Hamlet

1. Hamlet Day Two ENGL 305 Dr. Fike

2. Outlines • MLA format—get straight on this. • WC list—one continuous list, not primary and secondary lists. • Every paper should have a review of criticism. • You must have at least 5 critical sources (criticism on your play). • You need to learn how to write a research paper. • Go to the Writing Center. • Have a conference with me. • Do another draft of your outline. • Apply the elements of critical thinking, as I have modeled below in this presentation.

3. Group Activity • Passages: 1.2.129ff., 2.2.549ff., and 3.1.56ff. • You will start with one soliloquy and rotate twice so that you talk about all three. • First station: Generate questions about the soliloquy that you have been assigned. Write your questions on the board (or big sheets of paper). • Second station: Respond to the questions left by the previous group. Write your answers on the board (or big sheets). • Third station: Respond to the answers left by the previous group. Write your responses as before. Then appoint one person to present the content of the written material at your third station to the rest of the class.

4. Large-Group Discussion • What did you learn about your soliloquy?

5. A Traditional Perspective on Revenge • 4.5.134ff.: “To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil! / Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit! / I dare damnation. To this point I stand, / That both the worlds I give to negligence, / Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged / Most throughly for my father.” • 4.7.127: Laertes wants “To cut his [Hamlet’s] throat i’ the church.” • 4.7.129: The king says, “Revenge should have no bounds.”

6. POINT • What unifies all three soliloquies is Hamlet’s theological perspective: he thinks about the relationship between his actions and the afterlife.

7. “To be or not to be,” etc. • For a detailed analysis of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, see the next slides or my article: • http://www2.widener.edu/~cea/362fike.htm • If time remains (or on your own), apply the elements of critical thinking to this speech.

8. “To be or not to be” via the Elements from CRTW 201 • The context is a murder mystery in which Hamlet is planning, at this moment, to trick Claudius into revealing his guilt with the help of the players. • The point of view is that of a young man whose psychomachia [soul struggle] involves competing imperatives such as mother and father, reason and emotion, duty and caution, scholar and warrior, womanliness and what a critic calls “tough, fatalistic cool” (Rogers-Gardner 35); and whose psyche is beset by melancholy, acedia, and depersonalization (that is, a disconnection from his feminine side).

9. More • The question at issue is not the one that Hamlet himself asks: Why would one stay in this life and put up with “fardels” (burdens) when suicide is an option? Nor is it the question that students often assume it to be: namely, should Hamlet kill himself? It is instead a more general question that is not directly stated: “What course of action should one take in the face of worldly obstacles?” In other words, as the absence of the pronoun “I” indicates, the question is less personal and practical than it is general and philosophical.

10. Still More • His purpose, then, is to analyze the options or alternatives, which are these: endure passively, confront actively, or commit suicide. In exploring these alternatives, Hamlet has some information to go on: everyone ages, rulers oppress, the prideful insult, love stinks, law is slow, administrators suck, and merit does not always mean advancement.

11. More Elements • Although he assumes that he cannot tell the nature of the afterlife, the passage identifies competing alternatives: when we shuffle off our “mortal coil,” as a snake sheds its skin, the resulting state may be the end of individual consciousness or a state in which “dreams” may be more problematic than the worldly troubles left behind. If, as Hamlet mentions in a previous passage, God has “fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.132-33), then the implication and consequence of suicide would be damnation, which is also a key concept in Hamlet’s soliloquy, along with conscience and sin.

12. Final Slide • His conclusion—and here he finally switches from third person singular to first person plural, presumably in order to include himself—is that “thought,” by which he means over-analysis, prevents a thinking person from taking his own life or taking arms against his “sea of troubles.” The soliloquy ends with this statement to Ophelia, which Hamlet probably says under his breath: “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered,” which implies his own Claudius-like inability to pray. END