13 Jan Module B. Student sample essays. Module B: Shakespeare s Hamlet. Questions about Module B

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1 Module B Module B: Shakespeare s Hamlet TSFX David Strange Sydney University, 2015 This module requires students to engage with and develop an informed personal understanding of a prescribed text. Through critical analysis and evaluation of language, content and construction, students will develop an appreciation of the textual integrity of their prescribed text. They refine their own understanding and interpretations of their prescribed text and critically consider these in the light of the perspectives of others. Students explore how context influences their own and others responses to the text and how the text has been received and valued. (NSW Board of Studies, HSC Prescriptions, page 19). Questions about Module B Q) Do I need a related text? A) No Q) Is it permissible to cite critics? A) Yes, of course, but only has long as you build these ideas upon your own theory or personal understanding and claim that the critics indeed support your reading. Q) Is it compulsory to cite critics? A) No, but you would still need to refer to others perspectives your fellow students, or teacher s perhaps. Better to cite somebody other than merely your teacher. Q) Length of the essay? A) Approximately 1000 words. Q) Can I use the personal pronoun I in an essay which requires a personal understanding? A) Yes, but it wont get you any marks. Q) How to I develop a personal understanding of Hamlet? Everything has been said before. What constitutes a personal response to the play? A) Stay tuned to the lecture. What constitutes a personal understanding or personal response in syllabus terms? Which of these seem correct? The text resonates with you for the reason that it reflects your own life circumstances; your essay reflects a wisdom borne of making connections between the concepts of the play and your own life perspective. You quote the play so much in your essay that the text has obviously left its mark upon you. You frequently use the personal pronoun I in your essay, demonstrating a personal connection to the text. You argue original theories about the play borne out of deep thinking. You argue theories about the play standing on the shoulders of critics (your arguments are partly original, but mostly derivative). You argue the relevance of the play to the problems of the modernage. You argue with a passionate voice in your prose style, implicitly demonstrating your connection to the text. Student sample essays Experiment with your radical ideas via poetic prose and refine these ideas with textual citations The skull stares back at Hamlet, worm-ridden and without sight. A Palaeolithic bone held in the hands of a warrior prince to threaten the enemy, but the enemy here is the his own fear and intellect which prevents him from regicide. The intellect as a bone spear, recast and ancient, the primal image of an enemy holding the skulls of their fallen, but also has a totem to ward off evil spirits, and yet paradoxically also an image of a post-religious age (an image of pragmatism a man scientifically facing his own death with cool reason). But the bone spear is the clown s his father s clown, the rapier of wit, the foil of humour and the repository of courtly memory and caustic word. And it is soon to be Ophelia s skull, its skin and tendons ravished by worms after her soul has already been ravished by the body politic which her father occupied the hollow intellect and end of all man. David Strange 1

