Hamlet

Hamlet

1. Themes

   • Father - child relationships
     • Hamlet contrasts Father with Claudius
       • Idolises Father use of classical Imagery,
         • Compares Father to Hyperion. Titan associated with Sun,sight and wisdom. Compares Uncle to a satyr, God like creature, servant of Pan who was god of appetite.
   • Parrallel themes across all characters
     • WHY?
       • Makes it more obvious. For performance, for benefit of audience. The "distracted globe"
   • Dishonesty
     • GHOST
       • Is the ghost dishonest?
         • Ghost is in purgatory.
           • CONTEXT Catholics treated with suspicion in Protestant England in Shakespeare time. Ghost might be seen as suspicious if talking about being in purgatory which is a CATHOLIC concept.
         • Conflict of ideologies.
           • Christian one of forgiveness and "Do not Kill" and older Revenge theory and Honour
             • Even in what the Ghost says. Leave mother alone, kill Claudius.
               • "Taint not thy mind, not let thy soul contrive. Against thy mother aught."
   • Decay
     • Disgusted by the physicality of life.
     • "Things rank and gross in nature" Soliloquy that establishes Hamlets mental condition and personality.
     • Motif - Extended Metaphor.
     • "some vicious mole of nature"
       • Mole > blind burrows undergound. weakens foundations.
         • People born with a fatal flaw that overbears everything else.
           • Does Hamlet have a fatal flaw?

2. Hamlet's antic disposition

   • Why?
     • Makes him seem less of a danger
     • Disguise whatever plan he has
     • not responsible for what he does/ says
     • Clown/mad character. Stock character. Truth teller. Disguised truth amongst madness. Can stand outside the rules
     • CARNIVAL. Tradition of everything being upside down. release society's tensions. Instead of strict hierarchy Mad person can be in a permanent Carnival
       • Carnivalesque is a term used in the English translations of works written by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. 
       • Mikhail Bakhtin's four categories of the carnivalistic sense of the world: 1. Familiar and free interaction between people: carnival often brought the unlikely of people together and encouraged the interaction and free expression of themselves in unity. 2. Eccentric behaviour: unacceptable behaviour is welcomed and accepted in carnival, and one's natural behaviour can be revealed without the consequences. 3.Carnivalistic misalliances: familiar and free format of carnival allows everything that may normally be separated to reunite- Heaven and Hell, the young and the old, etc. 4. Sacrilegious: Bakhtin believed that carnival allowed for Sacrilegious events to occur without the need for punishment. Bakhtin believed that these kinds of categories are creative theatrical expressions of manifested life experiences in the form of sensual ritualistic performances.
       • Through the carnival and carnivalesque literature, a "world upside-down" (WUD) is created, ideas and truths are endlessly tested and contested, and all demand equal dialogic status. it is within literary forms like the novel that one finds the site of resistance to authority and the place where cultural, and potentially political, change can take place.
   • Tactics of Madness
     • Uses puns.
       • Calls Polonius a "Fishmonger" other meaning is Bawd= pimp.
         • Ironic because Polonius doesn't know whats going on. "Method in madness" Thinks something is going on but doesn't quite know what.
           • When in fact Hamlet is insulting him.
       • Playing with language
         • Reminds of Post-structuralist
           • Post-structuralism primarily encompasses the intellectual developments of certain mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and theorists. The movement is difficult to summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism, which argued that human culture may be understood as a series of signs or symbols; or, put differently, that human culture may be understood by means of a structure
           • The author's intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Also the author's identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is a fictional construct. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text.
           • words don't have an absolute truth. Always different meanings of words