. Parallel to his father self important blustering.
• Laertes is fond of inflated statistics, theatrically he leaps into Ophelia’s grave and asks to be buried in a pile of dust which reaches the heavens.
• Infuriated Hamlet bursts forwards, challenges the Laertes whose ‘grief/ Bears such an emphasis’ (lines 221-222) and mocks his inflated rhetoric: ‘forty thousand brothers… with all their quantity of love (lines 236-7);his ‘million acres’ (line 248) can not match Hamlet’s genuine affection.
• Hamlet accuses Laertes of whining, mouthing, acting, trying to ‘outface’ (line 245) him, indulging in extravagant gestures: ‘Woo’t drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?’ (line 243). We recall his scathing attack on Ophelia for face painting.
• With the words ‘an act hath three branches’ (lines 9-10) Shakespeare’s clowns are making satiric fun pf a famous contemporary suicide. Examined in the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins (1982).

Question 40

Act 5, scene 2, summary

Answer 40

-Hamlet reveals that when he was at sea he discovered the plot to kill him and sentenced Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death and damnation.
-Hamlet concludes that justice and conscience dictate that Claudius must die.
-Claudius’s courtier, Osric, invites Hamlet to a fencing match with Laertes; Hamlet parodies Osric’s verbal affections.
-Hamlet accepts the challenge, before they fight he apologises to Laertes.
-Laertes strikes Hamlet with the poison foil and in turn is fatally wounded by it; Gertrude defies Claudius and drinks the poison cup that the King prepared for Hamlet.
-Dying, the Queen and Laertes accuse Claudius.
-Hamlet kills the king.
-In grief for Hamlet, Horatio attempts suicide.
-Hamlet begs Horatio to tell his story ‘aright’ (line 318). He nominates young Fortinbras successor to the danish throne.
-Young Fortinbras arrives; Horatio summarises the action of the play.
-Young Fortinbras takes control and orders a soldiers funeral for Hamlet.
END

Question 41

Act 5, scene 2, analysis.

Answer 41

Multiple staging
-How is the denouement to be played: Action largely replaces talking. Is Osric involved in Claudius schemeing or an impartial referee? Does Gertrude realise she is drinking poison? When does Hamlet realise he is ‘benetted round with villainies’ (lines 29) ? How does the court react to the assassination of the King? Is Fortinbras a sinister entry of a refreshing start to an unfortunate country?
-At the end of act 5, Claudius is isolated as the no. 1 source of all the corruption and wickedness in Denmark.
-Hamlet claims that all that matter is being prepared for the judgement that awaits us after death: If it be now, ‘tis to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all (lines 193-5) . The simplicity of what Hamlet says here, almost entirely in monosyllables is a mark of its humility and sincerity.
-When Hamlet talks about the task before the dual (lines 64-70) he uses the possessive pronoun ‘my’ four times and ‘our’ once: this suggests to the audience that it is Hamlet’s cause, not the duty of a remote ghost.
-Through Shakespeare presenting Hamlet as a man of simple faith and so alive with his in the exchanges with Osric the audience become more upset when losing our engaging hero.
-Sons did not automatically succeed their father in Denmark but Hamlet suggests that Claudius got himself chosen as king by devious means: ‘popped in between th’election and my hopes’ (line 65).
Hamlet’s second transformation
-Hamlet’s vivid narrative to Horatio is coherent and succinct; dramatically contrasting to his confused and tormented soliloquies we’ve seen up until now. His experiences at sea have given Hamlet a new perspective on everything.
-Hamlet recognises that sometimes ‘indiscretion; (line 8) serves us better than over scrupulous thinking.
-The Hamlet that returns to Denmark has a new Philosophical strength. He has a grasp not only of his own situation but also of the universe which he operates.
-Hamlet senses deception, and as the plans for the fencing match are made he expresses forcefully his trust in God: ‘Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (Lines 192-3).
-Hamlet’s words are an allusion to Christ’s words in St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And none of them doth light on the ground, without your father …. Feare ye not therefore: ye are more value than many sparrows.’ (Matthew 10vv29-31) Tyndales translation of the New Testament, 1534.
The Denouement
-There is no need for soliloquy, Hamlet has arrived at his conclusion and there are few members of the audience who are not okay with his decision to revenge.
-Where Hamlet was previously wrestling with his conscience, he now believes the quit[ing] (line 68) the king who is clearly the author of so many crimes would be ‘perfect conscience’ (line 67); to let Claudius commit more evil would be ‘damn(able)’ (line 68).
-Hamlet’s way forward, it now becomes just a matter of opportunity: ‘the interim’s mine’ (liine 73).
-Killing Claudius has become to Hamlet not just a commandment from a Ghost, but a duty to restore the health of Denmark. Hamlet executes Claudius only when everyone has seen he deserves it.
-Although the original reaction from the court is to yell ‘treason, treason!’ (line 302) Laertes testimony that he is ‘justly served’ (line 306) and Horatio’s explanations will fully justify Hamlet’s apparently wild and lawless act.
-Claudius remains the most guilty villain in any Shakespeare play: adultery, regicide, usurpation, attempted murder and manslaughter. Horatio questions ‘Why, what king is this!’ (line 62).
Apology to Laertes
-Many critics are not happy with Hamlet’s apology to Laertes. Hamlet’s evident sanity here is and his scrupulous concern at all times for the truth, his laying of the blame on ‘madness’ which he characterises as an alter ego, a false self, rings hollow. We know that his killing of Polonius was an accident, but is his claiming innocence on this ground dishonest?
-Shakespeare intends Hamlet to sound sincere, but it comes across as an unsatisfactory apology.

-Although Hamlet takes action in this scene, without moral dilemma, it is important to remember that he does not initiate the action.

• Boethius consolation of Philosophy was a hugely influential book in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Boethius shows how the goddess Fortune how appears to distribute good and bad luck indiscriminately is in fact the handmaiden of God: testing the virtuous and giving the wicked scope to ruin themselves.
• Critical viewpoint: ‘Hamlet senses that he too has become part of a larger process: the plot of Providence as scripted by the divine playwright.’ James L. Calderwood, ‘To be or not to be, negation and metadrama in Hamlet’ (1983).

Dramatic Variety

• The scene with least words and most action, after the play of dramatic, intellectual wordplay, we get this scene with few lines, but long due to exciting sword play.
• We find greater pathos in text where Hamlet is left unknowing of his poisoning, whereas the most productions show Hamlet taking the sword he knew poisoned him and returning a strike to Laertes.

The tragic epitaph
-Horatio expresses the feelings of the audience in his farewell to his friend: ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince,/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (lines 338-9). However, the audience have been privy to many things Horatio has not, would this change his opinion on all the matter?

-In classical roman and greek literature, suicide is presented as not a sin, but as a heroic way for someone to end his/her life. Thus in Shakespeare’s roman works, Lucretia, Brutus, and Cleopatra are praised for taking their own lives. By identifying with the ‘ancient Roman’ (line 320) Horatio momentarily follows a different ethical code from his usual Christian one. Yet a few lines later he calls on ‘flights of angels’ to sing Hamlet to rest (line 339).