Introduction

Texts

Part One: The Renaissance at Court

I. Scholasticism, Humanism, and Statecraft

II. Life at Court: How Power is Exchanged between Princes and Courtiers

III. Women at Court

Part II: Hamlet

Final Assignment

Introduction

Much has been said and written through the ages about the universality of Shakespeare. Each director challenges the audience with a new anachronistic interpretation, always emphasizing the way the bard holds up—or perhaps showing how the resilience of Shakespeare’s genius “forgives” the way it is put to the test. Hamlet, often called the “first modern play,” is no different. Recently, Kenneth Branagh’s film of the complete text, with its regency setting, suggests that political intrigues and abuse of power are not limited to Denmark in the early middle ages. On the other hand, Franco Zefferelli’s film of the play starring Mel Gibson confuses the viewer with its adherence to the setting in12^th-century Denmark portrayed in the original version of the play. Sir Lawrence Olivier also tried to lend authenticity to his film version by setting the play at what might have been the original Elsinore. In Zefferelli’s strict adherence to the historical setting, he is forced to have the final duel conducted with broadswords, and Olivier’s, excepting the backdrop of high cliffs and stark black and white, seemed primarily dedicated to making the play into a Freudian psycho-drama. As a matter of fact, almost no one reads the play as a story of an actual struggle for the throne of Denmark, probably not even Shakespeare.

The story can be traced to a play by Saxo Grammaticus, printed in 1514. In 1570 François de Belleforest published a French version of it in Histoires Tragiques, adding adultery to incest and garnishing the tale with strong misogynistic and moralistic animadversions. Belleforest's tale appeared in English as The Hystorie of Hamblet in 1608.

The Ur-Hamlet, probably by Thomas Kyd is assumed to be Shakespeare's immediate source. References to it begin in 1589, and the promptbook may have belonged to Shakespeare's company. All we know for certain is that it introduced the ghost. However, Kyd's very successful The Spanish Tragedy (1589?), another early revenge play, is extant. It has a revenger, Hieronimo, who doubts and delays, and a woman who goes mad and commits suicide; furthermore it has some comic elements, a mixture of prose and verse, and a play-within-the-play.”^[i]

Hamlet, however, more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, is a story about life at court. The drama probes the issues of how courtiers, kings, and princes are supposed to behave. It examines the norms of court life, how those norms are violated, and how the characters respond to the challenges to their fixed roles. The title character questions the entire system and the role he has been forced to play in it. For that reason, I believe that if the text is read within the context of Renaissance discourse concerning life at court and the training of a prince, we can derive a new historical reading concerning use and abuse of power during the Renaissance. If we read the play as a text for the clash of humanism with standards of court and political behavior in the Italian Renaissance, we experience an intimate account of both the treachery and the power of Machiavelli’s Prince, the oblique equivalent of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and the powerlessness of the blah, blah’s woman at court.

            Scholars have always noted how little is known about Shakespeare’s life—no letters and only a few public records including his baptismal certificate, his will, his marriage certificate, and the records of the births of his children. We do know, however, something about his education at the Stratford Grammar School, a rigorous curriculum based in the classics, mostly in Latin. We know that his school masters were Jesuits recently graduated from Oxford (Greenblat 95-97), and we can assume from his writing that, outside of his study of Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero, he was a reader of anything that was important at the time. Although we can be fairly sure that he never traveled outside of England, his plays show familiarity with other times and places, and his expertise in botany, law, and astronomy show that he must have been a student of all disciplines. Although we might infer that Shakespeare read certain texts, having proof that he was familiar with Machiavelli, Erasmus, Castiglione, and Moderata Fonte is not necessary to a new historical reading of the play. It so happens, however, that it is possible to divide the characters in the play into categories that invite comparison with important texts on the behavior of princes, courtiers, and women during the century that preceded Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet.

