Hamlet/Raskolnikov Similarities

•Both hesitate to act and agonize over decisions

•Madness, both real and pretended, plays a role in their

stories

•Both are highly intelligent

•Both have dreams and visions

•Both love young women of dubious virtue

(Sonia/Ophelia)

•Both have loyal companions (Horatio/Razhumikin)

•Both have conflicts with their mothers

•Both encounter monstrous human beings

(Claudius/Svidrigailov)

•Both are college students

•Both commit murder, seemingly without remorse

•Both live in a fallen world full of corruption,

drunkenness, and vice

•Both hate hypocrisy and despise the ugliness of

humanity

•Both aspire to greatness and see great

possibilities in humanity

•Both have “doubles” within their own stories

•Both eventually accept suffering as a condition of

existence and a precursor of grace

•Both at last accept responsibility for their own

actions and lives

Tragic

Drama Comedy is a wave…

Tragedy is a whirlwind

Hamlet was written in

between 1599-1602

Qualities of the Tragedy in Drama

Derived from Aristotle’s Poetics

•The work recounts the fall of persons of high degree.

•It exemplifies the “tragic sense of life” …the sense that

human beings are inevitably doomed and that the

measure of a person’s life is to be taken by the way

he/she faces that doom.

•The tragic impulse celebrates courage and dignity in

the face of defeat, attempting to portray the grandeur of

the human spirit.

•It recounts a series of events in the life of a significant

person, culminating in a catastrophe, all treated with

seriousness and dignity.

•The protagonist is above ordinary people, and he/she

must be brought from happiness to misery (suffering =

pathos).

•The choice made by the protagonist is significant and is

dictated by his/her own error, frailty, or mistaken

judgment. (tragic flaw or hamartia [ha-marr-tea-a])

•The error, frailty, or mistake is not necessarily a flaw in

character but rather an extreme response to extraordinary

circumstances.

•Other Greek terms: catharsis – purging through emotional

response, especially pity and fear

•The two great eras of tragedy were Ancient Greece and

Elizabethan England. The difference between the two eras of

tragic greatness lies in the Greek emphasis of fate and

justice versus the Christian possibility of salvation and

grace.

•Tragedy consists of pairs of opposites: pity and terror;

justice and love; paradoxes, antitheses.

•Tragedy asks the ontological (speculating the nature of

being – human nature) question: “Is ‘being’ good or evil?”

•Tragedy is composed of three parts:

1. fall - terrible deed

2. suffering - stage marked by stasis, murkiness, not

knowing

3.reconciliation and self-knowledge

Revenge Tragedy

•Dates back to the work of Seneca, a 1st century Roman

Motifs

•Revenge of a father for a son or vice versa

•The hesitation of the hero

•The use of either real or pretended insanity

•Intrigue

•An able, scheming villain

•Philosophical soliloquies

•Sensational horrors (murders and threats of violence on

stage; exhibition of dead bodies; supernatural appearances)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

•It’s been performed more than any other play in the world,

and more has been written about it than any other literary

work. Written the same year as Julius Caesar.

•It’s been translated more than any other play

•There are over forty-five movie versions of the play.

•The first book written on Hamlet - Some Remarks on the

Tragedy of Hamlet - was published in 1736.

•The line “To be, or not to be” is the most quoted phrase in the

English language.

•Hamlet has inspired twenty-six ballets, six operas, and

dozens of musical works.

•Shakespeare’s play borrowed from both history and earlier

dramatizations of the basic story of Amlethus. (Saxo

Grammaticus’ Historia Danica, 1180)

Tips for Reading

Inversions Horatio:

In what particular thought to work I know not (1.1.170-1). vs. I

know not in what particular thought to work.

Archaic words/changed meanings *frequently will appear to mean the opposite of expected

“I doubt some foul play.” means “I suspect…” (1.2.278)

Wordplay – puns, metaphors, ambiguities Pun – Claudius: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Hamlet: Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun (son).

Interrupted constructions

Therefore our sometime sister have we taken to wife.

BECOMES

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen/ Th’

imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we (as ‘twere

with a defeated joy,/ With an auspicious and a dropping

eye,/ With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,/ In

equal scale weighing delight and dole)/ Taken to wife.

(1.2.8-14)

Delayed constructions

Within a month,/ Eye yet the salt of most unrighteous

tears/ Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,/ She

married. (1.2.158-60)

*Watch for stage actions…sometimes embedded in line.

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Elsinore was

probably

Helsingor

12 12

Fortinbras--a

Norwegian

prince--acts

as a foil for

Hamlet.

13 13

Kronborg Castle

14 14

Hamlet attends the university at Wittenberg, Germany.

more Kronborg Castle...

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Hamlet’s Tragic Flaw! (Hamartia)

What the Critics Say…. Goethe (1749-1832) The great German poet argued that

Hamlet is not brave enough. He lacks the “right stuff.”

The dramatic situation is like an acorn (the problem)

planted in a cracked vase (Hamlet) As the problem

grows, Hamlet becomes less sound.

AC Bradley(1851-1935): Famous Shakespearean

scholar said that Hamlet suffers from “melancholia” or

is merely mentally deranged.

Ernest Jones(1879-1958): The Freudian interpretation:

Oedipus Complex. He still has a childish sexual fixation

on momma Gertrude, thus his attitude toward Claudius

is ambivalent; he is grateful to Claudius for removing

his “rival” for his mother’s affections (King Hamlet) but

must also resent him as his new father figure.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The great British Romantic poet believes Hamlet’s delay is caused by “the effect of a superfluous activity of thought.” He thinks too much because he is too elevated for this world…has too fine a character. Cindy Lou Camp: AP paean who trembles at the feet of Mount Olympus believes that Hamlet is a character created by Shakespeare who isn’t real. BUT she also thinks that as a perpetual student (Hamlet isn’t a young buck) might over-think things a bit and would rather study the ramifications of murder before jumping into a life of crime. Plus—a ghost? Not reliable. OR: Maybe Hamlet doesn’t have a flaw. He is merely waiting for the ghost to be proven honest or not. A sort 21st century existentialist hero He is faced with a problem whose answer may lie beyond the limits of human reason or in fact may not have an answer. His uncertainty makes him “unstable.”

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Elements of a Revenge Tragedy

by Dame Helen Gardner (British scholar and

professor at Oxford 1908-1986)

*In a typical revenge play the protagonist must kill

the slayer of his relative or firend in the most

terrible way possible.

a. The hero faces a predicament not of his own

making.

b. The villain provides the means for the vengeance

c. The avenger conceives a plot and puts it into

action.

d. Usually the hero descends to the moral level of

the man being punished ( a mild irony) with a

terrible revenge scheme.

e. The denouement of Hamlet shows a “profound”

irony: Claudius plans Hamlet’s death, but both he

and his queen die.

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Some bits and pieces of fascinating stuff that

might show up on your final…

1. Unnatural: the murder of a brother by a

brother

2. Denmark is disturbed-dead king, invading

prince, new king.

3. Incestuous marriage

4. ghost

5. Appearances vs. Reality

6. 28% of play is prose.

7. short metric lines, rhyming couplets, shared

lines, prose, feminine (unaccented) endings,

long lines, broken lines (caesuras!)

8. Alexandrine lines: 12 syllables. Usually

broken by caesura for emphasis.

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