All Hamlet essay plans for A-Level English Literature
(blue = quotes/AO1, green = context/AO3, red = critics/AO4)
Explore how Shakespeare presents action and inaction in Hamlet. You must relate your
discussion to relevant contextual factors and ideas from your critical reading.
Intro: main idea + main context
Para 1: Hamlet is a source of inaction in the play as he is unable to commit to his revenge
- Burton ‘good scholars are never good soldiers’ ‘studies weakens the scholar’s bodies’ and ‘abates their strength
and courage’
- Applies to Hamlet as he sees himself as ‘dull and muddy-mettled rascal’ ‘unpregnant of [his] cause’
- ‘Am I a coward?’ ‘consciousness does make cowards’ showing the act of thinking renders revenge impossible
- Foakes believes Hamlet is ‘a soul unfit for the performance of great action’
- The ailment of thought sees ‘the currents turn awry and lose the name of action’
- Draws upon the idea of the Renaissance prince, a man of great thought and consideration who is able to question
and relet upon all subjects and find meaning in the world, Hamlet is built up as the idealised Renaissance prince
in the manner that he is able to question his own values and action
- When he finds Claudius praying he ‘shethes[s] his sword’ and prepares to complete revenge but cannot as he
decided to wait for when he can ‘trip him that his heels may kick at Heaven and that is soul may be damned and
black as hell’
Para 2: although his preoccupation with thought leads Hamlet to inaction, perhaps the powerful sexual power of women
in the play also leads to inaction
- Jones ‘Hamlet is driven subconsciously by an incestuous desire for his mother which complicates his task of
avenging the murder of his father’
- Jones ‘he has a long repressed desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection’
- ‘Your husband’s brother’s wife’ begins very close closet scene with an incestuous description of family relations
- Uses the phrase ‘takes off the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love and sets a blister there’ where the
rose represents idealised love and the blister refers to the practice or branding prostitutes showing a concern with
Gertrude’s sexuality arise for Hamlet
- Uses sexual language ‘heaven-kissing’
- ‘You cannot call it love, for at your age the heyday in the blood is tame’ oddly open discussion about her desires
for sex
- ‘In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed stewed in corruption, honeying and making love’ animalistic image of sex
in marriage
- This references Freud’s Oedipus Complex which poses the idea that a young boy holds an unconscious sexual
desire towards his mother which comes to manifest in different ways, for Hamlet one of these is his disgust at his
mothers sex life which Freud would see as a sexual envy
- This is also seen through the dramatisation of the conflict between Hamlet and Claudius ‘I am too much in the
son’
Para 3: where inaction renders characters powerless, action supplies them with great power
- Hamlet is powerless as he cannot carry out his revenge, but Laertes and Fortinbras are powerful due to their
preference for action allowing them to complete their revenge
- Hall states Laertes is ‘the most expressive contrast to the non-activity of the Danish prince’
- Hazlitt sees Hamlet’s powers as ‘eaten up by thought’
- Prosser contrasts Laertes as ‘like a hurricane [...] rush[ing] into the palace in an uncontrollable rage, roaring for
blood’ setting up opposition between L and H
- Laertes enters the court demanding ‘O thou vile King, give me my father’ ‘vows to the blackest devil’ and
threatens ‘to hell allegiance’
- This is significant to the Elizabethan audience as Hell was a very real place and the Devil a real person as many
painting and representations emerged at the time representing Hell as a dark and firefly landscape that was
decidedly foreboding, Laertes is seen to be going to great lengths to avenge his father
- Fortinbras is able to encase the whole pay ‘in a nutshell’
- ‘Give first admittance to the ambassadors’ sees him divert main plot
- ‘We shall express our duty in his eye, and let him know so’
, - Marino sees that Fortinbras ‘moves into active, independent manhood and finally achieves the natural telos for a
character of his type, kingship’ seeing im gain ultimate political and personal power by the end of the play
Explore how Shakespeare presents appearance and reality in Hamlet. You must relate your
discussion to relevant contextual factors and ideas from your critical reading.
