Hamlet

Hamlet

1. Inaction

   • "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." -Hamlet
     • Words led to physical action
       • Words are more powerful than physical deeds.
     • When words don't meet actions.
       • Theatre is words in action.
   • "The head is not more native to the heart, the hand more instrumental to the mouth."- Claudius
     • Hand=action, mouth=word
       • Impulse and thought vs emotion.
     • Native=closely related.
   • "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."-Hamlet
     • Overthinking.
       • Hamlet struggles to control his thoughts because they lead to action.
   • Action vs reaction
     • Hamlet's fatal flaw is his failure to act.
       • Needs confirmation.
       • Moral battle.
     • "Actions that a man might play."
       • We perform how people expect us too.
     • "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." -Hamlet
   • Audience anticipates war like we anticipate Hamlet's actions, one doesn't come and one comes late.
   • But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue."-Hamlet
     • "Give thy thoughts no tongue."-Polonius
       • Contrast between Polonius and Hamlet as all Hamlet does is talk about his feelings.
   • "I will speak daggers to her but use none."-Hamlet about Gertrude
     • Potency of words.
       • "Words without thoughts never to heaven go" -Claudius while praying.
       • "The rest is silence." -Hamlet
         • Hamlet's last thought is of words after a play all about words. When Hamlet dies words die.
     • "These words like daggers enter in my ears" -Gertrude

2. Uncertainty

   • Play starts in medias res (in the middle of a scene) throwing the audience into action.
     • Creates feelings of uncertainty and confusion.
     • "Who's there?"-Barnardo (sentinel)
       • Play begins with a question setting tone of uncertainty and questioning of identity.
         • Appearance vs reality.
           • "I doubt some foul play."-Hamlet.
             • Doubt=suspect.
             • Hamlet readily accepts Claudius' guilt and the ghost's version of events without proof that the ghost really is his father.
               • We believe what we wish to believe. We believe what we see and see what we want to believe. Confirmation bias/ intepreting information in a way that confirms ones suspicions.
                 • "That if again this apparition come, he may approve our eyes and speak to it."-Marcellus.
               • "Guity thing." -Horatio.
           • "One may smile, and smile, and be a villian."-Hamlet
     • Nighttime, stormy makes audience feel uneasy.
   • Political uncertainty in Denmark with loss of king and upcoming war.

3. Nature of grief

   • "Young Fortinbras, of unimproved metal, hot and full."
     • Comparisons between Hamlet and Fortinbras as both are full of anger and quick to make assumptions.
   • Depression is a blackness, lethargy, hopelessness and loneliness.
     • "Inky cloak." -Hamlet
     • "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable." -Hamlet
   • "Fruitful river in the eye"- Hamlet.
     • Sorrow is natural, essential and healing like water.
   • "His will is not his own."- Laertes
     • Hamlet is not in control of himself or his emotions.
   • "More grief to hide than hate to utter love."-Polonius.
   • "Poison of deep grief" -Claudius about Ophelia

4. Madness

   • Hamlet's "antic disposition".
   • "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite. That ever I was born to set it right. Nay,come, let's go together." -Hamlet
     • After meeting ghost, scene does not end with a rhyming couplet. Shows that time is not working properly, things are becoming unbalanced, disruption.
   • "I am but mad north-north west"-Hamlet
   • "Crafty madness"- Guildenstern

5. Hamlet as a character

   • God complex trying to decide Claudius's fate.
   • Ambiguous nature of Hamlet's genius.
   • "Impious stubborness, 'tis unmanly grief."
   • "So excellent was this king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr."
     • Views his father as the glorious sun god of classical mythology and Claudius as a lustful half-man, half-goat, inhuman creature.
   • "My father's brother-but no more like my father than I to Hercules."-Hamlet
     • Hamlet comparing himself to Hercules.
   • "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space."-Hamlet
     • Hamlet is nihilistic.
       • "Mortal coil." -Hamlet
       • "To sleep, perchance to dream." -Hamlet
         • Death as sleep.
       • "The rub [snag] is what dreams may come." -Hamlet
       • "Tis nobler in the mind to suffer... or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." -Hamlet
         • "To be or not to be." Soliloquy.
       • Death relieves the "heartache and the thousand natural shocks."

6. Garden imagrey

   • "Unweeded garden."- Hamlet
     • Things are where they should not be in Denmark.

7. Quote weaving

   • "Most foul, strange and unnatural."-Ghost about murder.
   • "Wild and whirling words."-Horatio
   • "Yeasty collection" -Hamlet about words
   • "Incestous."

8. Literary theories

   • "A dream itself is but a shadow."-Hamlet

9. Selfishness

   • "My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen." -Claudius
     • People are objects and titles to aqquire.