A Critical History of Hamlet

1. A Critical History of Hamlet By: Leslie Baker Jacob Mories Michael Young Gabrielle Fowler

2. Introduction • Each generation makes Hamlet it’s own interpretation • Painting’s, poetry, and films are produced through each generation

3. Popular Criticism’s • Elaine Showalter argues that Hamlet shaped the ways femininity and madness are understood • 1623 First publication in folio form told readers to prepare to read a work that was already a classic • Shapes Western culture and values

4. First Folio • Ben Jonson compares Hamlet to great Greek classical dramatists, and contemporary British ones • Shakespeare transcends historical boundaries • Shakespeare commands cultural attention • Aspects of the plays were strictly Elizabethan or Jacobean

5. New Historicist Critics • Shakespeare is more grounded in history • Compares differently from sixteenth and seventeenth-century British citizens and for us • Crosses boundaries of time and space

6. Human Nature • Some Critics today argue we question Shakespeare on value • In 1808 A. W. Schlegel argued Hamlet’s tendency to philosophize and meditate made him unable to act. Inspired reader to ponder with Hamlet the great questions of human existence. • William Hazlitt in 1817 depicts Hamlet as transferring his distress to all humanity. • “It is we who are Hamlet”

7. Romantic Critics • 19th century began to ask the question of why Hamlet delays. • No longer seen as simply a plot device • Sought an answer into the depths of Hamlet’s character

8. A.C. Bradley • Greatest character critic • Began the debate about Hamlet’s madness • Started more specific questions the personalities of the characters and about the unknown situations of the play. • Hamlet is a character whose psychology must be imagined to be as complete as that of any living man.

9. A.C. Bradley Continued • Discovers that Hamlet’s melancholy is a sickness, not a mood • Hamlet causes readers to identify themselves with him.

10. Sigmund Freud • He psychoanalyzed Hamlet and compared it with the play Oedipus the King • Also looked into the madness of Hamlet • Uses Hamlet to explain theories on dreams • Develops the Oedipus complex • Like Bradley he attempts to diagnose Hamlet’s melancholy

11. Ernest Jones • One of Freud’s disciples • Wrote: Oedipus Complex as Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery • Along with Freud this theory greatly influenced Florence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet

12. Olivier’s Film • Incorporates main elements of Freud and Jones theory of the play • Emphasizes suggestive relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude • Film was such an important landmark that it cannot bewatchedwithout understanding of this theory

13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNxFydsvY1A

14. T.S. Elliot • Singled out analysis and essay about Hamlet proposing his idea of objective correlative • Argues the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative • Theory is situation or chain of events shall be formula to particular motion • Suggest some similarities between his theory and that of Freud and Bradley

15. Jacqueline Rose • Proposed hypothesis about Elliot’s hypothesis that illustrates precisely the turn to questions of gender and aesthetic politics and the focus on Gertrude, provoking feminist thought into Hamlet • Rose’s reading of the play goes on to establish Gertrude as the “scapegoat”

16. Twentieth Century Criticism • Can be as understood as “disengaging the play from its Romantic association reaching an independent association” • This shift involved a new assumption about how to analyze dramatic texts challenging Bradley’s views

17. G. Wilson Knight • Wrote an essay that’s view was that mortality itself was the place more focus, and Hamlet himself as the death bringer • Viewed Hamlet as a disease consciousness in an otherwise healthy world whose presence infects the kingdom • Hamlet’s poison he argues is “the poison of negation, nothingness, threatening to a world of positive assertion”

18. Stephanie Mallarme • He emphasized not only Hamlet’s solitariness but his violence – he is a “killer who kills without concern, and even if he does not do the killing – people die.” • Mallarme’s sinister figure appears thereafter in a number of influential twentieth-century interpretations.

19. Margaret Ferguson • She wrote a recent essay that returns to Hamlet as the death bringer by commenting on the way kingship itself is associated in the play with the power to kill. • A key example for Ferguson is when Hamlet arranges Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed with a letter and he seals the letter with his father’s signet ring, the sign of royal power.

20. Bertolt Brecht • He speaks on and emphasizes that Elizabethan theater as being “full of alienation effects.” • “Alienation effects” was intended to require the actor to express the distance he or she felt from his or her role, and thus functioned to allow the audience to maintain its critical judgment and not to sink into passive acceptance of conditions or plots that should, Brocht felt, be resisted.

21. Roland Frye and Arthur McGee • Their books picked up and extend the debates already underway concerning moral and religious questions about revenge in several comments about Providence in act 5. • These scholars argue that one cannot talk intelligently about why Hamlet delays if one does not understand the issues that face Hamlet. • They discover how profoundly the text is shaped by its complex reevaluation of revenge as plot and as moral deed.

22. Conclusion • Hamlet’ has been and will continue to be debated, and criticized. • Scholar’s of every era have formed opinions about what the play means or does not mean • Shakespeare is the only person who truly knows exactly what Hamlet is meant to portray.