Hamlet Act 5, The Reality of Death: “The Rest is Silence”

1. Hamlet Act 5, The Reality of Death: “The Rest is Silence” • Gravedigger scene. • Laertes and Hamlet fight over Ophelia’s love at her grave. • Claudius and Laertes plot to poison Hamlet during the duel: with a poisoned rapier and a poisoned drink. • Laertes and Hamlet duel. • All is revealed and almost everyone dies of poisoning (except Horatio who lives on to tell Hamlet’s story) • Fortinbras becomes king. • Watch Mel Gibson at Hamlet’s death: http://youtu.be/DNWODAIBs7s

2. From 1600 (or so) till 2014….400 years of reading and performing Hamlet • Shakespeare’s rewriting of the popular revenge play genre • The nature of relationships: “a little more than kin and less than kind” • Fathers and sons, parents and children: authority and rebellion • The nature of human life – why do we keep living?: “to be or not to be” • The poison of grief, loss, madness, the harsh reality & certainty of death. • Surveillance and the abuse of power, the police state • Theatre about theatre – meta-theatricality: “the play’s the thing” Influence of Hamlet: • A ghost story: the ghosts of the past, of history, of family: “who’s there?” • A Detective story – crime, guilt, closely reading for evidence • Freud: Hamlet and the Oedipal complex in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) • Showalter: Influence of Ophelia on representations of women and madness • A Bildungsroman – a story of growing up into an independent existence • Youth in Western culture – mobility, existential angst, differentiation • Identity and Modernity in Western culture – individualism versus tradition

3. Growing up.From school learning………….... to university  University: Active producer Teacher and students debate what the answers might be: Students learn to read, to write, and to argue as convincingly as possible. Active producers of new ideas and new knowledge. New ways of understanding. School: Passive Receiver Teacher has all the answers Students repeat what they are told. Passive receptors of easily digestable existing knowledge .

4. The journey to independence: • Activedevelopmentof • your own knowledge • 1. Read the Play – Linear Reading • Use the Notes on each page • Look up all unfamiliar/difficult words • Annotate your own text with all this info • Annotate the text with your own thoughts • 2. Watch at least 2 Movies • 3. Read the Stories of the Myths: • “Like Niobe, all tears” – who is Niobe? • “Hyperion to a satyr” – who is Hyperion? • 4. Read Introduction (pages 28 – 66) and the readings suggested on lecture slides that most interest you • 6. Read the Play again – Informed Reading • Look for Connections: • statements that become ironic or significant in later action • repetitions/shifts in ideas by means of imagery • e.g: poison • e.g: mirror imaging of roles • Hamlet Lectures =Teaching you how to fish: • Lectures have involved: • brief summary of each act • close attention to the words and action of each scene • different performances on screen • different interpretations of the play

5. TWO KINDS OF EXAM QUESTIONS: Both require a strong argument& attention to detail in the form of relevant quotationsPassage Question: place extractbrieflyin context, then discuss it in detail like a poem, work through the passage from beginning to end, use quotations as evidence, indicate links to the rest of the play.Essay Question: Make sure you understand the question, underline the key words, then plan your argument, use quotations as your evidence. Your key questions to answer for yourself: • What does this piece of writing seek to do? • How does this piece of writing do what it does? . • First class essay = a strong clear argument. How do you convince your reader? By using quotations as your evidence to make your case like a lawyer in court. • You are becoming an independent thinker where reading means making your own interpretative choices and writing means making a strong case for your position. • To say it is simply open to interpretation is a cop-out. Make a case for how YOU see it!

6. How an Informed reading can help with a passage question = Working ideas through the entire play. e.g. Reading the play looking for how images of poisoning are connected. Act 1, Scene 5 GHOST: 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forgèd process of my death Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown .… Sleeping within my orchard/ My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole/With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,/ And in the porches of my ears did pour/ The leperous distilment, whose effect/ Holds such an enmity wi’th blood of man/That swift as quicksilver it courses through/ The natural gates and alleys of the body/ And with a sudden vigor doth posset/ And curd, like eager droppings into milk,/ The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine./ And a most instant tetter barked about,/ Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust/All my smooth body./ Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand/ Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,/Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin ….. With all my imperfections on my head Oh, horrible, oh, horrible, most horrible! The official story of King Hamlet’s death was the story of a serpent in the garden. Garden of Eden imagery, poison words are linked to acts of poisoning, images of disease, leprosy, decay and sin. As Hamlet moves to fuller knowledge is he hearing words that act like poison in his ears? Doubling of roles, repetition.

7. How an Informed reading can help with an essay question. Working ideas through the entire play. e.g: how are images of poisoning connected? CLAUDIUS: O, this is the poison of deep grief: it springs/ all from her father’s death …. poor Ophelia… Watch this Prezi prepared by a class about poison and poisoning in Hamlet: http://prezi.com/qlq8gft4l2tr/the-whole-ear-of-denmark-has-been-poisoned/ HAMLET: O, I die, Horatio; the potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:  LAERTES: Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good. In thee there is not half an hour of life. The treacherous instrument is in thy hand, Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice Hath turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie, Never to rise again. Thy mother’s poisoned. I can no more. The king, the king’s to blame.

