I made this document for OCR English literature to revise all of the different AO's needed for the Hamlet essay questions. Used it for my 1st year mock exams and got an A*.
Spurgeon – Corruption is “a condition for which the individual is apparently not responsible, any
more than the sick man is to blame for the cancer which strikes and devours him”
Bristol – “Hamlet and Claudius stalk each other like two murderous clowns attempting to achieve
strategic advantage over each other”
Hattaway – “Accidents are as important to the unfolding of the tragic action as the consequence of
the hero’s choice”
Virtue
Watson – “Shakespeare provides us with perspective – almost a scientific control group- by
including two other sons also seeking to avenge their father’s slayings”
Francis Bacon - “It is a princes part to pardon”
Revenge
Francis Bacon – “Revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well”
- Revenge is “a wild kind of justice”
- “It is a princes part to pardon”
Michael de Montagne – “He should arm himself with reason against this furiously blind desire for
revenge”
Indecisiveness/ Inaction
Prosser – “Laertes himself is not a whiff of fresh air. He is a hurricane. He rushes in the
palace in an uncontrolled rage, roaring for blood, having no idea whom he
seeks”
Laurence Olivier’s opening line – “this is a film about a man who could not make up his mind”
Watson – “Shakespeare provides us with perspective – almost a scientific control group- by
including two other sons also seeking to avenge their father’s slayings”
Coleridge – Hamlet had a “proportionate aversion to real action”
Appearance vs reality
Patrick – “A good King must be a good actor”
Flaherty – “Hamlet is self-reflexive; it constantly draws attention to the greater reality… an
audience in a theatre watching actors perform as characters”
Comedy
Levin – “too many subsequent Hamlets have tended to overemphasize the solemnity of the
part. After all, the pseudo lunatic is conventionally a figure of comedy”
, Flint – “comedy is describes as a standard cured for melancholy, and for the melancholic’s
inability to adjust his situation”
- “Hamlet uses more puns than any other Shakespearean figure”
T.S Eliot
Madness
Cott – “Hamlet is made because politics itself is madness when it destroys all feelings and
affection”
Flint – (Hamlet’s madness) “gives him the licence of a fool to speak cruel truths, transgressing
the language of social decorum”
Austen – “when Hamlet puts on an ‘antic disposition’ it is ‘feigned, forced’ rather than the
‘natural role of inflamed madness’
Charney – “Through madness, the women on stage can suddenly make a forceful assertion
of their being… breaking through unbearable social restraints”
Truth
Flint – (Hamlet’s madness) “gives him the licence of a fool to speak cruel truths, transgressing
the language of social decorum”
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