Hamlet

Man with a plan or just a ‘mad’ man?

Themes• What is madness?• Power (love, sex, corruption of, desire of)• Revenge• Murder• Women (role, view)• Deception/Trust• Certainty/Uncertainty• Action vs. Reaction and the need to act• Death

Revenge

• It is interesting that Hamlet is a revenge tragedy driven by a protagonist unable to commit to the act of revenge. It is Hamlet’s inability to avenge the murder of his father that drives the plot forward.

Women

• Notice how many women are in the play• What are their roles?• How are they treated?• What does this say about the culture of

Denmark in the mist of corruption?

Power

• Absolute Power corrupts absolutely• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih8NfDPt

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• Claudius desire for power helps to corrupt his very country and nation.

• Allows for a take over• Blinded by personal desire for power

Death• The entire play is surrounded by death.• Hamlet struggles with the giving and taking of

life• Hamlet struggles with what is this mystery of

death.• Death not only with characters, but also the

death of a nation.

Certainty/Uncertainty

• Hamlet is on a quest for certainty? How?

Certainty/Uncertainty

• Hamlet is filled with ideas and symbolism regarding human life and death. Hamlet, the protagonist, is a young man, coming of age. Throughout the play, he struggles to find answers to questions of moral uncertainty pertaining to life and death

Certainty/Uncertainty

• What are the certainties of life?

Certainty/Uncertainty

• The two most important are life and death– They are our mysteries in life…never fully understood.

Revenge is a course of action he cannot carry out without unquestionable certainty. “I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have, by the very cunning of the scene, been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions” (II, ii, 577~580).

Power of Love/Sex

Ophelia, naïve, young in lovePrivate counsel with HamletDaughter of PoloniusSister to Laertes

Ophelia• Of all the pivotal characters in Hamlet, Ophelia is the

most static and one-dimensional.

• She has the potential to become a tragic heroine -- to overcome the adversities inflicted upon her -- but she instead crumbles into insanity, becoming merely tragic.

• This is because Ophelia herself is not as important as her representation of the dual nature of women in the play.

• Ophelia's distinct purpose is to show at once Hamlet's warped view of women as callous sexual predators, and the innocence and virtue of women.

Ophelia“What Hamlet see in Ophelia”

• Through Ophelia we witness Hamlet's evolution, or de-evolution into a man convinced that all women are whores; that the women who seem most pure are inside black with corruption and sexual desire. And if women are harlots, then they must have their procurers.

• In essence, according to Hamlet: Gertrude has been made a whore by Claudius, and Ophelia has been made a whore by her father.

What the reader may see in Ophelia“The wounded lover”

• But, to the rest of us, Ophelia represents something very different. To those who are not blinded by hurt and rage, Ophelia is the epitome of goodness.

• Very much like Gertrude, young Ophelia is childlike and naive.

• Unlike Queen Gertrude, Ophelia has good reason to be unaware of the harsh realities of life. She is very young, and has lost her mother, possibly at birth. Her father, Polonius, and brother, Laertes, love Ophelia tremendously, and have taken great pains to shelter her.

The power of love to destroy

• She is incapable of defending herself, but through her timid responses we see clearly her intense suffering:

• Hamlet: ...I did love you once.Ophelia: Indeed, my, lord, you made me believe so.Hamlet: You should not have believed me...I loved you not.Ophelia: I was the more deceived.

Ophelia…as a symbol• What happens to purity in the mist of evil• Her frailty and innocence work against her as

she cannot cope with the unfolding of one traumatic event after another.

• Ophelia's darling Hamlet causes all her emotional pain throughout the play, and when his hate is responsible for her father's death, she has endured all that she is capable of enduring and goes insane.

• But even in her insanity she symbolizes, to everyone but Hamlet, incorruption and virtue

Action/Reaction: or the lack ofAction vs. Words

• Hamlet has many things on his mind. Suicide is one of them.

• Hamlet sees that Fortinbras has so much ambition. • Hamlet is still struggling on what to do. He feels like

he is worthless because he can’t follow a task that his father wants him to do.

• Thinks and over thinks: He talks a lot…especially to himself. Why?

Hamlet and The Really Big Question

• We know what you're thinking. You want some answers to the really big question:

• Why does Hamlet delay so long in carrying out his revenge?

• As most big questions tend to do, this sucker spawned hundreds of years of scholars writing hundreds of theories as to why. Here are some of the big schools of thought:

Don't talk to strange ghosts• Keep in mind that the Protestant Reformation

happened twenty or so years before Hamlet was written.

• Basically, these new Protestants had different views of Christianity than the current ruling team, the Catholics. From what the ghost says, it sounds like he's coming from Purgatory, a sort of waiting room where souls chilled out before they could get to Heaven. If this is true, then we trust the ghost; nothing wrong with a resident of Purgatory.

Don't talk to strange ghosts

• On the other hand, Protestants denied the existence of Purgatory. This means the ghost may be a demon from hell, which is why Hamlet wonders if the spirit is a "goblin damned" (1.4.5). So what is Hamlet – Protestant or Catholic? Protestant. Hamlet's chilling in Denmark, which is definitely Protestant nation……..

Don't talk to strange ghosts

• and he goes to the University of Wittenberg ,which was Martin Luther's university and also home to the church door he so famously nailed his theses to. This means the ghost could possibly be a devil that has come to tempt him and is, therefore, not telling the truth about Old Hamlet's murder. Hamlet takes his time with this one. The Prince obviously doesn't trust the ghost; he has to confirm before he acts

Hamlet has some scruples

• Think about the famous Christian sentiment from Romans, xii, 19: "Avenge not yourselves […] vengeance is mine, I will replay, saith the Lord." Translation: It's not man's place to take vengeance on anyone, period. That's God's job. Plus, everyone knows that murder is a sin

Hamlet has some scruples

• Shakespeare's inclusion of Christian morality in this play is really fascinating because it doesn't necessarily square with the basic tenets of revenge tragedy, which calls for bloody vengeance.

• At work in Hamlet is also the notion of the old, Pagan revenge code, that says when someone kills your father, you have to get your revenge on which, of course, means that person's kid will eventually kill you, and so on and so on ad infinitum until everybody dies and entire families are wiped out.

Hamlet has some scruples

• So Shakespeare does a nifty thing in Hamlet: he injects a Pagan revenge code into a Christian setting. Hamlet is a Christian hero with a Pagan duty. That would be why Hamlet delays in killing Claudius.

Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus Complex

• Let's say Hamlet does suffer from an Oedipus Complex. If this is true, then Claudius has done what Hamlet wants to do: kill King Hamlet (senior), and sleep with Gertrude. Hamlet can't kill Claudius, because secretly, he wants to be Claudius.

• If you want to add some weight to this theory, check out all those scenes where Hamlet displays a gnawing obsession with his mother's sexuality, down to the tiny details in his imaginings of her and Claudius getting it on.

• Also, think about it this way: if Claudius is in a way like Hamlet, then killing Claudius would be like killing himself. Revenge would be like suicide, which is why the two get so mixed-up, and why Hamlet has the same feelings about both.