Intro: main idea + main context
Para 1: how deception supplies power
Claudius appears diplomatic yet is corrupted, also deceives religious order through regicide
- ‘Bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe’
- ‘Holding a weak supposal of our worth’
- Yet he knows that he has disrupted the line of succession as Old Hamlet says ‘the whole ear of Denmark is by a
forged process of my death rankly abused’
- Attlick ‘the cunning and lecherousness of Claudius’ evil has corrupted the whole kingdom of Denmark’
- This is likely to stem from Machiavell’s novel ‘The Prince’ in which kingship is seen as toxic and corrupting as
rulers are seen to act for their own benefit and be manipulative, therefore Machiavelli assumed that the immoral
behaviour of politicians and rulers was normal and therefore likely to corrupt the state
Gertrude deceives Old Hamlet and the state through her sexuality
- Dall ‘Gertrude’s actions and body contribute far more to the story than her character’
- ‘Sometimes sister, now our Queen’
- ‘Like Niobe, all tears’ ‘A beast, that wants discourse of reason, would have mourn’d longer - married by uncle’
- ‘Most unrighteous tears’ sees her sexuality deceive the state
- She is also able to deceive Hamlet by trapping him in desiring her so he is distracted from his task of avenging
his uncle
- Jones ‘Hamlet is driven subconsciously by an incestuous desire for his mother which complicates his task of
avenging the murder of his father’
- Jones ‘he has a long repressed desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection’
- ‘Your husband’s brother’s wife’ begins very close closet scene with an incestuous description of family relations
- Uses the phrase ‘takes off the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love and sets a blister there’ where the
rose represents idealised love and the blister refers to the practice or branding prostitutes showing a concern with
Gertrude’s sexuality arise for Hamlet
- Uses sexual language ‘heaven-kissing’
- ‘You cannot call it love, for at your age the heyday in the blood is tame’ oddly open discussion about her desires
for sex
- ‘In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed stewed in corruption, honeying and making love’ animalistic image of sex
in marriage
- This references Freud’s Oedipus Complex which poses the idea that a young boy holds an unconscious sexual
desire towards his mother which comes to manifest in different ways, for Hamlet one of these is his disgust at his
mothers sex life which Freud would see as a sexual envy
Para 2: the appearance and reality of Hamlet’s revenge where he wishes that he could make it thoughts a reality
- Hamlet adheres to Aristotle’s rules for tragedy in which the tragic hero must have a fatal flaw that in the end leads
to their demise, for Hamlet this is his preoccupation with thinking too much and considering his actions that
means he is unable to be a hero and carry out his revenge
- Burton ‘good scholars are never good soldiers’ ‘studies weakens the scholar’s bodies’ and ‘abates their strength
and courage’
- Applies to Hamlet as he sees himself as ‘dull and muddy-mettled rascal’ ‘unpregnant of [his] cause’
- ‘Am I a coward?’ ‘consciousness does make cowards’ showing the act of thinking renders revenge impossible
- Foakes believes Hamlet is ‘a soul unfit for the performance of great action’
- The ailment of thought sees ‘the currents turn awry and lose the name of action’
- Draws upon the idea of the Renaissance prince, a man of great thought and consideration who is able to question
and relet upon all subjects and find meaning in the world, Hamlet is built up as the idealised Renaissance prince
in the manner that he is able to question his own values and action
- When he finds Claudius praying he ‘shethes[s] his sword’ and prepares to complete revenge but cannot as he
decided to wait for when he can ‘trip him that his heels may kick at Heaven and that is soul may be damned and
black as hell’
, - Ultimately because he cannot kill Claudius, Claudius’ plot kills him showing how his hamartia does lead to his
death at the end of the play
Para 3: the appearance versus the reality of madness in the play
- Righter ‘caught in a maze of deceiving appearances, he takes refuge in an illusion of his own devising. He
becomes an actor’
- Hamlet decides to ‘put an antic disposition’ which is made to seem highly theatrical through his ideas to have his
‘arms encumbered’, ‘this headshake’ and ‘pronouncing of some doubtful phrases’
- This play is a tragedy which is defined as a genre of uncompensated suffering and in many of Shakespeare’s
plays madness is used a form of divine punishment, in this way the hero of the play being mad allows the play to
centre around suffering
- Bradely makes the point about tragedy that ‘suffering and calamity are exceptional, some striking kind’ which may
feed into the striking acting of Hamlet’s madness
- His madness is made to seem highly theatrical as Ophelia accounts his ‘doublet all unbraced’, ‘no hat upon his
head’, ‘stockings fouled’, ‘knees knocking’ and his acting with ‘his other hand thus o’er his brow’
- It is seen by his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstrean as a ‘crafty madness’ or a clever act which he is putting
on
- Polonius too sees Hamlet’s madness as being put on as he speaks TO AUDIENCE ‘though this be madness yet
there is method in’t’
- In Saxo Grammaticus Amleth adopts the guise of a fool or madman as a protective cover, in this original version
madness is clearly an act and is never assumed to be real perhaps hinting that Hamlet’s madness is not intended
to be real
- ‘I am essentially not in madness, but mad in craft’ Hamlet speaks to his mother
- Mack sees this phase as ‘dramatically useful, arresting, combination of the tragic hero and buffon’
- Charney agrees seeing ‘all that is scenic could be seen as creating a language of theatrical gesture’
- The true virtue of theatre proves Righter’s view right that ‘Hamlet is a tragedy dominated by the idea of the play’
as it is of utmost importance to both Shakespeare and Hamlet
- This can also be seen as the cause for Ophelia’s madness in part
- Camden ‘throughout the play the appearance of Hamlet’s pretended madness is contrasted with the reality of
Ophelia’s madness’
- ‘Your sisters drowned Laertes’
Explore how Shakespeare presents corruption in Hamlet. You must relate your discussion to
relevant contextual factors and ideas from your critical reading.
Intro: main idea + main context
Para 1: bodily corruption leading to the corruption of the monarchy
The act of killing the king
- Attlick ‘the cunning and lecherousness of Claudius’ evil has corrupted the whole kingdom of Denmark’
- ‘Foul and most unnatural murder!’
- ‘Sleeping in my orchard, the serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death’
the way in which Claudius usurps the crown is the primary act of bodily corruption in the play
- ‘That incestuous, that adulterate beast’ paired with his description as the ‘serpent’ paints Caludius as a corrupting
and evil individual
- Stems from the creation myth in the Garden of Eden as it is the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to eat the
apple that leads to the corruption of all mankind
- ‘Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature’ contrasts to the orchard in which
Old Hamlet slept, Claudius has corrupted the garden and that too has seeped into the corruption of beauty and
purity is lost
- Paglia ‘in mediaeval and Renaissance iconography, a king napping in his orchard would symbolise the harmony
and nature of society’
- ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’
- This is likely to stem from Machiavell’s novel ‘The Prince’ in which kingship is seen as toxic and corrupting as
rulers are seen to act for their own benefit and be manipulative, therefore Machiavelli assumed that the immoral
behaviour of politicians and rulers was normal and therefore likely to corrupt the state
Bodily corruption occurs elsewhere
- ‘O that this too too sallied flesh would melt’
