HAMLET: AO5

Question 1

Helen Cooper:
“Hamlet - A Serial Killer?”
TRAGEDY

• “Hamlet” doesn’t fit the Elizabethan idea of tragedy:
• ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’
  -> Collection of non-literary tragedies ie. not plays
  -> “…wherein may be seen…how frail and unstable worldly prosperity is found, even those whom Fortune seemeth most highly to favour”

Answer 1

ELIZ:
1. “A spectacle of blood” - YES
-> Horatio in 1st Quarto: “Tragic spectacle of corpses”

2. The “antitype of comedy” - NO
   -> Beginning in calm, ending in tempest
   -> “Hamlet” begins w/ sickness
3. Fall of a ‘great’ man - CLAUDIUS
   -> From the top of Fortune’s Wheel
   -> A “tragedy of the state”
   * Sir Philip Sidney: “Tragedy…maketh Kings fear to be Tyrants”

Question 2

Helen Cooper:
“Hamlet - A Serial Killer?”
INTERNALISATION

… of real tragic action - the ability for internal suffering

Answer 2

• Hamlet at the front, thinking…
  -> … while “action is literally upstaged”
• “‘Hamlet’…replaces dramatic objectivity precisely with subjectivity”
  -> Retrospection is often heard through the medium of Hamlet’s (subjective) mind.

Question 3

Emma Smith (1)
- “Tragedies signal their interest in the singular self”

THE PAST

!“In terms of progress, everything is CIRCULAR”!

1. “What Hamlet does in the play tends to be about undoing and negation rather than doing and progress”
   +
   “Hamlet seems like a modern man, caught in the process of emotional and intellectual formation”
2. ‘Hamlet’ DOUBLED in the name of the DEAD KING + LIVING SON
   - Heniadys: adj. + noun -> noun AND noun for DOUBLING-> “rouge AND peasant…”

Answer 3

1.
- Play doesn’t follow H to England
- he RETURNS- Breaking off relationship w/ O
- Doesn’t return to university - stays a child?!
- Primary attachments to dead, not living

2. a) Cannot form an individual identity:
   -> No attempt (eg. Henry IV) to separate father and son
   -> Michael Sheen - H in a psychiatric ward, playing all characters
   -> Laurence Olivier - H + Ghost VO

b) RETROSPECTIVE
- OH mentioned first
-> Preoccupation w/ PAST - OH already in the past at the start of play
-> Remembering pre-lapsarian Cain/Able-type story
- Eliz.: succession crisis, but it would be treason to think about it
-> Considering the FUTURE = CRIME

Question 4

Emma Smith (2)

3. Harold Bloom: “The Anxiety of Influence”
   - Struggle against the ‘father poet’
   - Thomas Kyd: “The Spanish Tragedy”
4. Hamlet “resists its own movement to annihilation [Cooper: Elizabethan idea of tragedy] by looping back on itself into a parallel and doomed universe in which Hamlet is already dead”
   - OH + YH

Answer 4

3. Oedipus complex, but in terms of wrestling with the influence of parental figures
   -> Shakespeare’s own textual anxieties reflected in H’s Oedipus complex
4. In terms of progress, everything is CIRCULAR
   - Hamlet begins in tempest and ends in tempest
   -> Return of Medieval warrior king (Fortinbras)
   - DEATH as LINEAR and CIRCULAR
   -> Death = not final, as “Hamlet” is both dead and alive
   -> “To be…” + ghosts: blurring lines between life and death
   -> Ended/answered by “The rest is silence”
   -> This “condemns him to a life of remembering” - why he goes mad? All about escaping the shadow of a father? Identity?

Question 5

Greenblatt:
“A Protestant son, haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father”
+
Langley:
“Hamlet is lost in a world in absence”

Answer 5

Greenblatt
- Ghost, purgatory
- Thought after death
-> “to be…” vs “the rest…” vs “piles of ordinance”

Langley
- Action occurring between the utterance of something (“revenge me”) and that actually happening
-> Father gives the word, fulfilled by the son
-> Force of authority dead from the beginning
- “Words words words”
-> “Who’s there?”

Question 6

Robert Burton: “The Anatomy of Melancholy”

Answer 6

“The detrimental forces of melancholy causeth men to be aliened from the nature of man”
- Hamlet -> alone in his sadness, pushed out from centre of court

Question 7

Jan KOTT:

1. TO BE
2. HAMLET/OPHELIA
3. ROLES
4. KRAKOW
5. FORTINBRAS

Answer 7

1. “‘To be’ means for him to revenge his father”
2. “In the world, where murder holds sway, there is no room for love”
3. “None of [Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras or Ophelia] have chosen their part; it is imposed on them from outside”
4. Hamlet “was a rebellious ideologist and lived only for action”
5. “In the text of the play Fortinbras is only broadly sketched”

Question 8

Elaine SHOWALTER

Answer 8

• “Hamlet was the prototype of melancholy male madness, associated with intellectual and imaginative genius; but Ophelia’s affliction was erotomania”
• “For many feminist theorists, the madwoman was a heroine who rebels against gender stereotypes and the social order”
• “Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women and into his brutal behaviour towards women”

Question 9

G. Wilson Knight

Answer 9

“Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark…he is the poison in the veins of the community”

Question 10

Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’

Answer 10

“Nothing certain can be established about one thing by another”
- ie. all questions, no answers