HAMLET: AO5

Question 1

Helen Cooper:
“Hamlet - A Serial Killer?”
TRAGEDY

• “Hamlet” doesn’t fit the Elizabethan idea of tragedy:
• ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’
  -> Collection of non-literary tragedies ie. not plays
  -> “…wherein may be seen…how frail and unstable worldly prosperity is found, even those whom Fortune seemeth most highly to favour”

Answer 1

ELIZ:
1. “A spectacle of blood” - YES
-> Horatio in 1st Quarto: “Tragic spectacle of corpses”

2. The “antitype of comedy” - NO
   -> Beginning in calm, ending in tempest
   -> “Hamlet” begins w/ sickness
3. Fall of a ‘great’ man - CLAUDIUS
   -> From the top of Fortune’s Wheel
   -> A “tragedy of the state”
   * Sir Philip Sidney: “Tragedy…maketh Kings fear to be Tyrants”

Question 2

Helen Cooper:
“Hamlet - A Serial Killer?”
INTERNALISATION

… of real tragic action - the ability for internal suffering

Answer 2

• Hamlet at the front, thinking…
  -> … while “action is literally upstaged”
• “‘Hamlet’…replaces dramatic objectivity precisely with subjectivity”
  -> Retrospection is often heard through the medium of Hamlet’s (subjective) mind.

Question 3

Emma Smith (1)
- “Tragedies signal their interest in the singular self”

THE PAST
1. “What Hamlet does in the play tends to be about undoing and negation rather than doing and progress”
+
“Hamlet seems like a modern man, caught in the process of emotional and intellectual formation”

2. ‘Hamlet’ DOUBLED in the name of the DEAD KING + LIVING SON
   - Heniadys: adj. + noun -> noun AND noun for DOUBLING
   -> “rouge AND peasant…”

Answer 3

1.
- Play doesn’t follow H to England - he RETURNS
- Breaking off relationship w/ O
- Doesn’t return to university - stays a child?!
- Primary attachments to dead, not living

2. a) Cannot form an individual identity:
   -> No attempt (eg. Henry IV) to separate father and son
   -> Michael Sheen - H in a psychiatric ward, playing all characters
   -> Laurence Olivier - H + Ghost VO

b) RETROSPECTIVE
- OH mentioned first
-> Preoccupation w/ PAST - OH already in the past at the start of play
-> Remembering pre-lapsarian Cain/Able-type story
- Eliz.: succession crisis, but it would be treason to think about it
-> Considering the FUTURE = CRIME

Question 4

Emma Smith (2)

3. Harold Bloom: “The Anxiety of Influence”
   - Struggle against the ‘father poet’
   - Thomas Kyd: “The Spanish Tragedy”
4. Hamlet “resists its own movement to annihilation [Cooper: Elizabethan idea of tragedy] by looping back on itself into a parallel and doomed universe in which Hamlet is already dead”
   - OH + YH

Answer 4

3. Oedipus complex, but in terms of wrestling with the influence of parental figures
   -> Shakespeare’s own textual anxieties reflected in H’s Oedipus complex
4. In terms of progress, everything is CIRCULAR
   - Hamlet begins in tempest and ends in tempest
   -> Return of Medieval warrior king (Fortinbras)
   - DEATH as LINEAR and CIRCULAR
   -> Death = not final, as “Hamlet” is both dead and alive
   -> “To be…” + ghosts: blurring lines between life and death
   -> Ended/answered by “The rest is silence”
   -> This “condemns him to a life of remembering” - why he goes mad? All about escaping the shadow of a father? Identity?

Question 5

Greenblatt:
“A Protestant son, haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father”

Answer 5

• Ghost, purgatory
• Thought after death -> “to be…” vs “the rest…” vs “piles of ordinance”