The Formalistic Approach
Applied in Hamlet(II)
吴怡雯
142200324
The relationship between the main characters
Hamlet
son
The Ghost
lover
Gertrude
Ophelia
Fortinbras
daughter
Claudius
Polonius
father
Laertes
Plot Summary
Act I:
Demark prince Hamlet was studying
in German. On hearing that his
father was dead, he returned to
Demark immediately, but only to
find that his uncle Claudius had been
the new king and his mother
Gertrude married his uncle. Hamlet
felt devastated. At this time, his
friend Horatio told him the existence
of his father’s ghost. Hamlet went to
see the ghost and knew that it was
Claudius who killed his father.
Plot Summary
Act II:
To revenge for his father, Hamlet
pretended to be mad. However, Claudius
doubted his madness and asked his
friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
try him. Hamlet did talk nonsense, but
with enlightening and philosophical
sentences, which made his friends unsure
about his madness.
Plot Summary
Act III:
Claudius listened to Polonius’s advice and
asked Ophelia to try out Hamlet’s
madness. To prove he’s mad, Hamlet hurt
Ophelia’s feelings. At the same time,
through Claudius’s reaction towards the
play with the similar plot of killing the
king, Hamlet is sure that Claudius is the
one who killed his own father. When he
tries to revenge, he accidentally kills
Ophelia’s father, Polonius.
Plot Summary
Act IV:
Claudius tries to send Hamlet
to England by saying that
Hamlet is mad. Claudius
secretly asks the English king
to kill Hamlet, but the trick
has been noticed by Hamlet.
He takes the advantage of trap
and sends his two betrayed
friends to death. He himself
returns to Denmark.
Plot Summary
Act V:
After so many defeats, Ophelia
becomes mad. One day, she slips and
falls into the water. When Hamlet
returns to Denmark, it is exactly
Ophelia’s funeral. Ophelia’s brother,
Laertes, being encouraged by
Claudius, wants fence with Hamlet.
Laertes and Hamlet are both shot by
the poisonous sword. Laertes speaks
out Claudius’s trick on death and
begs for forgiveness. Hamlet finally
revenges for his father and dies
because of the poison on the sword.
His mother also loses her life for
mistakenly drinking the poisonous
wine.
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
Dialect: a confrontation of polarities
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. (III. iii)
Double business bound
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
1. The Trap Imagery
Varying Images
Different kinds of entanglement
Polonius: holy vows of heaven
springes to catch woodcocks
Laertes: he is “as a woodcock to mine own springe”
Claudius: O limed soul, that, struggling to be free
Art more engag’d
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
2. The Cosmological Trap
A rhetorical phenomenon (abundant questions &
minimal answers) throughout the play, like in the
soliloquies of Hamlet
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
2. The Cosmological Trap
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis and unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (I. ii)
The fair, in nature and humanity, inevitably submits to
the dominion of the foul
Focus on Denmark as the model of nature and human
frailty
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
3. “Seeming” and “Being”
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how
express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in
apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights no to me —— no,
nor woman either, though by your smiling you seem to
say so. (II. ii)
Paradox of men
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
3. “Seeming” and “Being”
In his warfare against bestiality, however, he asserts his
allegiance to heaven-sent reason:
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’event ——
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward —— I don’t know
Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do,”
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.(IV.vi)
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
3. “Seeming” and “Being”
No simple morality play
The noble prince, like his father before him, is despite
his best intensions, sullied by the “foul crimes done in
my days of nature”(I.v). All men apparently are, as
Laertes says of himself, “as a woodcock to mine own
springe” (V.ii). All the beauty and aspiration are reduced
ultimately to a “quintessence of dust”.
D. Dialectic as Form: The Trap Metaphor in
Hamlet
4. “Seeing” and “Knowing”
Ophelia: Lord, we know what we are, but we know not
what we may be”(IV.v)
Claudius: Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our
own”(III.ii)
O Hamlet, speak no more.
Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.(III. iv)
She doesn’t see the ghost of her former husband, nor
can she see the metaphysical implications of Hamlet’s
reason in madness.
Most people in Denmark are quite content with the
surface appearances of life and refuse even to consider
the ends to which morality brings everyone.
Idealism turns out to be a poor match for the prison
walls of either Denmark or the grave.