In class on Friday we began reviewing the characters and narrative of
Hamlet.
If you didn't finish reviewing by using the scene summaries and filling
in character & plot gaps in your notes you should do that on your
own so you can ask questions at the beginning of next week. We then
watched the Branagh version of the end of 5.2. I'm curious to hear what
you think about his directorial choices.
Here's the work you need to complete on the blog before class on Wednesday.
1. Choose a thread from
Hamlet.
appearance and truth
corruption and honesty
madness and normalcy
playing and acting
words and speaking
women and womanliness: mothers, daughters, lovers, “strumpets”
men and manliness: fathers, uncles, friends, rivals
action and inaction
water and other fluids
responses to authority: mocking, obeying, flattering, etc.
life and death (and the afterlife)
ghosts and spirits
sleep and dreams
flora (flowers, plans) and fauna (animals)
fortune and fate
I and eye (the self and seeing)
2. Choose five quotations (there are many below--loosely grouped--but
you may choose your own if you'd like) through which the thread is
woven.
“Seems, madam! Nay, it
is; I know not ‘seems.’” (Hamlet, 1.2)
“. . . these indeed seem,
/ For they are actions that a man might play / But I have that within which
passeth show; / These are but the trappings and the suits of woe.”
(Hamlet,1.2)
“That one may smile, and
smile, and be a villain” (Hamlet 1.5.114)
“The spirit I have seen
May be the devil, and the
devil hath power
to assume a pleasing
shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my
melancholy,
As he is very potent with
such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.”
(Hamlet 2.2)
“Perhaps he loves you
now; / And now no soil nor cautel [falseness] doth besmirch / The virtue of his
will: but you must fear, / His greatness weigh’d, his will is not his own,”
(Laertes, 1.3)
“When the blood burns,
how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows,” (Polonius 1.3).
“Do not believe
his vows; for they are brokers,
. . .
Breathing like sanctified
and pious bawds,
The
better to beguile”
(Polonius, 1.3)
“. . . there put on him [Laertes] / What forgeries you please; marry,
none so rank / As may dishonor him” (Polonius, 2..1.20-22)
“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”
(Polonius, 2.1.69-72)
“But virtue, as it new
will be mov’d,
Though lewdness court it
in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a
radiant angel link’d,
Will sate itself in a
celestial bed
And prey on garbage,”
(Ghost 1.5)
“O wicked wit and gifts,
that have the power
So to seduce!—won to his
shameful lust
The will of my most
seeming-virtuous queen”
(Ghost 1.5.50-52)
“Some little time: so by
your companies
To draw him on to
pleasures, and to gather
So much as from occasion
you may glean,
Whether aught to us
unknown afflicts him thus,
That open’d lies within
our remedy,”
(Claudius,
2.2.14-18).
“The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring
art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed to my most
painted word: / O heavy burden” (Claudius, 3.1.59-62)
For we have closely sent
for Hamlet hither,
That he, as ‘twere by
accident, may here
Affront Ophelia.
Her father and myself,
lawful espials*, *spies
Will so bestow ourselves
that, seeing unseen,
We may of their encounter
frankly judge,
And gather by him, as he
is behaved,
If’t be the affliction of
his love or no
That thus he suffers for.
(Claudius, 3.1)
Hamlet:
Where’s your father?
Ophelia:
At home, my lord.
Hamlet:
Let the doors be shut
upon him that he may play the fool nowhere but in ‘s own house.
(III,1)
I have heard of your
paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make
yourselves another.
(Hamlet, 3.1)
Do
you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? (Hamlet, 3.2.364)
[Polonius hides behind
the arras . . .]
Polonius [Behind]: what,
ho! Help, help, help!
Hamlet [Drawing {his
sword}]: How now! a rat? . . .
(3.4)
“ . . . my two
schoolfellows, / Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d . . .” (Hamlet
3.4.222)
[Claudius sends
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England
with Hamlet with a note telling England
to kill Hamlet.]
[When that doesn’t work
he convinces Laertes to seek a deceitful revenge in a fencing match]
“even his mother shall
uncharged the practice, / and call it accident.” (Laertes, 4.7.74-75)
“I will do ‘t / And for that purpose I’ll anoint
my sword [with a poison]” (Laertes, 4.7)
“And that he calls for drink, I’ll have
prepar’d him
A chalice for the nonce;
whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape
your venom’d stuck,
Our purpose may hold
there.”
(Claudius, 4.7.155-178)
Why as a woodcock to mine
own springe, Osric.
I am justly kill’d with
mine own treachery.
(Laertes, 5.2.__)
The foul practice/hath
turn’d itself on me.
(Laertes, 5.2)
She swoons to see them
bleed.
(King, 5.2)
Hamlet: O villany! Ho!
Let the door be lock’d.
Treachery! Seek it out.
Laertes: He is justly served.
It is a poison temper’d
by himself.
Exchange forgiveness with
me, noble Hamlet.
Mine and my father’s
death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me.
