Hamlet’s Delay

1. Hamlet’s Delay Is Shakespeare giving us a philosophical or a psychological argument in Hamlet and its tragic hero? Does Hamlet fail to act in time because the world is arguably beyond our effective comprehension? because he has a particular psychological problem, such as an Oedipus Complex? or because his character is too weak for the task--he is a coward, a ditherer, or a dullard and dolt?

2. HAMLET'S TRAGIC FLAW: Is Hamlet's distress understandable? Why does he fail to act until too late? Some of the most important interpretations of Hamlet's tragic flaw are: Goethe: The great German poet argued that Hamlet is not brave enough. He lacks the "right stuff." The dramatic situation is like an acorn (the problem) planted in a cracked vase (Hamlet). As the problem grows, Hamlet becomes less sound.

3. A.C. Bradley: This famous Shakespeare scholar said that Hamlet suffers from melancholia or is merely mentally deranged. Ernest Jones: The Freudian interpretation--Oedipus complex. He still has a childish sexual fixation on Gertrude. Thus, his attitude toward Claudius is ambivalent; he is grateful to Claudius for removing his "rival" for his mother's affections (King Hamlet) but must also resent him as his new father-figure. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Hamlet's delay is caused by "the effect of a superfluous activity of thought." He thinks too much because he is too elevated for this world, has too fine a character.

4. A more general interpretation is that Hamlet does not have a flaw. He is merely waiting for the ghost to be proven honest or not. In this he may be seen as a twentieth century existentialist hero. He is faced with a problem whose answer may lie beyond the limits of human reason--or in fact may not have an answer. It is this limitation, and the uncertainty it produces, that makes Hamlet "unstable." http://hti.math.uh.edu/curriculum/units/2001/04/01.04.03.php

5. What IF Horatio’s and Marcellus’s warning is correct and the Ghost IS IN Fact a demonic Devil who has come to trick the grieving Hamlet?

6. If you think about it: Only Hamlet hears the ghost- except when he commands “swear”.

7. You may agree with Hamlet when he judges his uncle and his mother’s love for one another.

8. But what right does he have to judge them in such a way?They love one another and marry.Claudious tries to rule as King after an unfortunate royal death

9. Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right. Yet as troubled as many of them might be by that news, they are even more stunned to discover that many judges find it irrelevant. State statutes and case law vary widely, but most judges conclude that these men must continue to raise their children — or at least pay support — no matter what their DNA says. The scientific advance that was supposed to offer clarity instead reveals just how murky society’s notions of fatherhood actually are. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22Paternity-t.html?pagewanted=allA year after Mike learned about Rob and Stephanie’s marriage, Lori read an article in the local newspaper about a paternity case involving Mark Hudson, a Pennsylvania doctor who discovered he wasn’t related to his 11-year-old son. Like Mike, Hudson had questioned his wife about the child’s origins and was assured he was the father. In Hudson’s case, the state appellate court deemed this misrepresentation fraudulent and dismissed his $1,400-a-month child-support obligation.

10. Claudious may be entirely honest when he says to Hamlet that he thinks of him as a son.Maybe he IS Hamlet’s father.

11. Maybe Hamlet is the real source of conflict in this play.Maybe Hamlet is no Hero at all.Maybe he is more a spoilt little prince with a grudge against his mommy and a desire to murder his new daddy.

12. Hamlet Considerations “Hamlet can only be regarded as his own fool or victim, replacing his father surrogate, the clown Yorrick” (Bloom ‘Shakespeare the discovery of the Human”p735 )

13. “Shakespeare contains us; he always gets there before us, and always waits for us, somewhere up ahead” Harold Bloom “Hamlet’s tragedy is at last the tragedy of personality” Bloom http://www.scribd.com/doc/63711552/Harold-Bloom-The-Tanner-Lectures-on-Human-Values-Vol-18-1997 The crucial question becomes: “How ought we to characterize Hamlet’s melancholia in the first four acts, and how do we explain his escape from it into a high place in Act V?”

14. Hamlet’s unique appeal: No other protagonist of high tragedy seems paradoxically so free. Bloom • Aristotle interpreted it as a creative process. • Aristotle compared it to music.

15. It outrages our sensibility that: “The Western hero of intellectual consciousness dies in this grossly inadequate context, yet it does not outrage Hamlet, who has lived through too much already.” H. Bloom

16. “It is we who are Hamlet” William Hazlitt “Hamlet’s stage, Hazlitt implied, is the theatre of the mind, and Hamlet’s gestures therefore are of the inmost self, very nearly everyone’s inmost self.” H. Bloom 428

17. The Ghost Scene:“Two Hamlet’s confront one another, with virtually nothing in common but their names.”Man of ActionThe Thinker

18. The Ghost demands an “immediate revenge but receives instead the deferred blood atonement that consumes five acts and four thousand lines”