            One of the problems in creating a course that relies on a historical reading of a text is whether to integrate the text with the historical readings or to assign the ancillary texts up front so that the students can apply all the contextual documents to the reading of the primary text as a whole. Each method has its drawbacks. On the one hand, students of literature often do not have the patience to wait for the primary “action” of the course while wandering around in history. On the other, this is a course that relies on a somewhat limited but crucial understanding of Renaissance writings and the concepts that surround them, and our primary text, Hamlet, requires that its readers be able to encounter those concepts as they read the play. For that reason, I have chosen to present the discussion of the background first, dividing it into three elements: 1) Scholasticism, Humanism, and Statecraft, 2) Life at Court, and 3) the Role of the Woman as a Token of Power. In making these divisions and in presenting them as separate contextual settings that we place the play into, I believe that the students will see Hamlet as a historically local, as well as a universal, entity. To direct the instruction, I have placed my own discussion of the influence of the historical documents on the play next to the lectures on the history.  I have done this to connect the play to Renaissance sources so that those giving the instruction can see the two together.

back to top

Texts:

Hamlet

Castiglione, The Courtier

Machiavelli, The Prince

back to top

 Part One: The Renaissance at Court

I. Scholasticism, Humanism, and Statecraft

The Rise of Renaissance Power and the Emergence of Humanism

Readings:

King, Margaret. Chapter Three, “Human Dignity and Humanist Studies: The Career of Humanism,(c. 1350-1530)”

            Machiavelli, The Prince.

Essential Questions:

What is a good prince? How does a good prince behave? How does Hamlet superimpose the idea of individual identity on a background of scholasticism?

Lesson 1: The role of scholasticism in the Europe of the Middle Ages:

Lesson 2: The Roots of the Rise of Humanism and the Influence of Humanism on Renaissance Thought

Learning Shapes Morality

Lesson 3. Machiavelli and The Prince.

            At the center of Hamlet lies the issue of clashing paradigms. Hamlet appeals to us as a character primarily because he questions the purpose of man’s life on earth. Is man created good or evil? He says, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!” and yet in the same breath, he says, “Man delights not me” (Act II. Scene, ii, ll. 286-7, 291). He says “use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity: the less they deserve the more merit is in your bounty.” (II,ii, 489-489)

Hamlet and his friends, Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, are students at Wittenberg, and judging from Hamlet’s age of thirty, he has spent a great deal of his life in intellectual contemplation. Still, he says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (II, i,168).And we might ask why Shakespeare puts Hamlet and his friends at Wittenberg, while the robust, athletic, and resolute Laertes studies in Paris. Wittenberg is the site where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door and launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517. It makes sense to infer from Shakespeare’s choice a challenge to the scholasticism of the Catholic doctrine observed and commented upon throughout the play. The debate over whether or not “the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” I, ii, 131-32) runs from Hamlet’s initial soliloquy through his “To be or not to be” speech to Ophelia’s burial, where the grave diggers discuss whether she should be buried in sanctified ground. Indeed, Shakespeare uses the grave diggers’ episode to highlight the absurdity of scholastic pedantry. Their jokes and riddles depend on syllogistic non-sequiturs characteristic of what came in humanistic discourse to be viewed as the ridiculous nature of ivory tower scholasticism:

1^st Clown: Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?”

2^nd Clown: I tell thee she is; and therefore make her grave straight: the crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial.

1^st Clown: How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her own defence?

2^nd Clown: Why ‘tis found so.

1^st Clown: It must be se offendendo, it cannot be else. For here is the point: If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act: and an act hath three branches; it is to act, to do, and to perform: argal, she drowned herself wittingly. (V, i, 1-11)

Hamlet’s ultimate act of hubris comes when he refuses to kill Claudius when he has the chance because Claudius is praying, “and so he goes to heaven” (III, iii, 74). Of course, the irony of the moment is that Claudius is unable to pray, and thus he would have been sent to hell despite his appearance of penitence. Viewed in the context of the emergence of humanism from the remote and sterile pursuit of theological truths that constituted scholasticism, it is easy to see the philosophical dialectic of the Italian Quattrocento in the play.

Shakespeare seems to show us that while the dogma of scholasticism is inadequate to the mysteries of life as it is lived outside the cloister, the pursuit of learning for it own sake is an exercise in impotence and confusion. Hamlet is a “modern” man. He is not one to accept things at face value. The simple description of Hamlet given by every confused high school student who has ever studied the play is that Hamlet is a character who can’t make up his mind, and because of this inadequacy, almost everyone in the play ends up dead. If we take the play out of a Renaissance context, this may be an accurate, albeit superficial, reading.

