Hamlet - critical quotes Flashcards
Shakespearean Tragedy
David Scott Kastan - A rarity most beloved
‘Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonisingly portray’
Shakespearean Tragedy
David Scott Kastan - A rarity most beloved
‘Tragedy for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering;
Shakespearean Tragedy
David Scott Kastan - A rarity most beloved
‘characters struggle unsuccessfully’
Shakespearean Tragedy
David Scott Kastan - A rarity most beloved
‘For Shakespeare, anyhow, the uncertainty is the point’
Shakespearean Tragedy
David Scott Kastan
views Shakespeare’s tragedies as treatments towards age-old questions about whether the cause of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution or arbitrary fate’
Pleasure of Tragedy
A. D. Nuttall - Aristotle and After
Nuttall considers the tension between pleasure and play in tragic drama
‘in the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as matter for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matter for enjoyment’
Friedrich Nietzsche
german philosopher, cultural critic and poet (wrote the birth of tragedy)
Coined the Nietzsche oxymoron ‘tragic joy’
The Shakespearean tragic hero
A. C. Bradley - The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy
females
‘it is only in the love tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Anthony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars’
The Shakespearean tragic hero
A. C. Bradley - The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy
’ it is pre-eminently (mainly) the story of one person, the hero’
The Shakespearean tragic hero
A. C. Bradley - The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy
death
‘the story depicts also he troubled part of the hero’s life, which precedes and leads up to his death’
‘a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death’
The Shakespearean tragic hero
A. C. Bradley - The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy
tragedy
‘exceptional suffering and calamity, affecting the hero […] are an essential ingredient to the play’
‘a total revers of fortune’
‘his fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire’
‘his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man’
Tragedy and Madness
Maynard Mack - what happens in Shakespearean Tragedy
‘Shakespeare’s hero’s are associated with this disease’
‘Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things - Hamlet about the corruption of human nature’
hamlet is like Cassandra ‘doomed to know’ ‘punishment and insight’
The play’s structure
Emrys Jones
‘most of its scenes are short and circumscribed’
‘from its opening scene the play establishes the simple fact that there are as many viewpoints as there are human beings’
‘everyone moves in a mist of passion’
Memory and remembrance in Hamlet
John Kerrigan
‘the language of this play is full of ‘memory’ and its cognates’
‘loyal to the past’
‘memories divert and slow the play’
‘even when comfort is found in the past, that only makes the present more desolate’
John Kerrigan
pain of memories
‘remember me!’ ‘with this command the ghost condemn Hamlet to an endless, fruitless ‘yearning for the lost figure’
John Bowlby observed ‘because of the persistent and insatiable nature of the yearning for the lot figure, pain is inevitable’
