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Summary Hamlet - context
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Notes on the contexts surrounding Hamlet
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Hamlet contextThe body politic
- Disease overtaking the body as a metaphor for political corruption
- ‘the natural gates and alleys of the body’ – 1.5
- ‘distracted globe’ – 1.5
Renaissance revenge tragedy
- Conventions include madness
The Spanish tragedy
- Role of the fool
The Spanish tragedy – 1590
- Includes ghosts
- Explores the ethics of taking revenge and controlling justice
The English reformation and Elizabethan religious tension
- Calvinism – believed in predestination
- Protestantism
- Puritanism – abstaining from drinking and partying
- Catholicism – absolution found through confession & ghosts are souls in purgatory
‘canonised’ – saintly
Bright’s treatise of melancholie – 1586
- Melancholy – fashionable malady associated with refinement and made intellect
- The divided self – the internal person is not the same as the external person
The Senecan revenge plays
- Ghost character and typical revenge themes
- Ultra-violent
- Consistently employs dramatic irony
Adam and eve
- Gertrude as eve, Denmark is Eden after the fall
- ‘the king’s corpse … exudes the sulphurous bad smells that fill the play’
- Adelman – ‘she plays out the role of the missing eve: her body is in the garden in which her husband
died, her sexuality the poisonous weeds that kill him, and poisons the world for her son’
Greek mythology
- Niobe – grieving mother figure
- Hyperion – father of Helios, overthrown by the tyrant Kronos
Overthrown by the next generation
- Satyr – sexual deviants
Satyr plays – large phalluses, drunk, comic relief between tragedies
- Aphrodite and Hephaestus
The diet of worms
- Setting of Wittenberg
- Martin Luther declared his views different to the catholic church – was excommunicated
Hamlet as a radical, his own feelings of excommunication
- Wittenberg was where martin Luther was professor of theology
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