Hamlet/Raskolnikov Similarities
•Both hesitate to act and agonize over decisions
•Madness, both real and pretended, plays a role in their
stories
•Both are highly intelligent
•Both have dreams and visions
•Both love young women of dubious virtue
(Sonia/Ophelia)
•Both have loyal companions (Horatio/Razhumikin)
•Both have conflicts with their mothers
•Both encounter monstrous human beings
(Claudius/Svidrigailov)
•Both are college students
•Both commit murder, seemingly without remorse
•Both live in a fallen world full of corruption,
drunkenness, and vice
•Both hate hypocrisy and despise the ugliness of
humanity
•Both aspire to greatness and see great
possibilities in humanity
•Both have “doubles” within their own stories
•Both eventually accept suffering as a condition of
existence and a precursor of grace
•Both at last accept responsibility for their own
actions and lives
Tragic
Drama
Comedy is a wave…
Tragedy is a whirlwind
Hamlet was written in
between 1599-1602
Qualities of the Tragedy in Drama
Derived from Aristotle’s Poetics
•The work recounts the fall of persons of high degree.
•It exemplifies the “tragic sense of life” …the sense that
human beings are inevitably doomed and that the
measure of a person’s life is to be taken by the way
he/she faces that doom.
•The tragic impulse celebrates courage and dignity in
the face of defeat, attempting to portray the grandeur of
the human spirit.
•It recounts a series of events in the life of a significant
person, culminating in a catastrophe, all treated with
seriousness and dignity.
•The protagonist is above ordinary people, and he/she
must be brought from happiness to misery (suffering =
pathos).
•The choice made by the protagonist is significant and is
dictated by his/her own error, frailty, or mistaken
judgment. (tragic flaw or hamartia [ha-marr-tea-a])
•The error, frailty, or mistake is not necessarily a flaw in
character but rather an extreme response to extraordinary
circumstances.
•Other Greek terms: catharsis – purging through emotional
response, especially pity and fear
•The two great eras of tragedy were Ancient Greece and
Elizabethan England. The difference between the two eras of
tragic greatness lies in the Greek emphasis of fate and
justice versus the Christian possibility of salvation and
grace.
•Tragedy consists of pairs of opposites: pity and terror;
justice and love; paradoxes, antitheses.
•Tragedy asks the ontological (speculating the nature of
being – human nature) question: “Is ‘being’ good or evil?”
•Tragedy is composed of three parts:
1. fall - terrible deed
2. suffering - stage marked by stasis, murkiness, not
knowing
3.reconciliation and self-knowledge
Revenge Tragedy
•Dates back to the work of Seneca, a 1st century Roman
Motifs
•Revenge of a father for a son or vice versa
•The hesitation of the hero
•The use of either real or pretended insanity
•Intrigue
•An able, scheming villain
•Philosophical soliloquies
•Sensational horrors (murders and threats of violence on
stage; exhibition of dead bodies; supernatural appearances)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
•It’s been performed more than any other play in the world,
and more has been written about it than any other literary
work. Written the same year as Julius Caesar.
•It’s been translated more than any other play
•There are over forty-five movie versions of the play.
•The first book written on Hamlet - Some Remarks on the
Tragedy of Hamlet - was published in 1736.
•The line “To be, or not to be” is the most quoted phrase in the
English language.
•Hamlet has inspired twenty-six ballets, six operas, and
dozens of musical works.
•Shakespeare’s play borrowed from both history and earlier
dramatizations of the basic story of Amlethus. (Saxo
Grammaticus’ Historia Danica, 1180)
Tips for Reading
Inversions
Horatio:
In what particular thought to work I know not (1.1.170-1). vs. I
know not in what particular thought to work.
Archaic words/changed meanings
*frequently will appear to mean the opposite of expected
“I doubt some foul play.” means “I suspect…” (1.2.278)
Wordplay – puns, metaphors, ambiguities
Pun – Claudius: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
Hamlet: Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun (son).
Interrupted constructions
Therefore our sometime sister have we taken to wife.
BECOMES
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen/ Th’
imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we (as ‘twere
with a defeated joy,/ With an auspicious and a dropping
eye,/ With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,/ In
equal scale weighing delight and dole)/ Taken to wife.
(1.2.8-14)
Delayed constructions
Within a month,/ Eye yet the salt of most unrighteous
tears/ Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,/ She
married. (1.2.158-60)
*Watch for stage actions…sometimes embedded in line.
Elsinore was
probably
Helsingor
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Fortinbras--a
Norwegian
prince--acts
as a foil for
Hamlet.
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Kronborg Castle
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more
Kronborg
Castle...
Hamlet attends the
university at
Wittenberg,
Germany.
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Hamlet’s Tragic Flaw! (Hamartia)
What the Critics Say….
Goethe (1749-1832) The great German poet argued that
Hamlet is not brave enough. He lacks the “right stuff.”
The dramatic situation is like an acorn (the problem)
planted in a cracked vase (Hamlet) As the problem
grows, Hamlet becomes less sound.
AC Bradley(1851-1935): Famous Shakespearean
scholar said that Hamlet suffers from “melancholia” or
is merely mentally deranged.
Ernest Jones(1879-1958): The Freudian interpretation:
Oedipus Complex. He still has a childish sexual fixation
on momma Gertrude, thus his attitude toward Claudius
is ambivalent; he is grateful to Claudius for removing
his “rival” for his mother’s affections (King Hamlet) but
must also resent him as his new father figure.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The great British Romantic poet
believes Hamlet’s delay is caused by “the effect of a
superfluous activity of thought.” He thinks too much because he
is too elevated for this world…has too fine a character.
Cindy Lou Camp: AP paean who trembles at the feet of Mount
Olympus believes that Hamlet is a character created by
Shakespeare who isn’t real. BUT she also thinks that as a
perpetual student (Hamlet isn’t a young buck) might over-think
things a bit and would rather study the ramifications of murder
before jumping into a life of crime. Plus—a ghost? Not reliable.
OR: Maybe Hamlet doesn’t have a flaw. He is merely waiting for
the ghost to be proven honest or not. A sort 21st century
existentialist hero He is faced with a problem whose answer
may lie beyond the limits of human reason or in fact may not
have an answer. His uncertainty makes him “unstable.”
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Elements of a Revenge Tragedy
by Dame Helen Gardner (British scholar and
professor at Oxford 1908-1986)
*In a typical revenge play the protagonist must kill
the slayer of his relative or firend in the most
terrible way possible.
a. The hero faces a predicament not of his own
making.
b. The villain provides the means for the vengeance
c. The avenger conceives a plot and puts it into
action.
d. Usually the hero descends to the moral level of
the man being punished ( a mild irony) with a
terrible revenge scheme.
e. The denouement of Hamlet shows a “profound”
irony: Claudius plans Hamlet’s death, but both he
and his queen die.
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Some bits and pieces of fascinating stuff that
might show up on your final…
1. Unnatural: the murder of a brother by a
brother
2. Denmark is disturbed-dead king, invading
prince, new king.
3. Incestuous marriage
4. ghost
5. Appearances vs. Reality
6. 28% of play is prose.
7. short metric lines, rhyming couplets, shared
lines, prose, feminine (unaccented) endings,
long lines, broken lines (caesuras!)
8. Alexandrine lines: 12 syllables. Usually
broken by caesura for emphasis.
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