(5.2)
And let me speak to the
yet unknowing world
How these things came
about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and
unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments,
casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by
cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot,
purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’
heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
(Horatio, 5.2)
____________________
“particular men / . . . /
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, / Shall in the general censure take
corruption / From that particular fault: the dram of evil / Doth all the noble
substance of a doubt to his own scandal,. (Hamlet 1.4)
“How wear, stale, flat
and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses
of this world!
Fie on ‘t! ‘tis an
unweeded garden,
That grows to seed;
things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That
it should come to this!
But two months dead! Nay,
not so much two . . .”
(Hamlet, 1.2)
“Something is rotten in
the state of Denmark.”
(Ma rcellus, 1.4.90)
“The time is out of
joint.”
(Hamlet, 1.5.210)
“this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory”
“And yet, to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me,”
(Hamlet, 2.2.305-320)
“. . . use every man
after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?” (Hamlet, 2.2.534-5).
Hamlet [to Ophelia]: “Get
thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I
could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me:
I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offenses at my beck
than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to
act them in. What should such fellows as
I do crawling between heaven and earth!
We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.” (Hamlet, 3.2)
“Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed,
Stwe’d in corruption,
honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty—“
(Hamlet [to his mother after the Mouse Trap] 3.4.104)
____________________
“This above all: to thine
own self be true”
(Polonius 1.3)
“Aye, sir; to be honest, as this world goes,
is to be one man picked out of ten thousand,” (Hamlet, 2.2.192-193).
Hamlet [to Ophelia]: “Ha,
ha! Are you honest?”
Hamlet [to Ophelia]: “The
power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than
the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness”
Hamlet [to Ophelia]: “You
should not have believed me” (3.1)
Hamlet [to Ophelia]:
Where’s your father?
Ophelia: At home. (3.1)
Hamlet [to Ophelia]: God
hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. (3.1)
____________________
“an excellent play . . .
set down with as much modesty as cunning . . . called it an honest method”
(Hamlet, 2.2.445-446, 450)
Speech from memory II, 2,
456-470 [speech about revenge taken from a play about the fall of Troy]
“Let them [the players]
be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after
your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you
live,” (Hamlet, 2.2.530-2).
“You could, for a need,
study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and
insert in ‘t, could you not?” (Hamlet, 2.2.545-6)
“What’s Hecuba to him, or
he to Hecuba.”
(Hamlet, 2.2.586)
“…The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the King.”
(Hamlet, 2.2)
“suit the action to the
word, the word to the action” (Hamlet 3.2.18-9)
“hold, as ‘twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image . . .”
(Hamlet.3.2.23-4)
[Hamlet uses “Mouse Trap”
to catch the king]
____________________
“ . . . Frailty, thy name is woman!” (Hamlet
1.2)
For Lord Hamlet,
Believe so much in him,
that he is young,
And with a larger tether
may he walk
Than may be given you.
(Polonius 1.3)
“O most pernicious
woman!” (Hamlet 1.5.111)
For if the sun breed
maggots in a dead dog, being god kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?
(Hamlet 2.2)
“Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be
a breeder of sinners?” (Hamlet 3.1)
God hath given you one
face, and you make yourselves another. (Hamlet 3.1)
Ophelia [talking to
Hamlet about a speech in the play-within-a-play]: “’Tis brief, my lord”
Hamlet: “As woman’s love”
(3.2.150-1)
“And would it not so you
are my mother” (3.4)
“Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed,
Stwe’d in corruption,
honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty—“
(Hamlet [to his mother after the Mouse Trap] 3.4.104)
O, speak to me no more; /
These words like daggers enter in my ears…
[. . . Ghost appears]
(Gertrude 3.4.105-6)
Queen: Be thou assur’d,
if words be made of breath
And breath of life, I
have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to
me. (Gertrude 3.4.216-7)
____________________
“. . . I perchance
hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on” (Hamlet 1.5.190-1).
“Mad for thy love?”
(Polonius 2.1.94)
“That he is mad, ‘tis
true; ‘tis pity, And pity ‘tis ‘tis true.” (Polonius 2.2.104)
“Into the madness wherein
now he raves . . .” (Polonius 2.2.159)
“he is far gone”
(Polonius 2.2.202)
“Though this be madness,
yet there is method in ‘t.” (Polonius 2.2.217)
[Ophelia describes an
encounter with Hamlet (2.1.87-94 and
98-111)]
“I am but mad
north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,”
(Hamlet 2.2.385-6)
“with a crafty madness, [Hamlet] keeps aloof”
(Guildenstern 3.1.8)
“It
shall be so
Madness in great ones
must not unwatch’d go.” (Claudius 3.1.200-1)
[Hamlet sees the Ghost;
Gertrude does not] “Alas, he’s mad! (Queen 3.4.118)
I essentially am not in
madness, / But mad in craft (Hamlet [to his mother] 3.4.205-6)
[In Act IV, 1, the word
“mad” or “madness” is used by the King and Queen in reference to Hamlet.]
“Let in the maid, that
out a maid
Never departed more.”
“Young men will do ‘t, if
they come to ‘t;
By cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you
tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
He answers:
So would I ha’ done, by
yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.” (Ophelia 4.5)
“And will a’ not come
again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy death-bed,
He never will come again.