19. The largest mistake we can make about the play, Hamlet, is to think that it is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind because (presumably) he thinks too much.... The fundamental fact about Hamlet is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well. His is simply the most intelligent role ever written for the Western stage; indeed, he may be the most intelligent figure in all the world of literature, West or East. Unable to rest in illusions of any kind, he thinks his way through to the truth, which may be a pure nihilism, yet a nihilism so purified that it possesses an absolute nobility, even a kind of transcendentalism. Philosophy-http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/  - Harold Bloom

20. Ophelia: “Why has she been such a potent and obsessive figure in our cultural mythology?” ‘Insofar as Hamlet names Ophelia as “woman” and “frailty,” substituting an ideological view of femininity for a personal one, is she indeed representative of Woman, and does her madness stand for the oppression of women in society as well as in tragedy? Furthermore, since Laertes calls Ophelia a “document in madness,” does she represent the textual archetype of woman as madness or madness as woman?” [DOC]  Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities ...

21. Feminist critics have offered a variety of responses to these questions. Some have maintained that we should represent Ophelia as a lawyer represents a client, that we should become her Horatio, in this harsh world reporting her and her cause aright to the unsatisfied. Carol Neely, for example, describes advocacy--speaking for Ophelia--as our proper role: “As a feminist critic,” she writes, “I must ‘tell’ Ophelia’s story.”But what can we mean by Ophelia’s story? The story of her life? The story of her betrayal at the hands of her father, brother, lover, court, society? The story of her rejection and marginalisation by male critics of Shakespeare?

22. …another feminist critic, Lee Dewards, concludes that it is impossible to reconstruct Ophelia’s biography from the text: “We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.”

23. “I think nothing, my lord,” she tells him in the Mousetrap scene, and he cruelly twists her words: Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. Ophelia: What is, my lord? Hamlet: Nothing. (III. ii. 117-19) In Elizabethan slang, “nothing” was a term for the female genitalia, as in Much Ado About Nothing. To Hamlet, then, “nothing” is what lies between maids’ legs, In French feminist theory, Ophelia might confirm the impossibility of representing the feminine in patriarchal discourse as other than madness, incoherence, fluidity, or silence. In French theoretical patriarchal language and symbolism, it remains on the side of negativity, absence, and lack.

24. A third approach would be to read Ophelia’s story as the female subtext of the tragedy, the repressed story of Hamlet. In this reading, Ophelia represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans as well as the Freudians thought womanish and unmanly. The return of the repressed. When Laertes weeps for his dead sister he says of his tears that “ When these are gone,/ The woman will be out”--that is to say, that the feminine and shameful part of his nature will be purged. According to David Leverenz, in an important essay called “The Woman in Hamlet.” Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women, and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia. Ophelia’s suicide, Leverenz argues, then becomes “a microcosm of the male world’s banishment of the female, because ‘woman’ represents everything denied by reasonable men.”

25. This above all to thine own self be true Like those of all imagined characters of unusual force and palpability, Polonius's domains have expanded from literature to life, where he has become a label, a social category. Since my experiences of Polonius in literature and life, I have wondered who and what a Polonius in a modern state might be. He is, I have decided, a powerful figure in a large institution, preferably the executive branch of the federal government. However, he moves easily among institutions. He can work in the private sector or a think tank or a public policy school in an affluent private university. When he is not in the government, and is instead rusticating in the private sector, he likes being a pundit. In that role, he enjoys writing op-ed pieces and going on television. The pundit occupies a strategic space in contemporary public discourse. Although some female pundits exist, he is usually a man. The origins of the word are themselves masculine. Pundit derives from the Sanskrit pandita, which means "learned, wise; a learned man, a teacher, an authority; one who announces his judgment, opinions, or conclusions in an authoritative manner; a critic." The word entered English through Hindi, another appropriation from the era of the British rule of the Indian subcontinent. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-2290157/Polonius-our-pundit.html

26. Shakespeare’s Sister: An Excerpt from Virginia Woolf Shakespeare’s Sister: An Excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3 Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.

27. history from a woman's perspective by emphasizing women's lack of tradition in a historically male-dominated society. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf addresses the topic "Women and Fiction," offering her own reading of history from a woman's perspective by emphasizing women's lack of tradition in a historically male-dominated society. Woolf's essay sets up a juxtaposition between males and females which is particularly helpful in framing the reader's understanding of relationships in literature prior to Woolf's time. Woolf's modern reading of history allows the reader to interpret Shakespeare's Ophelia not as a source of admiration for her assertion of identity but, rather, as a source of sympathy for her loss of identity after the removal of male dominance.

28. Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external demands, to reflect others' desires In "Reading Ophelia's Madness," Gabrielle Dane writes, "Motherless and completely circumscribed by the men around her, Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external demands, to reflect others' desires" (406). In congruence with Woolf's theory, Ophelia suffers from a lack of female tradition--not only from the absence of women in history but also from the absence of any reliable female influence in her life, that which would traditionally be fulfilled by her mother. The unexplained absence of Ophelia's mother leaves her father, Polonius, in the most influential role.

