Contextual Interpretations Of ‘Hamlet’

Question 1

Revenge

Answer 1

• Scholars have observed that revenge tragedy is often come from to Josh and Lily Catholic countries, presenting the contradiction that the strongest duty of a Catholic is to God and family (reflected on what Hamlet must choose to do)
• King Edward the first introduced the law against blood revenge.
• Christian Elizabethan England condemned private revengers: only God was supposed to have this power.
• ## Roman view of revenge & Roman tragedies of Seneca inspired revenge drama - hence also link to philosophy

Question 2

Incest

Answer 2

The issue of incest played a critical role in Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his deceased brother, and thus in the rotini story of English Reformation: incest as creating religious tuberlance?

Question 3

Death

Answer 3

• Despite progressing enlightenment to the Renaissance, superstition was still rampant along Elizabeth and Londoners. They had a morbid curiosity, reflected in their violent entertainment, like a bear-baiting and public hangings.
  In Roman catholic theology purgatory was a place with him as he died before confessing had this and then takeaway and only after could enter heaven, Protestants in Shakespeare’s audience with spent the ghost is an evil agent of the devil because Protestantism had abolished the notion of Purgatory

Question 4

Surveillance

Answer 4

it was popular rumour that Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, have not only given his son a set of precepts, but had sent spies to Paris to keep a watch on him

Question 5

Genre of Revenge Tragedy

Answer 5

• as defined by Aristotle: harmartia (hero’s tragic flaw), anagnorisis (When the tragic hero recognises something about themselves that spur the change in action), peripeteia (Reversal of fortune in the plot which marks the protagonists, descent towards tragedy = cathartic for audience) = saw tragedy as “morally ambiguous genre”

Question 6

Elizabethan England

Answer 6

Written at a time of great religious upheaval, and in the wake of the English Reformation, the players, alternately, Catholic (or piously, mediaeval) and Protestant (or consciously modern) -audience questioning of religious values
Context: ageing of Queen Elizabeth I, the question of her successor, the declining fortunes of the charismatic figure if the Earl of Essex and with him a model of chivalric honour, the Reformation, the revival of philosophical stoicism and it’s concerns with liberty and tyranny

Question 7

Fathers

Answer 7

•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”