2 13 Jan 2015 Fall back on subject matter and themes when in doubt and build your essay concepts upon them Obvious subject matter and themes: revenge, madness, appearance versus reality, the supernatural, suicide, spying, betrayal, imprisonment, sin and salvation, fate, corruption (the focus of the 2013 question). Less obvious subject matter and themes: orphans abandoned by their parents, heliocentrism, the contradictions of Christian theology, theatre and acting, impregnation with madness, Julius Caesar references, Machiavellian politics, the role of the joker, the marriage of Laertes and Hamlet, Ophelia as a clown and prophet, sexuality leading to madness, the mousetrap as a motif, the dumb show as prologue, incest, the sexual and the theatric, the paradox of the ghost s advice, King Hamlet s words as poison in the body of Denmark, the off-staging events of KH Ghost s appearance and Ophelia s madness, Opelia surveyed even in death, celestial metaphors as a foreshadowing of the play s Act 5 blocking. Delving deeper into the language features and textual integrity of Hamlet Through critical analysis and evaluation of language, content and construction, students will develop an appreciation of the textual integrity of their prescribed text. Language as Backstory Act 1, Scene 1, Lines We learn via Horatio s backstory that King Hamlet has duelled the King of Norway and been victorious. Horatio establishes that King Hamlet was a monarch in the medieval tradition. Moreover his risk-taking and heraldic duel with Norway now has its consequences; Denmark may soon be invaded and Hamlet s ghost appears perhaps to warn of the imminent invasion. The duel is also an element of foreshadowing: later Prince Hamlet will also be pricked on by a most emulate pride to duel Laertes and risk all, ironically at the very moment that Denmark is invaded by young Fortinbras, who takes his vengeance on King Hamlet. Language as Leit Motif Words as poison Barnado: Sit down awhile, / And let us once again assail your ears Ghost: So the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged process of my death / Rankly abused The play directly references ears and eyes throughout Act 1 on seventeen (17) separate occasions. Poison is poured through the ear on several occasions in Act 1. Horatio rejects the story of the ghost poured through his ears until his eyes behold the thing itself; Claudius pours the poison of lies into the ear of Denmark in the aftermath of his wedding; Horatio informs Hamlet through the ear what he has disturbingly seen through the eye, creating deep angst within the mourning prince; both Laertes and Polonius urge Ophelia not to believe Hamlet s promises or list his songs ; the Ghost pours the poison of his death and after-life wanderings into Hamlet s ear setting in train the deaths of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Ophelia, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet himself. Irony The uselessness of education Marcellus: Thou art a scholar, speak to it Horatio. Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. Horatio: In what particular thought to work I know not,/ But in the gross and scope of my opinion / This bodes some strange eruption to our state. Education, erudition and scepticism are entirely useless in the new temporal realm of ghosts and spirits. Horatio is mocked for his lack of insight, belief and axiomatic (true by definition) interpretation of the strange phenomena of the ghost s appearance. As soon as the ghost appears, Horatio s intellectual scepticism lapses into a confused mixture of Christian theology and Roman superstition. He later confesses to believing in Marcellus superstitious belief about the bird of dawning keeping spirits, fairies, witches and planets all at bay. Biblical References A superstitious era caught between the classical age of the Renaissance (and its reverence for antiquity) and a medieval Christianity little transformed by the Reformation. A comment on the play itself (a cross between a Senecan drama and Christian morality play). The ghost has appeared and is only believed by Horatio upon its third visit, as later the cock is heard when it appears to Hamlet (echoing the warning of Christ to Peter) underlining the play s themes of deception, doubt, faith and resurrection. Resurrection Consider the amount of resurrections in the play: King Hamlet s ghost will reappear in martial stalk; Hamlet will return from his attempted murder ala Julius Caesar to appear at Ophelia s graveside ; Laertes dramatically returns from France with an army to avenge his father s death; young Fortinbras overcomes the apparent rebuke of Norway to seize Elsinore. The representation of resurrection in the play is a subversion of the message of hope and salvation in the scriptures: resurrections are ominous and portend death and destruction Horatio: In the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead /Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. 2

3 Synecdoche The range of body parts mentioned in Act 1- in order of their appearance Heart Eyes Ears Hands Stomach Head Throat Mouth Eye lids Corpse Flesh Face Body Tongue Mind s eye Cap-a-pe ( head to toe ) Toe Foot Beard Blood Temple Soul Shoulder Marrow Mole Bones Jaws Brain Artery Nerve Hair Sinews Arms Fingers The use of synecdoche emphasises the physical nature of the play the unseemly death of King Hamlet and introduces the difficult idea that life itself is the strange conjunction of the corporeal and the spiritual. We remember that King Hamlet begins the play caught between these two worlds: physically tortured and spiritually lost. Stichomythia Hamlet: A little more than kin, and less than kind. Hamlet s sardonic retorts position his language as a weapon a rapier sword with which he duels the intellect of those who attempt to deceive him throughout the play (Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Gertrude, and Ophelia among them). He will later meet his match in the gravedigger, the first character to match his intellect and wit. At this point (Act 5, Scene 2) he will abandon language as a weapon and accept his fate in the duel with Laertes. Parallelism and Hendiadys Parallelism: A little more than kin, and less than kind. Hendiadys: Without the sensible and true avouch of my eyes In the gross and scope of my opinion. Parallelism: Hamlet s language attempts to perceive and rectify the radical imbalance of his world, and reconcile the dialectical opposites of the time. Claudius likewise employs parallelism in Act 1 to reconcile the apparent contradiction of the death of his brother with his hasty marriage of his brother s wife. Hendiadys: A technique in which the same idea is said twice and separated by a conjunction usually and. Some say the hendiadys (over 250 in all) amplify the theme of doubling in the play (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Cornelius and Voltemand, King Hamlet and Claudius, Hamlet and Laertes, etc). Others that it highlights the theme of marriage and incest. Another possible reading is that it highlights the absurdity of language itself to articulate the nature of reality itself language as a repetitive and self-parodying attempt to capture the ineffable. Soliloquy Hamlet breaks into his first soliloquy as a type of prayer to himself, vowing that he will avenge his father s death. Shakespeare breaks dramatic convention to have his protagonist verse soliloquy not to expand upon the backstory or plot (narrative) but rather as a feature of characterisation. Hamlet s two soliloquies in Act 1 position him as a deeply emotional and intellectual man, but not as a man of action. Extended Metaphor Act 1, Scene, Line 10 Francisco: Not a mouse stirring. Interpretation Hamlet is the mouse being lured into a trap a trap that will deeply confound his mind, just as the later mousetrap he creates for Claudius will equally confound and stun the king before his royal court. Prosody Trochaic substitutions and spondee Doomed for a certain term to walk the earth. My fate cries out! The iambic pentameter is often broken as a means to demonstrate the unrest of the times and the shock of Hamlet as he learns his father s fate. 3

