Hamlet

1
Hamlet

• Day Two
• ENGL 305
• Dr. Fike

2
Outlines

• MLA formatget straight on this.
• WC listone 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 Ill be
  revenged / Most throughly for my father.
• 4.7.127 Laertes wants To cut his Hamlets
  throat i the church.
• 4.7.129 The king says, Revenge should have no
  bounds.

6
POINT

• What unifies all three soliloquies is Hamlets
  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 Hamlets To be or not
  to be soliloquy, see the next slides from my
  article Thinking in a Discipline An Assignment
  in Critical Thinking Class, The CEA Forum 36.2
  (2007).
• 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
  Hamlets soliloquy, along with conscience and
  sin.

12
Final Slide

• His conclusionand here he finally switches from
  third person singular to first person plural,
  presumably in order to include himselfis 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