8. The revenge narrative is still a very popular genre in Hollywood movies. • Hamlet is Shakespeare’s reworking of the revenge narrative. What does Shakespeare’s play have to say about the triumphs and satisfactions of revenge? Watch and compare the different endings: Doran: http://youtu.be/W9VZp7IFfXQ Zeffirelli: http://youtu.be/BoNAEfrI2oQ Zeffirelli and Almereyda: http://youtu.be/rRmorF72S8Y

9. Hamlet is a Hall of Mirrors Multiplying the Role of Revenger Act 4 and 5: focus on Laertes’s role as the classic revenging hero. In grieving & seeking revenge for his father, Laertes is both Hamlet’s brother-figure and his foe. The play multiplies the role of revenger, telling, staging & restaging the story of revenge:  King Hamlet kills Fortinbras, young Fortinbras plans his revenge. Claudius poisons King Hamlet, the ghost tells Hamlet the story of his death and demands revenge. Hamlet sees a player tell of Pyrrhus killing Priam, to get proof he stages a play which restages his father’s murder and in which a player, “one Lucianus, nephew to the King,” poisons the Player King on stage in front of Claudius. Hamlet kills Polonius, causes the deaths of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Ophelia. Laertes returns ready to kill everyone to avenge Polonius. Claudius and Laertes plot to poison Hamlet in a duel, Laertes poisons Hamlet and is poisoned by Hamlet, Claudius poisons Gertrude, Laertes tells of the plot. Hamlet poisons Claudius. Fortinbras is named king. Horatio remains alive to tell the story. Laertes HAMLET: I’ll be your foil, Laertes (5.2.201)

10. Why does Hamlet have to die?Where is the justice in this play? • Perhaps Hamlet has to die so that we don’t have to. • If Hamlet has doubles in the text, he has doubles in the audience too. A major theme in Shakespeare’s plays is the role of art as a mirror-image of life • Stanley Cavell’s “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof” Cavell argues that in obeying the ghost, Hamlet himself becomes a ghost: Here the father asks the son to take the father’s place, to make his life come out even for him, to set it right, so that he, the father, can rest in peace. It is the bequest of a beloved father that deprives the son of his identity, of enacting his own existence, it curses, as if spitefully, his being born of this father. Put otherwise, the father’s dictation of the way he wishes to be remembered – by having his revenge taken for him– exactly deprives the son, with his powers of mourning, of the right to mourn him, to let him pass.

11. So who is Hamlet?: Coward? Hero? Neurotic? Misogynist? Idealist? Watch at least two versions. Why? The meaning of a play or a character lives in history, in performance, in the changing interpretative choices of directors and actors, of audiences and readers…like you

12. No closure: only Lasting Questions • Can we trust the words of the ghost or do they poison Hamlet’s life? • What are the correct relationships between kin? • What is the duty of parents to children? Of children to parents? • What is the price these young people (Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrants, Guildenstern) pay for obedience to parents and authority/father-figures? • Can only madness speak truth to power? • The story comes full circle in Hamlet’s request to Horatio to remember him: Horatio, I am dead, thou liv’st, report me and my cause aright ….. If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. (5.2.291-302) • What makes Horatio different from the other young people in the play? • If words and stories can poison, in witnessing Hamlet’s tale have we (the audience) all been ‘poisoned’ too?

13. Watch on YouTube Hamlet – Play Summary & Analysis by Thug Notes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A98tf9krihg

14. Sparky Sweet’s Useful Questions • Hamlet’s “procrastination is one of the most debated subjects in all of Shakespeare”. • Can we really trust Hamlet’s Ghost Daddy? • Was Gertrude in on the whole thing? • Can everybody see the Ghost in Act 1 but only my boy Hamlet in Act 3? • Is Hamlet just pretending to be crazy or has his mad fiction become fact? • Looks like old Willy’s gone and made Hamlets of us all.

15. Further Critical Reading Introduction to Hamlet in the Oxford Shakespeare by G.R. Hibbard, pages 28 -66 CamiliaPaglia’s essay on the Ghost’s speech: a good example of how to answer a passage question in EXAMS. Online file on English Dept website. Good critical essays: Alexander Leggatt’s essay, “A Figure Like Your Father” in Shakespeare'sTragedies: Violation and Identity. (Very good and clear. Insightful on how acts of violence evoke questions about the identities of the victims, perpetrators, and the acts themselves) RU Short Loan Level 1 Loans Desk  (822.33D LEG)   Janet Adelman’s essay, “Man and Wife is One Flesh : Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body” in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. (A psycho-analytic interpretation of the Hamlet family dynamic) RU Short Loan Level 1 Loans Desk  (822.33D ADE) Stanley Cavell’s essay, “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof” in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. (Difficult and very challenging essay but a highly insightful interpretation) RU Short Loan Level 1 Loans Desk    (822.33 CAV) Just for fun: http://www.shakespeareauthority.com/family/natural-plant-poisons-in-shakespeare-poison-as-weapon-and-symbol-in-the-tragedies