If we study Machiavelli as the writer who removed the art of statecraft from its idealistic grounding in republicanism and view Hamlet’s dilemma as Machiavelli might have seen it, then we see the complete expression of Shakespeare’s vision. Claudius is the unscrupulous embodiment of Machiavelli’s prince. I think it is no accident that the play is subtitled “Prince of Denmark,” and that it is not Hamlet but Fortinbras, a man with an unclouded ambition to restore the honor of Norway by reconquering lands lost by his father, who restores order to the state of Denmark.  Margaret King says, “The permanency of human character…permits politics to be a science. If human beings always behave in a certain way, then when circumstances are repeated the same outcomes will follow. Analysis becomes possible.”[i] The acquisition and holding of power in a  state is not a matter of morality or intellectual endeavor. All such debate concerning the obligation of a prince to govern a nation is ultimately irrelevant. Machiavelli admires Cesare Borgia because he was able to be ruthless without being unnecessarily cruel. Machiavelli believed that half-measures were dangerous when dealing with opponents, but cruelty should not be used unnecessarily. His belief that  “men sooner forget the death of a father than the loss of their property”[ii] reflects the difference between Hamlet and Fortinbras. This is Hamlet’s flaw, and it is essential to Hamlet’s epiphany at the end of Act IV, scene iv, when he says,

Examples, gross as earth, exhort me:

Witness this army, of such mass and charge,

Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d,

Makes mouths at the invisible event;

Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,

Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honor’s at the stake. (IV, iv, 47-57)

In Kenneth Branagh’s film of this soliloquy, the camera focuses initially on a close-up of Hamlet’s face, yet moves gradually outward to take in the entire landscape. In using this technique, I believe that Branagh correctly interprets the difference between the moral responsibility of the individual life and the pragmatic responsibility of the Prince. It is Hamlet’s eventual divorce from the scruples of humanistic thought and debate that enables him to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, saying to Horatio, “Why, man, they did make love to this employment/ they are not near my conscience;” (V, ii, 57-58) Without the understanding of Machiavelli, we might be confused by Horatio’s statement of admiration, “Why, what a king is this!” (V, ii, 63) Many critics, to say nothing of Tom Stoppard,[iii] find Hamlet’s peremptory treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern problematic. When we examine Hamlet’s action from a pragmatic, Machiavellian perspective, however, we see that executing the two is necessary to consolidate his power and to eliminate the influence of Claudius. What Horatio means in this plaudit is that Hamlet has finally come to the understanding that statecraft involves the transcendence of individual concerns. We then comprehend Hamlet’s statement to Horatio, “The readiness is all” (V, ii, 194) as a resignation of Hamlet’s individual self to the necessity of his role as prince. A ruler who tries to follow moral precepts instead of pragmatic considerations is bound to fail, for men are ungrateful, untrustworthy, cowardly, and greedy for gain.

back to top

II. Life at Court: How Power is Exchanged between Princes and Courtiers

Essential Questions:

What is a courtier?

How do we know what a good courtier is like?

Readings:

Castiglione, Baldessare. The Book of the Courtier. Book the First, Book the Second.

Lecture 4:

III. Women at Court

Essential Questions:

How does a woman behave at court? What does it mean to be a virtuous woman? How are women used as tools of men’s power?

Lecture 9: Medieval Misogyny

Readings: Castiglione, The Courtier, Book the Third, pp. 207-226

Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr., “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Introduction to the Series.” In Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men. PP. vii-xxvi.

In order to place the women of Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude, within the Renaissance paradigm, it is necessary to look beyond Castiglione. In the third book of The Courier, Castiglione describes the ideal woman at court as one who performs an essentially civilizing function at court: Her usefulness is in her affabilità piacevole (pleasing affability) and her observance of una certa mediocrità difficile (a certain difficult mean).She keeps the wheels of social interaction well greased. But even in Book Three of The Courtier, the conversants are drawn into discussion of the history of misogyny by referring to Aristotle’s discussion of men and women, a frame of reference which in itself presumes a historically ingrained belief that women are fallen, lustful, and inferior to men. The matter of a woman’s honor hovers always in the background. It is the first matter that must be dispatched in the conversation when the Duchess says,

She must also be more circumspect and at greater pains to avoid giving an excuse for someone to speak ill of her; she should not only be beyond reproach but also beyond even suspicion, for a woman lacks a man’s resources when it comes to defending herself.[i]