4 Rhyming Couplets Act 1, Scene 5, Lines The time is out of joint: O cursed spite / That I was ever born to set it right. Hamlet expresses his dismay at the conclusion of Act 1 that he is born to murder the king and thereby be the agent of divine justice. The rhyming couplet is an ironic language device to capture his realisation; his fate is at once an agent of determination (as neatly compressed as the couplet itself) but also a dark epiphany (whose poetry belies his despair) at the duty of regicide which lies before him and ultimately denies him his destiny as king of Denmark. Pun Act 1, Scene 4, lines 1-2 Hamlet: The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold. Horatio: It is a nipping and an eager air. Translation The heir bites shrewdly; it is a nipping and eager heir who wishes to know the Ghost s story. Language Devices: Celestial Metaphors 1 The morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o er the dew of yon high eastward hill. 2 As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood, / Disasters in the sun; and the moist star, / Upon whose influence Neptune s empire stands, / Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. 3 When yond same star that s westward from the pole / Had made his course t illume that part of heaven / Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, / The bell then beating one Enter GHOST 1 Echoing the later death of Hamlet (the mourning son) in russet mantle clad (drawing blood in his duel with Laertes) and aligning his death to the resurrection of Christ, who will return via Jerusalem s eastern gate. 2 A foreshadowing of Act 5 in Laertes (the wandering star returning from France and creating a riot in his wake), Hamlet (whose madness and death is a disaster in the King s son) and Gertrude (who moist with poison, crosses or eclipses Hamlet and Claudius on the stage of her son s duel before drinking the wine and falling to her death in sickness). 3 An indirect description of King Hamlet as a journeying star westward from the Polacks (Denmark itself) who now burns in purgatory on his way to t illume heaven. He appears immediately after, The bell then beating one describes the deathly ringing in his ears in his poisoning through the ear. Irony and Foreshadowing Barnado: Who s there? Francisco: Nay answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. Barnado: Long live the king! The opening scene is literally a changing of the guard and dramatically an ironic reminder of the murder of King Hamlet in his orchard, effecting a regal changing of the guard. The scene gives credence to the Ghost s story: he was snuck upon in the garden as he slumbered. Barnado unusually challenges the sentinel on duty: Who s there? the world is turned upside down. It is a time of anxiety and paranoia in Denmark. But moreover the question, Who s there? underscores an early theme about the deception of appearances. Is the Ghost real? And who snuck upon him in the garden? Delving deeper into the critical perspective of others They refine their own understanding and interpretations of their prescribed text and critically consider these in the light of the perspectives of others. Bear in mind that this other could be a critical theorist (e.g. AC Bradley, Professor Harold Bloom), a critical theory (e.g. feminism, existentialism, nihilism) or else the ideas of your teacher and fellow students. For Lena Ashwell, Hamlet reveals that: Man is no longer the miserable worm of the old Catholicism or slave of the ancient Feudalism, but freed by the Renaissance, trying the newlyfledged wings, both wings of Reason, the intuitive and the intellectual, the deductive and the inductive, perceiving at last both the subjective and the objective, the worlds within as well as the worlds without. In Cefaulu (2000), p Prepared by Dr Michelle Hamadache, Macquarie University,

5 But there are indications that early audiences saw Hamlet as a ghost story. In print, perhaps coincidentally, the Ghost seems at first to have elicited more respect than the hero. All three early published texts of Hamlet correspond closely in their depiction of the Ghost, demonstrating a consistency of presentation not reproduced elsewhere in the play. What we know of the play s early reception, too, indicates a prominence for the Ghost that is eclipsed only when the prince s inner life begins to take precedence. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare s Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61.1 (2010), pp.1-27, p. 2. Prepared by Dr Michelle Hamadache, Macquarie University, 2014 Hamlet has been called the first modern man (Rossiter), by which it is suggested that to be modern is to value the interior world of the individual; to question reality, the world, and oneself. To doubt. Francis Barker argues that Hamlet is still a transitional, contradictory text, for while the play gestures towards a private place of subjectivity, at the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is in short nothing. Paul A Cefalu, Damnéd custom Habits Devil : Shakespeare s Hamlet, Anti-Dualism, and the Modern Philosophy of Mind, ELH, 67.2 (2000), pp , p.402. Prepared by Dr Michelle Hamadache, Macquarie University, 2014 Context whose context? Shakespeare s context and that of your own, and your selected critics. How does the social, political, religious and historical context of Shakespeare s times and our own influence our interpretation of the play? Key points to begin research about the context The Renaissance / Senecan tragedy Medieval Christianity / The Reformation Medieval heraldry Galileo/Copernicus/Kepler Heliocentrism and the Scientific Revolution Tyndale s Bible 1526 The legend of Amleth 5