hamlet. what is hamlet about? centuries of debate t. s. eliot: “certainly an artistic failure”

Hamlet

What is Hamlet about?

Centuries of debate

T. S. Eliot: “Certainly an artistic failure”

Hamlet

Good play for anyone having trouble figuring things out.

Good play for anyone who isn’t having trouble figuring things out--yet.

Renaissance version

It’s about a man called on to exact revenge for the murder of his father.

Problems:The murderer is a king.The source of the information is a ghost.The revenge must be honorable.There are spies everywhere.

Hamlet’s doubts

Why should his mother remarry such an unattractive man?

What does the appearance of his father’s ghost mean?

Why has he lost his mirth? Did his uncle kill his father? Why doesn’t he kill his uncle right away? Why do women behave the way they do?

Disease and death imagery

Francisco: “Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart” (1.1.10)

Horatio: “I’ll cross it, though it blast me” (1.1.130)

Horatio: “It is a mote to trouble the mind’s eye” (1.1.116: the war preparations and ghost)

Gertrude: “All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72)

Disease imagery

Hamlet: The world . . . is an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely” (1.2.133)

Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would melt (1.2.129)

Upset by his mother’s remarriage to his nasty uncle, Hamlet contemplates suicide and sees the world as an “unweeded garden.”

What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties (2.2.304)

Hamlet tells R & G that he is melancholy (depressed), does not exercise, the world seems diseased, however noble seem the heavens.

“Man delights not me--no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so” The audience is not privileged in this play, where soliloquies

merge with speeches.

Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! (2.2.55)

Hamlet berates himself for doing nothing, even when motivated by a ghost, in comparison to the player whose emotions run away with him due to nothing but a fiction.

So he plans the Mousetrap.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it, trippingly on the tongue (3.2.1)

Hamlet instructs the actors

Relevant to theme of play (words, appearances, exposure of Claudius) but not to Hamlet’s state of mind (not a soliloquy)

‘Tis now the very witching time of night (3.2.387)

Hamlet is in the mood for murder (having exposed Claudius’s guilt) when on the way to his mother.

How all occasions do inform against me (4.4.33)

Just as he was moved by the player to berate himself, Hamlet is moved by Fortinbras to take action, even for nothing.

Yet he meditates on the difference between men and beasts (unsaid: sense of right and wrong, which makes the play so powerful)

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dusty of Alexander (5.1.204)

Hamlet raises issue that too much thinking is bad for anyone.

Hamlet, like the play, strangely finds consolation in the grave-yard, not more melancholy.

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come . . . The readiness is all (5.2.217)

Beautiful, but ironic, since Hamlet seems very unready to face the king’s threat.

As philosophy, this sounds consoling but fatalistic. A dangerous combination.

Hamlet’s tragedy: he tries to accept the world, and it kills him.

Classical Tragedy

It’s about a man whose admirable intelligence leads him through a sequence of decisive, moral actions that, due to circumstances he cannot control or reasonably foresee, unfortunately kill him.

Counter-argument: Most of his actions are mean.

Olivier Version

The play is about a man who cannot make up his mind.

Problem:Oedipal longing for mother and jealousy of

the man married to her.Emotion clouds reason.

Feminist Hamlet

This is a play about a woman who has no control over her life, goes mad, and kills herself.

Her problems: Overbearing father, jerk for a boyfriend,hothouse existence,

no female companionship or understanding, ignorance about the facts of life.

Modern versions make her angry p. 631 for Helena Bonham Carter in Mel Gibson version

Zeffirelli Theory

This is a play about a man who reminds one of Mel Gibson’s “mad max.”

Problem:How can a man remain a hero in a world of

random violence?

Almereyda version

A play about a man whose intentions are thwarted by impersonal forces like an uncurious mother, and a ruthless uncle, and corporate capitalism (symbolized by New York high rise money):

Almereyda

The film takes its epilogue from lines Hamlet perhaps wrote for the Player King:

Our wills and fates do so contrary runThat our devices still are overthrown;Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own:

(3.2.209-211)

Problems with Almereyda verison

The lines that immediately follow reveal Hamlet’s obsession with his mother.

So think thou wilt no second husband wed;But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.

(3.2.212-213) This may be a second-rate thought, like the rest of the play within

a play. The film therefore alters the context of the lines it takes as an

epilogue just as Olivier, but here the reason may be anti-Freud, where Olivier

stressed Hamlet’s attraction to his mother).

Problems with Almereyda verison

The film does not focus on Hamlet’s idealism.Not enough emphasis is given to what

Hamlet says about the difference between his ideals and the sordid reality of the world. The film perhaps tries to get us to take the Dahli Llama stuff seriously(the best part of the film), but fails to carry through in the second half.

Alm Problems with Almereyda verison ereyda

The film wrongly debases Hamlet’s stature,

It does not do enough to show that side of him that is intelligent and courageous (able to out-duel a man whom Lamord (death) called the greatest swordsman in France--4.7.90)

The film dresses him like a be-drugged tramp, hardly the man Ophelia called “Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mold of form” (3.1.155-156), even after Hamlet berates her (unless the knit hat and period motorcycle and electronic gadgetry is meant to be ultra-cool).

R & G Are Dead

Hamlet says “whiff and wind” speech during dinner with R&G , suggesting it’s on his mind but indoor setting loses force of “overhanging firmament”

Film eliminates problem of tedious fourth act by avoiding question of Claudius’s guilt since R & G died in act four, act 5 is presented as a mime in

the play-within-a-play scene Claudius sees his past in Mousetrap, but R&G can’t see their

future

R & G Are Dead Makes Hamlet a romance rather than a

tragedy. Romances hide social domination, which

define good and evil, but projecting good and evil as magic. Acting can be good or bad, so it’s magic Fortune can be good or bad, so it is really about

social domination

R&G Are Dead

Modes of social control change as economy changes

R & G fore-feel modern science but they can’t escape their world or

they wonder if they should follow instructions to put Hamlet to death

but they can’t escape hierarchy of power (orders from the king), meaning they glimpse fact that but can’t understand that they are actors in that “world” (like all of us in our worlds)

Professor Ross’s view

This is a play about not knowing, or being certain, how to behave. Customs seem to determine what is right and

wrong, not the other way around. Hamlet wonders about Purgatory, mourning,

dating, fencing, remarriage, succession, action, acting, drinking, custom itself, believing a ghost.

See Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead for film approach to these issues.

Customs in Hamlet

Customs define society

They are determined by the mores (pn, morays), that is, example and experience, and are not necessarily rational.

Customs in Hamlet

Customs give social certainty to uncertain situations, but what if one does not know the local custom? When to put on one’s hat or take it off (Osric in 5.282-193) What to believe (“defy augury” or see providence in the fall of a

sparrow [Ophelia?], 5.2.219) Why does Hamlet duel, knowing the king is trying to kill him?

Suicidal, thinking of Ophelia? Afraid to act? Thinks he has time? Perhaps it is not his custom to kill: he rejects the unwritten law, the customs or honor and revenge.