Hamlet - Critics Flashcards
David Bevington
An inherent problem in revenge plays is they “dehumanise” the avenger.
The indecision of Hamlet who doesn’t rush to violent action is what humanises him: “the humanising of Hamlet is the strategy needed to counter the dehumanising thrust of the revenge tradition”.
Divine Providence:
Hamlet accepts that he is under the control of a greater power and is “thereupon handed the solution he has devoutly sought for but has been unable to find on his own initiative”
David Scott Kastan
The nature of tragedy
“Tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility”
Retribution vs capricious fate
“Uncompensated suffering”
A. C. Bradley
Tragedies:
•concerned with a person of high degree- “love and remorse and grief are the same in a peasant as a king” - the fall of great people show the power of fate
•tragedy is always contrasted with previous joy or happiness
•always ends with the death of the hero
•demonstrates the power of fate - “plaything of inscrutable power”, reversal of fortune
•”essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death”
(Madness) Maynard Mack
Madness:
•allows the characters to make “free (yet relevant) associations” eg polonius as a fishmonger
•madness protects the speaker from being judged as a conscious being - Shakespeare used this to criticise the court.
•”the meaning of tragic madness approximates the meaning of Cassandra” - Cassandra could tell the future but was destined to never be believed.
•Maddness shows the combination of the “tragic hero and the buffoon”
John Kerrigan
Revenge and remembrance:
•”Hamlet never promises to revenge only to remember”
•Hamlet has a fixation on the past especially Hamlet sr.
•rememberance “haunts” Hamlet - Ghost personifies the past
•Hamlet is trying to severe his relationship with his dad but is prevented by Ophelias continued presence and his remaining in Wittenberg.
Janet Adelman
Oedipus complex:
•Hamlets goal is “not to avenge his father but to remake his mother”
•Gertrude is ambiguously connected to the murder and is the “intimate unknown figure around whom these fantasies swirl”
•”psychic domination of the mother”
•closet scene sexually charged - always mentions his mother being ‘whor’d’ when speaking of his father
Ernest Jones (a pupil of Freud)
Hamlet cannot carry out the murder of Claudius because “he identifies with him too much”. This is because Claudius has “fulfilled precisely Hamlets own Oedipal fantasies”.
William Hazlitt
Relatable:
•The character of Hamlet is relatable: reflections on human life, moralises his feelings
•physiological reality, naturalistic
“He is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it and tries to reason himself out of it”
Gail Kern Paster
Stoicism:
•Horacio is the Stoic character, who Hamlet praised as “new-stoic”
•Horatio is trustworthy, constant, honest, rational
•Shakespeare is aware of the limits of Stoicism because revenge can be seen as necessary
•Hamlet stands as “a critique of Stoicisms political relevance and viability in the state”
•Hamlet= “inner turmoil and its socially visible manisfestations” = “ungartered”
•Hamlet swings between “melancholic lethargy” and “ineffectual rage”
R N Watson
Revenge
•Hamlets hestitation is right
•the concept of blood revenge was “the only thing mourners could do on behalf of the dead” because catholic praying (to escape purgatory) was outlawed.
•the Christian, renaissance idea that vegance should be left to god was “widely quoted, and even more widely ignored”
•”the legacy of paternal identity was rendered irrelevant by socio-economic changes.. people had to make a living or make a name for themselves rather than inheriting both”
Catherine Belsey
Feminisation
•”men in Shakespeare’s time were in perpetual fear of feminisation”
•masculinity=aggression=Laertes
•Hamlets hesitation was regarded as feminine
•an Elizabethan audience would’ve regarded Hamlet with “ambivalence” because paternal loyalty was important and you should murder a bad king
•modern audiences are more suspicious of using violence and do not care so much about paternal loyalty - more inclined to “admire more than we condemn”
A D Nuttall
“Pleasure of tragedy”
Kiernan Ryan
Hamlets inability to act comes from the fact that the revenge, that society expects him to carry out, is futile in a corrupt world that is ‘out of joint’.
“Paralysed by the futility of the revenge his society demands that he seek”.
Claudius is merely a product of this, his death would thus be inconsequential.
Dr Johnson
Treatment of Ophelia: ‘useless and wanton cruelty’
Hamlet was failure