The voices of the women in Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude, are almost entirely encoded. Unlike many if not most of Shakespeare’s other women, neither Ophelia nor Gertrude lets us know directly how she fits into the intrigue of the men’s battle for power. It is for this reason that I have reservations about Kenneth Branagh’s conspicuous display of Ophelia’s sexuality in his film version of the play. Ophelia’s affair with Hamlet, revealed in her mad scene by her singing a bawdy song, should be a shameful secret, and I believe the bedroom scenes earlier in the film sap the real power and pathos of Ophelia’s secret. In giving Ophelia so little voice, Shakespeare makes a subtle yet striking point about women as the detritus of men’s’ struggles for power. Their silence speaks volumes and makes them compelling. In the world of Hamlet, the women exist as tokens. Ophelia’s chastity represents the honor of her family, and Gertrude’s position as queen legitimizes Claudius’s claim to the throne. For these two women, “the rest is silence.” Ophelia’s mad scene is a perfect example of the story of a woman scorned, delivered through the language of flowers and ballads, and audiences respond with empathy to Ophelia’s shame and grief in a way that they might not if her affair with Hamlet were stated more openly. Ophelia has no way to tell her story. She has no voice and no power except through her father and her brother. Her father and brother are courtiers. Their power rests on the pleasure of the king. Ophelia is, to some degree, their coin of the realm. Her virginity preserves their honor. The loss of it would mean their place at Elsinor was less secure, especially if she has become Hamlet’s mistress. When Laertes warns Ophelia not to open “your chaste treasure to his unmastered importunity” (I,  iii, 31-32), he is protecting himself as much as his sister. But Laertes is young and able to make his way in the world. Polonius is even more threatened by the possibility of Ophelia’s tarnished reputation. His advice to his son, “To thine own self be true,” (I, ii, l. 78) is very different from his command to his daughter, “I would not, from this time forth/ Have you so slander any moment leisure/ As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet./ Look to it, I charge you” (I, iii, 132-135)

Read in the terms of  Castiglione’s courtier, there is no place for a dishonored Ophelia. Laertes and Polonius are right. Even though Hamlet jumps into her grave, and Gertrude says at her death, “I hop’d thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife,” (V, i. 216) there is no reason to believe that the daughter of a courtier would be accepted as the wife of an heir to the throne. The response of Hamlet and Gertrude to her death is more a might-have-been regret than a true possibility. In reality, her place as Hamlet’s lover was extremely fragile and dangerous. In the world of life at court, she has enacted her doom long before she drowns herself. It is perhaps for this reason that critics have been so enamored of Ophelia. She is the subject of the well-known study Reviving Ophelia, which describes the vulnerability of adolescent girls. In the world of the play, however, Ophelia is far more tragic. Ophelia is doomed. Her death has more to do with her powerlessness in a court in which her role was rigidly defined than with her seeking the approval of the men around her.

Gertrude is another story and a perplexing one at that. She is, I think, the most opaque character in the play. She never gives any indication that she has conspired with Claudius to kill her husband. There is not the conniving malice of Lady Macbeth in her, or if there is, it is not presented. Her silence, in fact, is her power. As the primary vehicle through which Claudius can claim the throne of Denmark (why else is Hamlet not made king on the death of his father?) she is, like Ophelia, a commodity, a token of power. Unlike Ophelia, she is the ultimate token of power. Although she tells Hamlet, “Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul;/ And there I see such black and grained spots/ As will not leave their tinct,” (III, iv, 90-93) once Hamlet has left her boudoir, the extent of her guilt can be found in only one statement: “So full of artless jealousy is guilt/ It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.” (IV, v, 18-19). This, indeed, shows Gertrude’s commitment to silence. As long as she plays the game according to the rules she has been given, she will not only survive, but she will be a queen. Like Hamlet, we will never know whether she even understands her complicity. Gertrude, I would propose, shows the objectification of the woman in the power structure of the Renaissance more profoundly than any of Shakespeare’s other female characters.

back to top

Part II: Hamlet

Thematic Elements:

Resolution/ Paralysis

Decay

Appearance/Reality

Fathers and Sons and what it means to honor them

Natural/ Unnatural

The art of Statecraft

Scholasticism/Humanism

Entrapment

The meaning of the role of Princes, Women, and Courtiers

Lesson 1: Something Regarding Ghosts:

Act I, Scene I, through Act I, scene ii.

