HAMLET: Death

Question 1

Ghost
1. “Question it Horatio” … “By heaven I charge thee speak”
2. Stephen Greenblatt
3.
“If it assume my noble father’s person, I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape”
vs.
“My father’s spirit, in arms!”

Answer 1

1. Is it a King or a daemon, putting on a guise
   - Nothing is certain:
   -> Instability of objective truth in the Danish court - dramatic effect to represent this feeling of sickness
   - Speak rudely to the ‘King’
   -> “it” - impersonal pronoun
   -> “speak” - repeated imperative
   -> Demonstrates confusion
2. Confusion intensified by the problematic theology for the Protestant audience
   - Suggests a porous Heaven/Hell - purgatory, CATHOLICISM
   -> SG: Shakespeare is “creating a Catholic world”
   * His father = suspected Catholic, and so WS is dealing with his father’s legacy -> LIKE HAMLET!
3. Contradictory - even Hamlet’s not sure! No objective truth
   - Fundamentally/Metatheatrically, nothing on stage is REAL! Reality itself doesn’t exist
   -> Mimesis

Question 2

Hamlet in mourning:
1. “‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black”

Helen Cooper:
- Hamlet at the front, thinking…
-> … while “action is literally upstaged”

Answer 2

1. Hamlet is playing the mourner, wearing black,
   BUT!
   a) A rejection of external shows of mourning wouldn’t stop internal grief
   YET!
   b) Doesn’t actually express how he’s feeling - only says what it’s NOT/describes the show:
   - Repeated negatives “no, nor, not”
   -> Only the audience (through soliloquy - Hamlet alone, at the front of the stage, talking to us) truly understand him

• “For they are actions that a man might play”
  -> Metatheatrical - Hamlet = a good actor, but not good at acting (doing)
• Emma Smith: “What Hamlet does in the play tends to be about undoing and negation rather than doing and progress”

Question 3

Hamlet: “O that this too too solid flesh would melt”

(Gertrude rant continued on CORRUPTION)

Eric Langley:
- Hamlet alone in his sadness, pushed out from the centre of the court
-> RB, “tAoM”: “the detrimental form of melancholy causeth men to be alienated from the nature of man”

Answer 3

• “would”
  -> ambiguity (literal/physical?)
  -> Passive - something that happens to him, but can’t do it himslef
• Hamlet = ‘King’ of words, not action
• “melt”
  -> Changing shape, becoming something else?
• Like an actor, escaping the bounds of the self
  -> (Forbidden) suicide?
• “Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His cannon ‘gainst self-slaughter”
• Richard Burton, “The Anatomie of Melancholy” - accidie (depression): SIN of sloth!

Question 4

Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man!”

a) “How indefinite in faculties”
b) “in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!”

YET! Paradoxical

c) “what is this quintessence of dust?”

Answer 4

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM!
- Humanity great…
a) Intellectual output
- In a play so concerned about thought, from witty/intelligent Hamlet
- What makes man great, not violent OH
-> Paradise Lost: “All summed up in HAMLET?!?” (written after)

b) Raising above the divine on Tillyard’s Great Chain of Being
- “a” -> Classical, rejecting Protestant monotheism

• YET!
  c) -> Ironic?
  -> Sense of futility? On-stage, all meaningless, not a reality anyway.
  -> “Dust” - funeral

Question 5

Hamlet: “To be, or not to be” (1)
THE QUESTION, TRAGIC HERO

1. “To be, or not to be, that is the question”
   - Simple, monosyllabic -> yet so complex
   - All 11 BEATS (not 10)! Complexity of thought -> trying to pack it all in? Emotional turmoil?
   - All existential questioning, but no answers

2.
“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…”
vs.
“Or to take arms against a sea of troubles”

Answer 5

1.
-> Exact inverse negative - made binary
-> Definate “that” and “the”
- But not personalised

• YET! “Question” remains ambiguous!
  -> Infinitive “to be” - decontextualised…

2.
* To be who/what?
- METATHEATRICAL: Role as revenger/tragic hero - if not that, what is my purpose? Jan Kott
-> PASSIVE “suffer” / “Mind” -> YH, words, not action
-> ACTIVE “take” / “arms” -> OH, warrior
* “outrageous fortune” - father murdered, so getting revenge
YET!
To take arms against a “SEA of troubles” it, in a literal sense, ultimately futile…

Question 6

Hamlet: “To be, or not to be” (2)
SUICIDE, DEATH, DOUBLING

3. “To die, to sleep”
   + a) “…we end the heartache”
   + b) “To sleep, perchance to dream…for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil”

-> EMMA SMITH
-> “The rest is silence”

Answer 6

3.
* To live/exist?
- Presented as same, but not:
-> Considering the nature of death
a) SUICIDE
b) Depicting a liminal state between living and death
-> THOUGHT continues into death

[Emma Smith]
“In terms of progress, everything is CIRCULAR”
- Hamlet begins in tempest and ends in tempest
- Return of Medieval warrior king (Fortinbras)

• DEATH is presented as both LINEAR and CIRCULAR:
  -> “Hamlet” is both dead and alive (OH/YH)
  [+ Constantly in his father’s shadow, no identity: “[He is] condemn[ed]… to a life of remembering” - arguably what sends him mad]
  ∴
  DEATH is NOT FINAL…
• “To be…” (+ ghosts): blurring lines between life and death

…UNTIL!
- Ended by “the rest is silence”
-> End of the cycle, Hamlets both dead?
-> Answer to “to be…”?
-> No thoughts after death, just nothingness/silence? - HOWEVER!
* New double of H enters (Fortinbras)
* Makes LOTS OF NOISE after “the rest is silence” -> “(…a peal of ordnance are shot off)”
* Continuation? Ultimate religious unanswered question?

Question 7

Ophelia’s Death
SUICIDE?
1. “There is a willow grows askant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves…”
2. “mermaid-like”
3. “Till that her garments…pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death”

4. “If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial”

Answer 7

1. Poetic, depicted like a painting
   - “his” -> nature as masculine
   - Pastoral, yet nature eventually kills her
2. Mythical / Uncannily angelic
3. Utterly passive - pathos
   - “melodious” -> all the purity/innocence (flowers), contrasting ending of “muddy death”
   -> Metrically cut - life ended
   - Feminist: Her clothes drag her down
   -> Imposed Patriarchy kills her

• Emphasis that it wasn’t her fault - once again, she is passive
  -> Suicide means it wouldn’t be a church burial
  -> Gertrude LIES (she wasn’t there) to protect the image of the court
• Priest: “Her death was doubtful”

4. Comes from privilege -> discussions of CLASS
   - Holbine’s “The Ambassadors” represents the Renaissance idea - should all be equal in death / death is everywhere (“memento mori”)

YET! Death disguised by court - hide rot/corruption?
- Gendered -> attempt to make it seem very passive/FEMININE
- Suicide Ophelia’s only way to get out of control of MEN

Question 8

Hamlet: “Alas, poor YORICK!”

1. “(Takes the skull)”
2. “Here hung those lips that I have kissed… Where be your gibes now?”

Answer 8

1. Physical, tangible death - without the abstractness of “to be…”
   - Natural, visible rot…
   -> … vs. poisoned corruption of court
   -> BUT! Yorick removed to bury Ophelia, who has (arguably) died as a result of the court
   -> Infiltration of court’s poisonous corruption

2.
- Memory
- Jester -> words, words, words used to mock the court
-> Language rotted away