Death & The Ghost Flashcards
(8 cards)
Act 1, Scene 1 on the Ghosts Ambiguity
‘The cock crows…it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons.’ = The cock is a symbol of purity that scares the GHOST implying it is EVIL, as believed by Protestant audiences.
Dismissal of death
‘all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity’ 2.1
“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death the memory be green”
“Cast thy nighted colour off…’tis common, - all that live must die”
“your father lost a father, that father lost, lost his”
“tis unmanly grief…’tis a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, a fault to nature”
Hamlet says Poloniuys is “at supper…where he is eaten; a certain convocations of politic worms are e’en at him”
The ghost – where is the ghost portrayed as a deeply ambiguous figure
“This thing…this dreaded sight…this apparition”
“It started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons”
“By thy intents wicked or charitable…a questionable shape”
“It is an honest ghost”, Hamlet claims at the end of Act 1
“He took my father grossly, full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May.”
About the ghost’s ambiguity act 2, scene 2
‘The spirit that i have seen my be a devil - and the devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape…out of my weakness and my melancholy…abuses me to damn me’
1.5 The ghost has come from…
‘sulph’rous and tormenting flames’
The uncertainty of what comes after death / a fear of death & Death as a relief
3.1 2bon2b
‘To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance, to dream…for in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…
weary life…
the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bound no traveller returns…
“end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished!”
Ghost’s visit 3.4
‘This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose’
Death as the great leveller
“your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service” to worms
“here’s fine revolution…Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ‘em? mine ache to think on’t”
Regardless of what we do “to this favour [we all] must come”…”to what base uses we may return…Imperious Ceasar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away”