Significant Passages: Act I, scene I, ll. 165-173

Act I, scene ii, ll. 129-159

Consider the following:

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets

A little more than kin and less than kind

‘Tis a fault to heaven

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

Journal entry: Choose one of the following:

1) Why has Horatio been invited to watch for the ghost? What else is abnormal in Denmark besides the ghost? OR

2) Explicate Hamlet’s speech, ll. 129-159.

3) Why do you think Shakespeare chose Wittenberg as the university that Horatio and Hamlet attend?

Lesson 2: The warning of Ophelia and the confrontation with the ghost.

Act I, scene iii through Act I, scene v.

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

His greatness weighed, his will is not his own;

For he himself is subject to his birth.

He may not, as unvalued persons do,

Carve for himself, for on his choice depends

The safety and health of this whole state.

The canker galls the infants of the spring

Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,

And in the morn and liquid dew of youth

Contagious blastments are most imminent.

Aye, springes to catch woodcocks.

Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers,

Not of that dye which their investments show

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Murder most foul, as in the best it is,

But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.

Though lewdness court it in a shape of Heaven

So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,

Will sate itself in a celestial bed

And prey on garbage.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reckoning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself,

As I perchance hereafter shall think meet

To put an antic disposition on…

Time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!

Significant passages:

Act I. sc. iii, ll. 56-80

Act I, sc. iv, ll. 14-22

Journal entry: Choose one of the following: 1) What advice do Laertes and Polonius give Ophelia (be specific)? What do you think of their advice? Characterize Ophelia as she appears in this scene, OR 2) Contrast Polonius’s advice to Ophelia with his advice to Laertes, OR Connect Polonius and Ophelia to Castiglione’s views of men and women at court?

Lesson 3: Entrapment

Act II, scene i through Act II, scene ii.

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,

With windlasses and with assays of bias,

By indirections find directions out.

I entreat you both

That, being of so young days brought up with him

And sith so neighbored to his youth and havior

That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court

Some little time, so by your companies

To draw him on to pleasure, and to gather

So much as from occasion you may glean,

Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus

That opened lies within our remedy.

But what might you think

If I  had played the desk or table book,

Or given my heart awinking, mute and dumb,

Or looked upon this love with idle sight—

What might you think?

Be you and I behind the arras then.

Mark the encounter.

Why, then ‘tis none to you, for there is nothing

Either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in

reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving

how express and admirable!

‘Sblood, there is something in this more than

natural , if philosophy could find it out.

I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is

southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Do you hear, let them be well used. For they are

the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time.

After  your death you were better have a bad

epitaph than their ill report to their desert.

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,

Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,

And can say nothing—no, not for a king

Upon whose property and most dear life

A damned defeat was made.

The spirit that I have seen

May be the Devil, and the Devil hath power

To assume a pleasing shape.

The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

Journal entry: 1) For what purpose does Polonius send Reynaldo to Paris? Explain how he “by indirections find(s) directions out.” What is his motivation for spying on his own son?

OR 2) Shakespeare places the scene between the King, Queen, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern in close proximity to that between Polonius and Reynaldo. What is the analogy between them?

OR 3) explicate Hamlet’s soliloquy, ll. 502-560.

Lesson 4: The Play within a Play TC \l2 "

Act III, scene i and Act III scene ii

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

We are oft to blame in this—

‘Tis too much proved—that with devotions’ visage

And pious action we do sugar o’er

The Devil himself

The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plastering art,

Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it

Than is my deed to my most painted word.

Oh, heavy burden.

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of.

Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.

There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brook,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger.

For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature—to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

Dost thou hear?

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice

And could of men distinguish, her election

Hath sealed thee for herself. For thou hast bee

As one in suffering all that suffers nothing,

A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards

Hast ta’en with equal thanks.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

What do you call this play?

The Mousetrap.

You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.

‘Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn and Hell itself breathes out

Contagion to the world.

Journal entries: 1) Explicate Hamlet’s soliloquy, ll. 56-90.

OR 2) What advice does Hamlet give his actors regarding their craft: What, according to Hamlet, is the “purpose of playing”? Does Shakespeare’s Hamlet fulfill this purpose?

OR 3) How does Hamlet show up Rosencrantz with a recorder? What makes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a particular target for Hamlet’s disdain?

