Hamlet Critics Flashcards
Kastan
- Shakespearean tragedy. Uncertainty is the point.
- At the core of Shakespearean tragedy is the uncertainty of the reason behind the suffering, and the emotional response of the character to the suffering.
- ‘Characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old. ‘
- ‘Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering,’
- ‘Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonisingly portray, and in the refusal of any answers starkly prevent any confident attribution or meaning or value to human suffering.’
Nutall.
- The pleasure of tragedy, and the tension between pleasure and pain.
- ‘In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as a matter for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matters for enjoyment.’
- ‘While it may seem essential to the idea of pleasure that it be felt, pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness.’
Bradley.
Tragic Hero.
Three Rules for a Tragic Hero.
-Past life of fortune and promise leading to a downfall.
“They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory”.
-Has to die by the hand of another person.
“no play in which the hero remains alive is in the true Shakespearean sense, a tragic hero”.
-Their Fate is something entirely out of their control.
“it is essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to their death.”
Mack.
Tragedy and Madness.
Shakespeare explores the Psychological suffering of mind.
Within Hamlet, Shakespeare uses the Madness as a form of Doom or Punishment .
“madness is to some degree a punishment or a doom”.
Kerrigan Argues that the Madness acts as a form of insight to the world differently.
His “intuitive unformulated awareness” allows him
outwardly “criticise the Jacobean social system”.
This can also be seen with Ophelia who is not meant to be able to assess this newfound Knowledge.
“she cannot be supposed to have conscious knowledge”.
Kerrigan.
Memory and Remembrance.
Kerrigan argues that the Play drives on the remembrance of the past.
“Hardly has it begun than it pauses to celebrate old Hamlet as a representative of that lost and epic age”.
Hamlet is surrounded by the past and it acts as a curse. He is forced to remember his father and his wishes, this could be a sign to how he is driven to madness.
“Remembrance haunts him, even to the point of madness”.
Furthermore Denmark is a reflection of a lost and epic age, or of a better time before it fell.
“true,false and cynical remembrances all reflect on the play’s chief link with the past”.
“because of the the persistent and insatiable nature of the yearning for the lost figure pain is inevitable”.
Adelman.
Avenging his father or saving his mother?
Adelman argues that Hamlet’s priorities shift within the play.
“Hamlet cannot kill Claudius here: to do so would be… a permanent interruption of his more fundamental purpose”.
Hamlet prioritises purifying his mothers image instead of avenging his father as she occupies the space in his mind which his father lost.
“The loss of the father turns out in fact to mean the Psychic domination of the mother”.
Adelman also focuses on the religious imagery of Gertrude’s metaphorical position as Eve, as is seen by her son and King Hamlet as the cause for the fallen state of Eden(Denmark).
“she plays out the role of the Missing Eve. Her body is the garden in which his father dies”.
Hazlitt.
The Complexity of Hamlet.
Hazlitt argues that Hamlet is the perfect reflection of the human mind as it is COMPLEX. These complexities with Hamlet’s mind and madness and what he perceives are relatable to the audience.
- ‘Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and development of character.’
- ‘He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect.’
- ‘He is the prince of philosophical spectators; and because he cannot have his revenge perfect, … he declines it altogether.’
Grindlay (Elsinore’s ‘Un-weeded garden’).
- Shakespeare’s constant biblical references to the Garden of Eden can be used to discuss themes of gender in ‘Hamlet’.
- ‘Imagery of the natural world that describes both Gertrude and Ophelia turns them into victims of a literary legacy of the Fall of Man: a gender ideology that blamed women, embodied by Eve, for mankind’s decent into sin.’
- Denmark is the garden of Eden, which has become corrupted by sin, and is now rotting. ‘Imagery of smell becomes almost a code for Denmark’s postlapsarian state.’
- (In reference to Gertrude) ‘Like Eve, she has been tempted, and like Eve she had fallen. ‘
- (In reference to Ophelia) ‘In her madness, she epitomises the disorder of nature, as she presents scattered flowers to all around, ‘ and ‘Ophelia’s muddy death has already marked her fall,’
Grindlay (The trouble with Ophelia).
- The character of Ophelia is crucial, yet is ‘largely defined by her absence.’
- ‘The most interesting thing ophelia achieves in the play is her madness, but this is short lived, and her death and its aftermath are governed by the words and actions of others.’
- ‘Ophelia’s wild speech can be seen as an ecriture feminine. Through her madness, she finds a space for herself beyond the patriarchal structures of the play,’
- (About her death as recounted by Gertrude) ‘In this sanitised version of events, Ophelia’s death is presented as an accident, as garlanded by wild flowers’
Greenblatt.
- Hamlet in purgatory. There are many allusions to the Ghost coming from purgatory.
‘Hearing the Ghost again, he (Hamlet) speaks words that would have been utterly familiar to a Catholic and and deeply suspect to a Protestant: “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit”.’ - Shakespeare never outrightly says the ghost resides in purgatory.
‘Shakespeare, with his remarkable gift for knowing exactly how far he could go without getting into serious trouble, still only uses a network of allusions’ - This is one of many unanswerable questions in Hamlet, and is one of the reasons the play so distinctly conveys the theme of uncertainty.
‘The opposing positions challenge each other, clashing and sending shockwaves through the play.’
Jones.
- Hamlet and the Oedipus-complex. Hamlet feels sexual affection for his mother, but has successfully combatted this with his relations with Ophelia (a sharp contrast to the Queen).
‘Her naive piety, her obedient resignation, and her unreflecting simplicity sharply contrast with the Queen’s character.’ - After his mother’s second marriage:
‘The association of the idea of sexuality with his mother, buried since infancy, can no longer be concealed from his consciousness.’
Ryan.
- Shakespeare’s tragedies are such because the protagonist is doomed to stuck in an utterly unfamiliar time and/or place where they cannot be who they are.
- ‘His creation of characters who can’t come to terms with their world reveals the capacity of human beings to be radically different from the way their world expects them to be’
- ‘Every one of his tragic protagonists is doomed by having been cast in the in the wrong role in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
- ‘In the process they reveal the potential they possess to be another kind of person in another kind of world, which they will tragically never live to see’
- ‘Hamlet: cruelly miscast as a 16th century prince, bewildered by his inability to sweep the revenge he has sworn to take…’
Smith.
- Though often praised as forward thinking, Hamlet is a play that ultimately looks backwards. (RE-venge, RE-member). ‘Re-venge, like re-membering, takes on the quality of repetition, just as the play repeats images and moments from its own past.’
- ‘Like Hamlet the prince, Hamlet the play is haunted by a more successful predecessor’ (referring to Kyd’s play that was more memorable in Elizabethan times.)
- ‘The skull Hamlet encounters is not an anonymous harbinger of death, but a specific reminder of the past’
- ‘Overshadowed by all of these pasts, neither Hamlet can make progress. Hamlet as a revenger is also Hamlet who must be revenged: seeking retribution for his father’s death he kills another father and makes his own death a circular inevitability.’