. .” (Ophelia 4.5)
“Your sister’s drowned, Laertes…she chanted
snatches of old tunes, / As one incapable of her own distress.” (Gertrude 4.7)
____________________
“Remember thee! / Yea,
from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,” (Hamlet
1.5.105).
“So, uncle, there you
are. Now to my word;
It is “Adieu, adieu!
Remember me.”
I have sworn’t.”
(Hamlet 1.5.166-8)
“What’s Hecuba to him, or
he to Hecuba.”
(Hamlet, 2.2.586)
“. . . Am I a coward?
. . .
But I am pigeon-liver’d*
and lack gall *cowardly
To make oppression
bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all
the region kites* *
Scavenger birds
With this slave’s offal*:
bloody, bawdy villain! *
King Claudius’ guts
Remorseless, treacherous,
lecherous, kindles villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I!
This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear
father murder’d
Prompted to my revenge by
heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore,
unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like
a very drab*, *
prostitute
A scullion*!” *
kitchen servant
(Hamlet 2.2)
“Thus conscience does
make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue
of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the
pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great
pitch and moment
With this regard their
currents turn awry
And lose the name of
action.”
(Hamlet 3.1.84-89)
“Now could I drink hot
blood.”
(Hamlet 3.2)
“Now might I do it pat,
now he is a-praying;
And now I’ll do ‘t. And
so he goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged…
No!”
(Hamlet 3.3)
[“How all occasions do
inform against me . . .” Hamlet finds out that Fortinbras is willing to waste
“two thousand souls” for “a little patch of ground / that hath in it no profit
but the name,” while Hamlet himself cannot act despite the murder of his
father. (4.4)]
“And so have I a noble
father lost;
A sister driven into
desp’rate terms . . .
My revenge will come”
(Laertes.4.7.27-31)
King: “what would you
undertake, / To show yourself your father’s son indeed / More than in words”
Laertes: “To cut his
throat i’ the church.”
(4.7.138-41)
[See: 4.7.184-201:
Ophelia allows herself to drown; and 1.3.141, “I shall obey, my lord”; Does
Ophelia also have a problem with action?
Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern also “obey”; what if they all
acted on their own will instead of following Claudius?]
____________________
“I shall obey, my
lord,” (Ophelia 1.3)
“ . . . as you did
command, / I did repel his letters and denied / His access to me,” (Ophelia
2.2.120-121)
{Note the Queen has a
total of thirty lines in the first two acts.
Hamlet has many soliloquies that are longer.}
“But we both obey. . .” (Guildenstern)
“I shall obey you…
And for your part
Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties
be the happy cause
Of Hamlet’s wildness; so
shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his
wonted way again,
To both your honors.”
(Gertrude 3.1)
____________________
“your noble son is mad: /
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, / What is ‘t but to be nothing else
but mad” (Polonius 2.2.98-100)
“That he is mad, ‘tis true:
‘tis true ‘tis pity, / And pity ‘tis ‘tis true: a foolish figure” (Polonius
2.2.104-105)
“My liege, and madam, to
expostulate
What majesty should be,
what duty it,
Why day is day, night
night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste
night, day and time.
Therefore since brevity
is the soul of wit
And tediousness the limbs
and outward flourishes,
I will be brief,”
(Polonius 2.2.92-98).
“The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy,
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical pastoral . . .” (Polonius 2.2.403-406).
“More matter, with less art.”
(Gertrude 2.2.102)
_______________________________
“the funeral bak’d meats
/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”
(Hamlet 1.2)
“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself
into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting
had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst
self-slaughter!”
(Hamlet 1.2.31-4)
“Why, what should be the
fear?
I do not set my life at a
pin’s fee,”
(Hamlet 1.4.70-1).
“You cannot, sir, take
from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except
my life, except my life.” (Hamlet 2.2.215-217)
King: . . . where’s
Polonius
Hamlet: At supper.
K: At supper! Where?
H: Not where he eats, but
where he is eaten.
King: Where is Polonius?
Hamlet: In heaven; send
thither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ the other
place yourself.
King [to attendants]: Go
seek [the corpse of Polonius] there.
Hamlet: He will stay till
you come.
(4.3)
“Alas, poor Yorick! I
knew him Horatio” (Hamlet [while
holding a skull]5.1)
“The rest is silence.”
(Hamlet 5.2)
3.
Post
on the blog. (1) Type the thread you've chosen. (2) Type out each of
the five quotations you've chosen including act and scene. (3) Under
each quotation write an explication of the quotation's meaning in
relation its context (its scene, its act) and in relation to
the thread. (You might also point on the quotation's relevance to other
threads too.) (4) After that develop a bold, insight about the
significance of thread in relation to the play as a whole. (This
paragraph will be similar to the center of the webs you created at the
beginning of the year and similar to an open response essay on the
MCAS.)
Your post(s) will be structured in this sequence.
Thread
Quotation 1
Explication 1
Q2
Ex2
Q3
Ex3
Q4
Ex4
Q5
Ex5
Thread overall
all the best,
Mr. James Cook