See the soliloquy performed by various Hamlets on video

Important lines: scene I, ll. 131-136; scene II, ll. 1-12; scene II, ll. 47-64

Lesson 5: Hamlet’s confrontation with Gertrude:

Act III, Scene iii through Act III, scene iv.

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

That single and peculiar life is bound

With all the strength and armor of the mind

To keep itself from noyance, but much more

That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests

The lives of many.

Behind the arras I’ll convey myself

To hear the process.

In the corrupted currents of this word

Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,

And am I then revenged,

To take him in the purging of his soul,

When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?

No.

Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty—

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,

Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,

Infects unseen…

And do not spread compost on the weeds

To make them ranker.

Assume a virtue if you have it not.

Journal entries: 1) Explicate the king’s speech, 36-72 OR 2) Why does the ghost appear again during Act III, scene iv? What significance might there be in the fact that the Queen cannot see or hear the ghost?

See scene with Gertrude.

Lesson 6: Hamlet’s exile

Act IV, scene i, through Act IV, scene iv.

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

But so much was our love

We would not understand what was most fit,

But like the owner of a foul disease,

To keep it from divulging let it fee

Even on the pith of life.

Compounded with the dust, whereto ‘tis kin

To bear all smooth and even,

This sudden sending him away must seem

Deliberate pause. Diseases desperate grown

By desperate appliance are relieved

Or not at all.

A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him.

This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,

That inward breaks, and shows no cause without

Why the man dies.

What does Hamlet find to admire in Fortinbras’s expedition against the Poles? What deficiency in himself makes him admire Fortinbras? What thematic elements do we find in Hamlet’s speech Act IV, scene iv, ll. 31-66? What complementary deficiency in Fortinbras does the scene stress?  How would Machiavelli view Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Claudius?

Lesson 7: Ophelia’s madness  

Act IV, scene v through Act IV, scene vii.

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

Her speech is nothing,

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move

The hearers to collection. They aim at it,

And botch the words up to fit their own thoughts,

Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,

Indeed would make one think there might be thought,

Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

To my sick soul, as in’t true nature is,

Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.

So full of artless jealousy is guild,

It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,

But in battalions! …The people muddied,

Think and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers,

For good Polonius’s death. And we have done but greenly

In huggermugger to inter him. Poor Ophelia

Divided from herself and her fair judgment.

Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged

Most thoroughly for my father.

I’m lost in it, my lord. But let him come.

It warms the very sickness in my heart

That I shall live and tell him to his teeth

“Thus didst thou.”

I will work him

To an exploit now ripe in my device,

Under the which he shall not choose but fall.

And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe,

But even his mother shall uncharged the practice

And call it accident.

Laertes, was you father dear to you?

Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,

A face without a heart?

There is within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it.

And nothing is at a like goodness still

For goodness, growing to pleurisy,

Dies in its own too much.

To the quick o’ the ulcer.

I will do’t,

And for that purpose I’ll anoint my sword.

I bought an unction of a mountebank

So mortal that but dip a knife in it,

Where it draws blood not cataplasm so rare,

Collected from all simples that have virtue

Under the moon, can save the thing from death

That is but scratched withal.

I’ll have prepared him

A chalice for the nonce, whereon but sipping,

If he by chance escape your venomed stuck,

Our purpose may hold there.

Journal entries: 1) How do you suppose the King succeeded in calming Laertes before Act IV, scene vii begins? What are the details of the plot against Hamlet? How does this scene show both the position of Laertes as the ideal courtier and of Claudius as a Machiavellian genius?

OR What is the significance of Ophelia’s encoded mad scene? (Look at flowers and the lyrics to the songs she sings.) How does this understanding foretell her doom?

Lesson 8: Hamlet’s return

Complete the play

Speaker and Situation                                             Thematic Element

Why e’en so! And now my Lady Worm’s chapless,

and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade. …

Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her,

let her paint an inch think, to this favor she must come.

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander

returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam;

and why of that loam whereto he was converted

may not stop a beer-barrel?

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.

And is’t not to be damned

To let this canker of our nature come

In further evil?

We defy augury. There is a special providence in

the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to

come; if it be not come, it will be now; if it be

not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

I am satisfied in nature,

Whose motive in this case should stir me mot

To my revenge. But in my terms of honor

I stand aloof, and will not reconcilement

Till by some elder masters of known honor

I have a voice and precedent of peace

To keep my name ungored.

back to top

Final Assignment:

Take

back to top