Han Peng Liu

Hamlet – Lecture

Introduction

 Many people feel that in hamlet people feel that they hear the voice of Shakespeare itself. Of all great artists he was
the best at using the characters to show the ideas he wanted to display.
 Very dangerous to assume that philosophical statements were Shakespeare’s thoughts.
 Shakespeare was a man who was caught between two worlds and two religions. Some of his teachers were
pronounced catholic sympathy.
 Shakespeare, felt keenly about the tension between old and the new world.

The character Hamlet

 Hamlet experiences similar tensions but under extraordinary circumstances.

 Hamlet doesn’t trust mother or any women kind at all.
 Discovery of treachery caused Hamlet to further reinforce his hate towards women.
 Hamlet cannot trust friendship because his friends were spying on him.
 The only friend Hamlet has left is Horatio. Otherwise, he is in a world of hypocrisy.
 Claudius relies on poison, poison saw, and secret execution.
 Medieval and Modern world  caught in both worlds both hamlet and Shakespeare.
 Crumbing of olden catholic culture and the rise to the new world.
 Chief appeal of hamlet for the subsequent of the 400 years.
 The trap between the old world and the new is a theme that is repeated throughout.
 At the start of the play, hamlet was referred to as young hamlet  we should probably see him as about 18 or 20.
However, in the end of the play we can see that Hamlet was 30 years. Exactly 30.
 A double time sequence
 Hamlet matures throughout the play through the experiences he goes through and obstacles that allows him to grow
and mature.
 Spiritual development and growth of Hamlet.
 Before Shakespeare, individuals use to think that people conformed to other types rather than have their own
personality.
 Shakespeare mocks astrology such as in King Lear.
 Shakespeare was irrational and sceptical man that did not believe in supernatural things but it appealed to audience.
 Ghost could reflect the emotional state of Hamlet. To hamlet, it confirms that he was being deceived by his father.
 Gertrude cannot see the ghost. However, Hamlet can therefore referring to the psychological state.
 Ghost works on two levels  literal and psychological.
 Hamlet  pockets of privacy, never know everything about the person, not in control of the whole character.
 Hamlet mad or pretending? Depends on how the actor interprets it.
 Hamlet and wild and turbulence are balanced generosity of spirit helps appeal to audience.

Other characters and their relationship with other characters

 Close relationships show how to interpret character:

o Young man’s maturity  idolising father.
o Uncle  loathes and despises  spoken with open content.
o Claudius  addresses with irony and sarcasm.
 Claudius is a smooth diplomat  make deals and sign treaties
o Polite and concern for his queen.
o Half way through pay that he confesses.
o Hamlets torments begin to work on him.
 Hamlets speeches to his mother go from tendered concern to fury.
 Jokes, puns and smart talk until they take side with Claudius  hostile tone  (these characters I don’t know how to
spell names).
 Horatio simple and sincere tone spoken to by Hamlet.
 Apart from Horatio that are entourages of Hamlet are the soldiers and grave digger  hamlet finds interesting.
 Hamlet  natural democratic  reflects Shakespeare.
 Country and folk people often reflects true values.
Themes

 Interesting to compare the themes of the play.

 Revenge - Primitive and ugly crime.
 Hamlet fulfils mission for revenge  responsible for deaths of _____. (Polonius?)
 Third young man to avenge fortenbras
o Have access to Denmark strategy
o Take over kingdom.
o Fulfilled mission  big winner
o He is Shakespeare’s new men. Cold clear eyed, politician  Shakespeare dislike these men.
o Claudius stops Fortenbras.
 Politics have their own priority  Hamlet would be great as a ruler but in reality Fortenbras would be a better ruler
in terms of politics.
 Tragedy - theme
 Hamlet lives a lifetime of experience.
 Soliloquy  Hamlet. By throwing in many of these we are able to look into the feelings of Hamlet.

When questions were asked

 The use of stars and astrology was being mocked and he was trying to challenge the old traditions of having one
particular personality. For example, Hamlet cannot just be seen as a ‘melancholic’ man. Rather, Shakespeare
challenges the stereotypical view of a person.
 Hamlet doesn’t need to portray Claudius’ guilt; the stuff up of his plan allows it to be revealed. Sabotaging to plan.

The second lecturer

Introduction

 Interesting thing about Hamlet is the occupation of Hamlet and how it is being portrayed.
 It isn’t to say that Hamlet is not dominating the act but rather not isolated. A play is not just central to Hamlet.
Rather centralise Hamlet.

Act Five Scene One Between first clown and second clown

 Many themes have been explored already in the previous acts.

