Others Flashcards
(6 cards)
Hamlet’s final pleas to Horatio
‘Report me and my cause alright to the unsatisifed’
ideas of REPUTATION, TRUTH, ironic because horatio IMMEDIATELY LIED TO PROTECT HAMLET - ‘he never gave commandment for {R&G} death’ - history quickly rewritten - give swhole play sense of perspective (small domestic affair affecting nation) - ALSO since HAMLET is given a soldier’s death (ultimate irony - he was awful killer, great thinker - history being misinterpreted / malleability of truth / reality)
FATE
‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends’ 5.2
HAMLET believed that in his escape from the ship / killing R&G he ‘was heaven ordinant’ (directed by heaven)
“Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eye”
“my fate cries out”
“there’s a divinity that shapes our ends”
“there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. if it be now, ti snot to come”
Use of wit and humour to make profound observations
CLOWNS - add to satirical element of the play, establish clear Christian context, ideas of IRRELIGIOUS SUICIDE (even she acted more than HAMLET)
PRIEST: ‘If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been out o’ Christian burial’
Shaekpsear uses COMEDY to make social commentary about the gentry, offers different perspective on Ophelia’s death
Clown/Gravediggers: “is she to be buried in Christian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation…How can that be unless she drown’d herself in her own defence…if this had not been a gentlewoman, she shouldn’t have been buried out o’ Christian burial”
joking about “he that builds stronger…the masn, the shipwright or the carpenter?…a gravemaker…lasts till doomsday”
Clowns wider introspective perspective: “i came to that day that our last king Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras”
Power of thought 2.2
‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’
Use of wit and humour to criticise and condemn
“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death the memory be green”
“A little more than kin, and less than kind… I am too much i’th’sun”
Polonius as a humouours device - criticise and condemn
Polonius’s “few precepts” become a hypocritical, contradictory monologue with verbose, didactic and dominating speech and elevated and pompous language which ironically culminates in “This above all: to thine own self be true,”
Polonius’s arrogance and ignorance that it is “the very ecstasy of love”
….“that hath made him mad”
…. “the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy”
… “the head and source of all your son’s distemper” (Claudius)
Polonius’s irony in speech: “since brevity is the soul of wit And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad.”
“Ophelia, walk you here-Gracious, so please you” - sycophantic
