Hamlet
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 10:52 AM
- Hamlet seems to be about existence itself
- Hamlet has a universality where white young men (those who can afford to study Shakespeare), saw themselves in
the inner turmoil of hamlet
- The play is very uncertain. The characters don’t often know what people are doing, who is lying, these are never
resolved
- The play is about the difference of death and being alive.
- 2 Ways of being - to be or not to be
- Troubling the stark binaries of being and not being. Hamlet is able to play with appearance
- The relationships in Hamlet are interconnected and very complex. One way to read it is to track a single
relationship between two characters throughout the play. An example of this would be Gertrude who is Hamlets
mom but he jokes that she becomes his Aunt when she marries Hamelt's uncle.
- A play within the play
What happens after death:
- Gravedigger scene
- The skull can be identified with an individual c
- Yet death makes us all anonymous, death is a great leveler
Appearance VS Reality
- 1.2 79-88
- The relationship between action and true feeling
- Even if he looks like he is sad, he's actually sad in a way we can't see
- The reality is an amplification of the appearance
The difficulty of interpretation is staged explicitly
Context
- Hamlet and Ur-Hamlet
- Ur is the German prefix which means original
- Ur-Hamlet is a play from Shakespeare's time that predates Hamlet (about 10 years before) and we do not know if
it is BY Shakespeare
Father and Son
- Do you love your father enough to kill the person that killed him
- King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet shares a name and that is something Shakespeare invents. It makes it harder for
the audience to figure out what is going on. Example would be comedy of error
Hamlet VS Comedy of Errors
Comedy of Errors
- The fiction of the play relies on these implausible things
- You can feel Shakespeare moving his characters together
- No one knows what is going on
Hamlet
- The uncertainties are because things in life are uncertain
- What is the difference between real emotion and fake emotion
- These reflections are about existence themselves
- These reflect real life's uncertainty
Hamlet
- Thinks more than he acts
- He is hesitant in killing Claudius yet when he sees someone behind the arras, he kills hastily. Did he know who it
was? Why does he act different
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 10:52 AM
- Hamlet seems to be about existence itself
- Hamlet has a universality where white young men (those who can afford to study Shakespeare), saw themselves in
the inner turmoil of hamlet
- The play is very uncertain. The characters don’t often know what people are doing, who is lying, these are never
resolved
- The play is about the difference of death and being alive.
- 2 Ways of being - to be or not to be
- Troubling the stark binaries of being and not being. Hamlet is able to play with appearance
- The relationships in Hamlet are interconnected and very complex. One way to read it is to track a single
relationship between two characters throughout the play. An example of this would be Gertrude who is Hamlets
mom but he jokes that she becomes his Aunt when she marries Hamelt's uncle.
- A play within the play
What happens after death:
- Gravedigger scene
- The skull can be identified with an individual c
- Yet death makes us all anonymous, death is a great leveler
Appearance VS Reality
- 1.2 79-88
- The relationship between action and true feeling
- Even if he looks like he is sad, he's actually sad in a way we can't see
- The reality is an amplification of the appearance
The difficulty of interpretation is staged explicitly
Context
- Hamlet and Ur-Hamlet
- Ur is the German prefix which means original
- Ur-Hamlet is a play from Shakespeare's time that predates Hamlet (about 10 years before) and we do not know if
it is BY Shakespeare
Father and Son
- Do you love your father enough to kill the person that killed him
- King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet shares a name and that is something Shakespeare invents. It makes it harder for
the audience to figure out what is going on. Example would be comedy of error
Hamlet VS Comedy of Errors
Comedy of Errors
- The fiction of the play relies on these implausible things
- You can feel Shakespeare moving his characters together
- No one knows what is going on
Hamlet
- The uncertainties are because things in life are uncertain
- What is the difference between real emotion and fake emotion
- These reflections are about existence themselves
- These reflect real life's uncertainty
Hamlet
- Thinks more than he acts
- He is hesitant in killing Claudius yet when he sees someone behind the arras, he kills hastily. Did he know who it
was? Why does he act different
