Hamlet AO5 Flashcards
Champion
Soliloquies serve two fundamental purposes: It is an expository device which anticipates the future events of the play. It is a philosophic device which sketches the inner struggles and shares it with the audience. It clarifies the developing personality of the protagonist.
Dreher
Polonius is the most reprehensible father.
Edwards
We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.
Hamill
Gertrude is not so much overborne but awakened to see her soul’s peril mirrored in images that are familiar both visually and iconographically.
Hazlitt
Polonius talks very sensibly but acts very foolishly.
Hytner
Theatre is a loaded and complex metaphor in the play.
Theatre becomes a weapon to discover the truth.
The play creates a court where dishonesty is at the heart of the regime.
At the centre of the play is a man desperately concerned with the nature of truth and desperately concerned with his own ability to be truthful to himself.
Johnson
Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent.
Knight
Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark.
Claudius can hardly be blamed for his later actions. They are forced on him.
Mack
Polonius is always either behind an arras or prying into one.
McEvoy
Claudius can be seen to be an effective, modern ruler.
He genuinely loves Gertrude.
Robinson
The death of Polonius is a symbol of Shakespeare’s attack on patriarchy.
Shaw
If Hamlet had not delayed his revenge there would have been no play.
Hamlet’s madness is feigned. Hamlet feigns madness episodically.
Showalter
Ophelia is a young girl passionately and visibly driven to picturesque madness.
Shakespeare gives us very little information from which to imagine a past for Ophelia. She appears in only 5 of 20 scenes, and her tragedy is subordinated to that of Hamlet.
Smith
Hamlet is stuck physically and emotionally.
Hamlet is a play preoccupied with the past.
Hamlet’s own instincts are towards undoing rather than doing. He cannot make progress.
The past and its obligations and conventions are everywhere.
Stephenson
Hamlet’s action is due to the utter failure and collapse of his plan to compromise the king by the mouse-trap.
Tubb
Gertrude’s sexual relationship with Claudius defines her character for both Hamlet’s and taints the audience’s perception of her as an intemperately lustful and self-indulgent individual.
Gertrude’s close relationships to the central male characters mean that she is a key figure within the narrative.
Gertrude wilfully disobeys Claudius by drinking the poisoned wine, and, in doing so, identifies Claudius as her killer, which gives Hamlet the clarity of purpose, and the means and motives for revenge.
Wagner
Ophelia serves the play essentially as a useful device used by Hamlet, Polonius, and Shakespeare himself.
Shakespeare uses her sparingly and almost forgetfully.
Wilson
Polonius chooses his career over his daughter’s well-being.
Woods
Hamlet policies the boundaries between performance and reality.
This relationship between ‘show’ and ‘authenticity’ , ‘performance’ and ‘reality’ preoccupies Hamlet throughout the play.