29. Ophelia possesses no identity of her own because Polonius attempts to fashion "the weight, the pace, the stride" of himself upon her. He believes his needs are her needs and, knowing no significant influence apart from Polonius and her brother, Laertes, Ophelia loses her identity as a woman by allowing herself to be molded by men. At Ophelia's entrance into Hamlet, Laertes accompanies Ophelia and advises her on her relationship with Hamlet. From the outset, Laertes and Polonius treat Ophelia's private matters as if they were issues of familial importance; both men take upon themselves the role of explicitly telling Ophelia how she should behave. "For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour,/ Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,/ [...] The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more," instructs Laertes to his sister (1.3.6-10).

30. "You do not understand yourself so clearly/ As it behooves my daughter and your honour”Polonius’diction reveals his sense of possession and his concern for social appearances to serve his own interests. Although he is speaking to Ophelia, he refers to her as "my daughter," claiming ownership and dominance over her. In Laertes' absence, Polonius continues the attempt to fashion Ophelia's relationship with Hamlet to his own liking, saying, "You do not understand yourself so clearly/ As it behooves my daughter and your honour" (1.3.105-6). Polonius insults Ophelia's ability to comprehend the situation, but, more importantly, his diction reveals his sense of possession and his concern for social appearances to serve his own interests. Although he is speaking to Ophelia, he refers to her as "my daughter," claiming ownership and dominance over her. The words "behoove" and "honour" suggest that Polonius' primary concern is that Ophelia act according to the proper societal standards, keeping up the appropriate appearance because her behavior reflects back on him as a public official and as her father

31. "More than anything, perhaps, [...life] calls for confidence in oneself. [...] And how can we generate the imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority [...] over other people" (Woolf 35). Woolf describes a hierarchy between men and women in A Room of One's Own which sheds light on Polonius' relationship with Ophelia in Hamlet as a source of power for Polonius, further diminishing Ophelia's position to that of a mere foil to male characters in the novel. In Woolf's view, members of the male sex generally feel that they have an "innate superiority" over women. This hierarchy, then, necessitates the presence of submissive female characters in order for males to sustain positions of power in any capacity.

32. Gertrude and Hecuba The reactions of Gertrude and Hecuba to the violent death of their husbands (both kings as well) are opposites.When her husband is murdered (by her brother-in-law, though she does not know it at the time) Gertrude probably mourned him, as it seems that she genuinely loved him. But rather quickly she re-marries and, particularly distasteful to Hamlet, her husband's brother. This changes the mood of the castle from one of mourning to one of celebration in a short time.

33. Hecuba, on the other hand, reacts to her husband's (Priam) murder more as Hamlet would have liked his mother to. She is distraught and pious. When Priam is slaughtered she becomes uncontrollable -- "When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport / In mincing with his sword her husband's limbs, / The instant burst of clamor that she made / (Unless things mortal move them not at all) / Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven / And passion in the gods.” What I am trying to get at is that Hecuba reacted to her husband's death as Hamlet would have liked to see his mother react to her husband's murder ...

34. Gonzaga denied it vehemently and was never punished for the crime, though the duke’s barber was tortured and executed. The Murder of Gonzago play sponsored and modified by Hamlet to produce signs of guilt in his uncle Claudius. It may be based upon the story of a murder of 1538 which appealed to Renaissance Europe’s fascination with poisons. Luigi Gonzaga was accused of killing the duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria dellaRovere, by pouring poison in his ear.

35. If Hamlet were a record of actual historical events, if there were real-life actors who had given many performances at Wittenberg of a play called The Murder of Gonzago which Hamlet had seen there, what was thisoriginal play like? From ‘The Murder of Gonzago‘ALETHEA HAYTER- I return therefore to my police enquiry. If we take the performance of it that was given at Elsinore, and leave out all the stage directions, leave out the 'dozen or sixteen lines' inserted by Hamlet, leave out — above all — the dumb-show, what remains of the plot as revealed by the actual words spoken? The main character, Gonzago, is a sick elderly man — no parallel to Hamlet Senior who was a handsome powerful athletic figure — and there is nothing in the text to suggest he was a king. The stage direction refers to him as one, Hamlet describes him as a duke, but in the text he is addressed simply as 'my lord'. His wife Baptista is devotedly attached to him, and there is no indication that she is deceiving him or loves another. The third character, Luciano, is an unexplained villain who poisons Gonzago; the fact that Luciano is Gonzago's nephew, or any relation of his, is nowhere stated in the lines …. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:AUr0XAAPR2sJ:ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/view/678/665+murder+of+gonzago+story&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgJkPp5uWrgkutWeeBsQvG39mLyHuMZffd67qBwnWta4bwcsUhz5ojfu58fIc2vQQlx5BvPn-yI_3STLLFwwSQvxJbm3YMIC6WTt74MmSXt8_ptfSaGOepjor4K5Fw6bOFxzz_z&sig=AHIEtbTW7WaiRexiBVPlrk2oJnyULSlSog