Lecture notes
Hamlet revision and study guide A* detail for OCR English Lit
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This is a self made study guide for Shakespeare's Hamlet, using critical material to help students construct top band essays.
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Content preview
Page 1 of 60,Themes
- Madness
- Revenge
- Deception
- Mortality
- Religion
- Art and Culture
- Lies and deceit
- Sex
- Gender
- Family
- Artifice and appearance
- Inaction and the complexity of action
- The nation as a diseased body
- Surveillance
- Mirroring and subversion
- Suicide
- Kingship
- Guilt
Characters:
- Hamlet
- Old Hamlet
- Claudius
- Gertrude
- Horatio
- Polonius
- Ophelia
- Laertes
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,The mystery of death:
• Spiritual aftermath of death-embodied in the ghost
• Physical remainders of the dead: Yorick’s skull and the decaying corpses in the cemetery.
• Death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge
• The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether
or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world.
Curiously, Hamlet’s ghosts don’t appear to feature in Hamlet’s conception of death, it is ‘the
undiscovered country from whose born no traveller returns’.
Hamlet
Old Hamlet’s call to revenge
An outlier living in fraught and perilous times, when Hamlet is called upon to avenge his father’s
murder -- poisoned by his brother, Claudius, while he slept -- it should come as little surprise that
the means by which he effects this revenge should likewise defy the norm. The Ghost himself
provides a preliminary premise for conceiving of revenge anew. 'What look’d he, frowningly?'
Hamlet asks Horatio, who responds: 'A countenance more in sorrow than in anger'. These are
dreadful, dolorous duties, necessary but lamentable; thus 'sorrow,' not 'anger,' is the appropriate
mindset. Hamlet instantly alights upon the outline of a potential new schematic. The Ghost tells
Hamlet he is 'bound' to '(r)evenge his foul and most unnatural murder', and Hamlet replies: 'Haste
me to know’t, that I with wings as swift (a)s meditation or the thoughts of love (m)ay sweep to my
revenge').
Hamlet as a man of doubles
Louise Cowan points out, 'Hamlet is caught between the Medieval and the Modern priest,'
signifying that this character embodies both the dying ideas of the Middle Ages and the
burgeoning ideas of Modernity. Fran Kermode suggests that the language in Hamlet is 'full of
doubles, antitheses and repetitions,' and the play itself has many 'doublings.' The Prince is
caught between two regimes: the one of his father, King Hamlet and the one of his uncle, King
Claudius. Hamlet also stands between two kinds of friends, Horatio and Rozencrantz/
Guildenstern; two females, Ophelia and Gertrude; and finally two young men who, like the young
Prince, have lost their fathers, Laertes and Fortinbras.
Hamlet and authenticity
Hamlet has a false notion of himself, a self he believes to constitute an internal force within him,
disparate and superior to the self as viewed by other characters.
Hamlet's standing as 'th'expectancy and rose of the fair state' yearns for self-grandeur, while yet
Hamlet claims that no-one can 'denote [him] truly.' That he has 'within which passeth show –
these but trappings and suits of woe,' he believes his interior self to be imperceptible to all, and
thus existent of its own accord, and this stubbornness is the essence of Hamlet's predicament.
Fortinbras and Hamlet
Although Harold Jenkins describes Fortinbras as 'actively campaigning to right his father’s alleged
wrongs,' Claudius’s speech indicates that King Hamlet had gained those lands within the 'bonds
of law'. If it is true that Fortinbras merely seeks to fulfil his own dream of power as Claudius
suggests, then Fortinbras represents the Machiavellian prince born in the Renaissance who seeks
to exploit an opportunity for his own gain.
It is significant that Hamlet is present when Claudius introduces Fortinbras and addresses
Laertes. In hearing Claudius describes Fortinbras’s march on Denmark, Hamlet is reminded that
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, he, like Fortinbras, has lost a father. Hamlet cannot forget the loss of his father, but unlike
Fortinbras, he is not interested in trying to claim an opportunity to rule Denmark by challenging
Claudius. He can neither advance the aggressive action of Fortinbras nor can he embrace
Claudius’s kingship of Laertes. How Hamlet imagines himself in relationship to both Fortinbras
and Laertes is further developed later in the play.
Laertes and Hamlet
Frank Kermode acknowledges that Laertes is a necessary counterpart to Hamlet as a kind of
double, as a ‘student, avenger and ultimately deadly opponent. In Laertes, Hamlet beholds a
young man who is willingly beholden to Claudius’s new regime, yet he cannot accept the marriage
of Claudius and Gertrude.
Interestingly, Hamlet never intends to harm Laertes, describing him as 'a soul of great article,' and
later, he confesses to Horatio that he sees something of himself in Laertes: 'I’m sorry...that to
Laertes I forgot myself. For by the image of my cause I see the portraiture of his [...] his grief did
put me Into a tow’ring passion'. Hamlet had seen an example of a man who exacts revenge
through military action in Fortinbras; in Laertes, Hamlet witnessed a man torn asunder by grief. It
is the reflection of the actions and motives of these two characters that gives Hamlet the vision of
how he will conduct his own business of revenge.
Harold Bloom describes the Hamlet in Act 5 as a man who has 'stopped playing'. Hamlet has
discovered who he is in relationship to the world around him, and his is now ready to act. Bloom
imparts, 'his self-consciousness is...eerily transcendental and sublime, one in which the abyss
between playing someone and being someone has been bridged'. Hamlet has encountered the
abyss and returned a changed man. He is not the warrior Fortinbras who acts simply to fight and
gain profit, nor is he the young gentleman Laertes who honours a corrupt court out of an outdated
sense of honour and duty. Rather, as he proclaims to Laertes, 'This is I, Hamlet, the Dane [...]
though I am not splenitive and rash, yet have I in me something dangerous, which let thy wisdom
fear...'. The something dangerous is not his skilled sword or his quick mind; it is a self-awareness
that neither Fortinbras nor Laertes possess.
Hamlet as a man of inaction
Hamlet characterises man as ‘one part wisdom and three parts coward’ in his speech, confessing
his predilection to think and not act. With the uneven division of ‘one part wisdom’ and ‘three
parts coward’ he emphasises inaction by amounting it to ‘three parts’ of a man, as opposed to
‘wisdom’, which is only one part. Yet, he may also be speaking rhetorically about his the three
failed attempts to avenge his father’s death. First, there is the mousetrap fiasco he places so
much emphasis on – 'the play's the thing’ and yet it is interrupted before Claudius’ guilt can be
fully ascertained. There is also the prayer/murder scene he postpones until Claudius is 'about
some act that has no relish of salvation in’t'. His implied goal is to kill him and damn him with the
same sword. The last of his failures is the accidental murder of Polonius, whom he 'took for [his]
better half', instead of Claudius.
Harold Bloom argues ‘Hamlet […] cannot strike us as a likely avenger because his intellectual
freedom, his capaciousness of spirit, seems so at odds with the Ghost-imposed mission.’
Proponents of this popular view include Goethe, Coleridge, and Schlegel. Goethe writes of
Hamlet’s ‘over-sensitiveness, Coleridge believes Hamlet has an ‘excess of intellect that
overbalances contemplation in favour of action and Schlegel believes that 'reflective deliberation
is a pretext to cover cowardice and lack of decision'
Bradley asserts that 'whatever we …may think about Hamlet’s duty, we are meant in the play to
assume that he ought to have obeyed the Ghost’. However, It is perfectly reasonable, upon first
reading or viewing, to go along with Hamlet’s doubts, to demand as he does verification of the
Ghost’s testimony, to wonder whether the Ghost is a 'spirit of health or goblin damned.'
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