 Opening of the fifth act we get a classic Shakespearean strategy, we get in a comic what seems to be a digressive
episode.
 We come across the grave diggers and it encapsulates the play itselfconcentrates on exploring what was being
explored in the previous four acts.
 Burial of Ophelius, damnation or salvation?  active suicide, not passive.
 Be alert to the uses of the word:
o Act
o Do
o Perform
 “it argues an act, and an act hath three branches – it is, to act, to do, to perform”
 Ambiguity
 It argues “to be or not to be”.
 Acting is both doing things and also of course imitating people doing things. That is what acting is and that is the
ambiguity in which the whole play turns. This is part of Hamlets agony.
 In act 3 scene 4 line 105 (ending)
o This is a good use of the word act in addressing what it actually means and how it is used.
o “Th’important acting of your dread command”
 Hamlet hasn’t fulfilled the mission of the act of fulfilling to avenge his father.
 Hamlet doesn’t know how to act or WHEN to act.
 Act, action, acting, to do, doing, deeds. As against: to think, thoughts, thinking, words discourse.
Han Peng Liu
 Hamlet the most radical things the most experimental thing about hamlet is precisely he fact that is that he cannot
act and play is supposed to be act.
 He meant to portray a person in whose view the external world and all its incidents and objects were comparatively
dim, and of no interest of themselves and which began to interest only when they were reflected in the mirror of his
mind…
 Shakespeare places him in the most stimulating circumstances that a human being can be placed in: he is the heir
apparent of the throne: his father dies suspiciously: his mother excludes him from the throne by marrying his uncle.
This was not enough but the Ghost of the murdered father is introduced to assure the son that he was put to death
by his own brother. What is the result? Endless reasoning and urging- perpetual solicitation of the mid to act, but as
constant an escape from action-ceaseless reproaches of himself for his sloth, while the whole energy of his
resolution passes away in those reproaches This, too not form cowardice for he is made one of the bravest of his
time not from want of forethought or quickness of apprehension for he sees through the very souls of all who
surround him but merely form that aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world within themselves.
 He is all meditation all resolution a far as words are concerned but all hesitating and irresolution when called upon to
act so that resolving to do everything he in fact does nothing.
 From lecture 12 1811 – 12, lectures 1808-1819 on literature. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,5, ed R.A
Foakes in 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), vol 1 p 390.
 Every one of the characters compare themselves with Hamlet themselves:
o At different times throughout the nineteenth century, artists of the stature of Goethe and Beethoven.
Their identification, not, was not with Hamlet’s author, as fascinated as they were but Shakespeare’s
genius, but with a character in a paly, a fiction.
 To be or not to be is the question, It is not just being that is the issue (to act or not to act)  should I do or be.
 “So the things I do are what sum me up”. There is this huge gap that Hamlet itself becomes paralyse from. What I am
and what I do  sorting out the relationship.
 Something within that defines us quintessentially.
 How we think and how we feel relates to how we act. Whether it is different to what we do. That is why it is
important – to do, to act, to perform.
 We recognise in Hamlet a modern, autonomous consciousness a characteristically modern tendency to vertiginous
and paralysing self-reflectiveness encourages by a sense of living at a critical moment of history and of having to
negotiate unprecedented changes.
 The time is out of join. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
(1.5. 189-190)
 We all know that feeling of a world that we cannot control. All we can do is endlessly reflect, on our values and
meanings and how it relates to what is happening.
 In Hamlet, history becomes the histrionic (the theatrical): acting takes the place of acting.
 Hamlet turning actions into imitations of actions. Turning performances into performance. Turning acting into acting.
 Hamlet is more comfortable acting as imitating rather than acting as doing/action.
 Conversion of politics into the ideal world of Hamlet’s imagination in the play itself.
 (2.2. 535-540)
 Prostitute’s pretends love  an epitome of acting and the concept of the acting, performing and doing.
 Words are not actions.

Aristotle on the primary of action

 The objects of mimesis are people doing things

 A tragedy is a mimesis of a high, complete action…
 A tragedy is a mimesis of an action… And it is of course with reference to their actions that men are said to succeed
or fail.
 A tragedy is a mimesis not of people but of their actions and life. Both success and ill success are success and ill
success in action – n other words, the end and aim of human life is doing something, not just being a certain sort of
person.
 A tragedy, I repeat is a mimesis of an action and it is only because of the action that it is a mimesis of the people
engaged in it.
o Aristotle, poetics in ancient literary criticism: The principal texts in a New Translation,
ed D.A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon. 1972), pp. 92, 97, 98,99)
 The infinities are fundamental part of to be or not to be. It is a question of what to be.
 Hamlet never resolves, it he lets events resolve it. What is means is that you get a variety of Hamlet in the play:
o Heroic
o Unheroic
o Anti-heroic
o Mock-heroic
 Definitions?  What it means to be a man.
 Hamlet’s father  man of action.
 There are two Hamlets  Senior Hamlet  ghost of the play.  re-embodied in Fortenbras.
 Hamlet cannot adjust to it he cannot accept the world  there is another world, another way to be.
 The function of the play is precisely to echo this basically ambiguity  what does to act mean does it mean to do or
pretend to do. Is it possible to distinguish it?
o Hamlet
He that plays the king shall be welcome – his Majesty shall have tribute on me…
(2.2. 318)