Hamlet AO5

Question 1

Kerrigan

Answer 1

Hamlet only promised to remember.
This can be used to challenge his procrastination.

Question 2

Kastan

Answer 2

There are no clear-cut answers to the human condition.
Ambiguity.
Shakespeare’s tragedy is the genre of uncompensated suffering.

Question 3

Bradley

Answer 3

Characters of high rankings and exceptional qualities suffer the reversal of fortunes leading to death.
The omnipotence of fate and powerlessness of man.

Question 4

Hazlitt

Answer 4

Hamlet embodies the whole range of human experience. The audience can relate to him.
Remarkable for his originality and nuance of feeling.
Other writers paraphrase nature.
Hamlet has the refinement of feeling.
A prince of philosophical speculation.

Question 5

Melvin Bragg

Answer 5

Soliloquies are ‘thinking machines’

Question 6

Mack (madness)

Answer 6

Madness is a literary motif that enables characters to speak a truth that is otherwise dangerous or political.
It is dramatically useful.
Madness is both punishment and insight.

Question 7

Nuttall

Answer 7

Enjoying tragedy. ‘Proper pleasure’ - Aristotle
Poetry and drama must please.
Most modern audiences seek the uncomfortable over the easy and sweet.
Enjoying discomfort his uncomfortable to admit.

Question 8

Adelman

Answer 8

Hamlet’s chief task is to purify his mother.
Gertrude’s power lies in her importance to Hamlet.

Question 9

MacDonald

Answer 9

‘The end is a half-line after a rhyming couplet – as if there were more to come – as there must be after every tragedy.’

Question 10

Charney

Answer 10

“[Ophelia’s] madness… enables her to assert her being; she is no longer enforced to keep silent and play the dutiful daughter”

Question 11

Rutter

Answer 11

“Ophelia performs… the psychic journey of Prince Hamlet and the big themes of the play. Hamlet is thinking about madness; Ophelia plays it for real…. Hamlet toys with the idea of suicide; …Ophelia commits suicide”.

Question 12

Lisa Hopkins on doubling

Answer 12

‘Hamlet is a play where things are never single or simple.’

Question 13

Mark Van Doren on acting and performance

Answer 13

Hamlet “shows he is a man by being many men”.

Question 14

Diana Bornstein on advice given to women

Answer 14

‘Women are often given the same advice that is given to servants… Chasity, piety, obedience’

Question 15

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe on religion

Answer 15

“All duties seem holy for Hamlet”