HAMLET: Metatheatre

Question 1

Hamlet and Old Hamlet
“No more like my father than I to Hercules”

Answer 1

-> Not the “too big for this world” Greek tragic revenger
-> Only the main character for us, through an intimate relationship (soliloquies etc.)
- On the fringes of the court, yet upstage (Helen Cooper)

Question 2

Hamlet and His Role
1. “O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right”
2. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends”
3. “His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy”

Answer 2

1. • Metatheatrical awareness of his role as tragic hero/revenger
     -> Hamlet at his most excited/animated around actors - the ‘Players’ - free verse!
   • Conscious of ‘acting’ -> “suit the action to the word, the word to the action”
   • Tells from memory the story of Pyrrhus, the archetypal violent avenger of his father -> the kind of role H wants but is unable to play
     -> Born to be a revenger, but not a King?
   • Strange feeling amidst the Elizabethan primogeniture crisis
     -> Rhyming couplet is used to make it memorable, not to end the speech
   • Awareness of dramatic style
2. “Divinity”
   a) God?
   b) Determinism of the tragic genre - an acceptance of his role and fate?
   - Accepted ACTION/the things he needs to DO
   c) Claudius and his fate?
3. Separates guilt from self - ‘mad’ Hamlet (3rd person) a role, so ‘real’ Hamlet should be excused

Question 3

“O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”

1. “Oh, vengence! // Why, what an ass am I!”
2. “That I…must like a whore unpack my heart with words”

Answer 3

1.
a) Disrupts syntax - dramatic, exclamatory
b) Metatheatrical self-awareness
-> Richard Burton, looks slowly at his hand, which he has dramatically raised

2. Self inadequancy, sees his inabiliity to be that violent, revengeful tragic hero
   -> Words over actions
   - “My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth”
   -> YET! He is now condemning himself for what he wanted earlier in the soliloquy!
   - “Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,…can say nothing”
   - Contradictory/confused -> madness?

Question 4

The Court
1. A table prepared, with flagons of wine on it

Answer 4

1. No change of scene - the court is staged in real time -> performance evident to audience