HAMLET

HAMLET

The plot

FIRST ACT

The story is set in the castle of Elsinore, where Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark, is dead. After two months Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, marries her brother-in-law Claudius. However, The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and tells Hamlet and Hamlet’s friends Horatio that he has been murdered by Claudius, who has poured poison in his ear. He asks Hamlet to avenge him.

SECOND ACT

Hamlet pretends to be mad to be able to carry out hisplan more easily. Polonius, the king's adviser, believes that Hamlet's madness is caused by love for his daughter. Hamlet makes sure that a troupe of actors mimic a performance similar to the murder of his father.

THIRD ACT

Claudius while watching the performance gets angry andgoes away, Hamlet goes to talk to his mother and discovers that Polonius is listening to their conversation, so Hamlet kills Polonius.

FOURTH ACT

Hamlet is sent to England to be killed but manages toescape. Laertes, son of Polonius, wants revenge for the death of his father and king Claudius, after discovering that Hamlet has escaped, organizes his death in a duel with Laertes.

FIFTH ACT

King Claudius prepares a poisoned drink to kill Hamlet and puts poison on the tip of Laertes‘s sword. Laertes woundsHamlet with the poisoned sword then the swords are exchanged and Hamlet wounds Laertes. The queen dies because she drinks a poisoned wine and Hamlet stabs the king. Both the king and Laertes die. Hamlet asks Horatio to make King of Denmark Fortinbras. Hamlet dies and Fortinbras takes possession of the kingdom.

Setting

SETTING

The story of Hamlet is set in the late Middle Ages (14th and 15th centuries), around the royal castle of Elsionore, a city in Denmark.

Denmark was a Protestant country, so Hamlet studied in Wittemberg, Germany, where Martin Luther started the protestant Reformation.

Shakespeare’s choice of Denmark may be due also to the development of the plot…

Hamlet is the most talkative of all Shakespeare’s characters.

In his famous essay, entiltled Desire and Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet, he holds that the most striking characteristic of Hamlet'language is its ambiguity.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Locan saysthat the real psychological dimension of the play lies not in Hamlet’s behaviour but in his lanuage.

THE CARACHTER OF HAMLET

the shock Hamlet recevies from the death of his father and re-marriage of his mother is the cause of his melancholy.

Everything he says is conveyed throughmetaphor, smile and, above all, wordplay.

His words have a hidden meaning; they have, therefore, enormus affinities with the language of the unconscious which proceeds equally through various forms of distortion and alterations in meaning.

THEMES

Hamlet is a play of life and death and of man's ambiguous relationship with both.Another important theme is "honour" and honourable action. The theme of honour makes it clear that any action to correct a wrong should be reasoned, not emotional.

Hamlet could be read simlply as a revenge tragedy. However, through the theme of vengeance, Shakespeare develops a series of themes that are central to humanity:

- The relationships between father and son, mother and son, Hamlet and his friends; - love relationships; - Madness; - Youth and age; - Action and inaction; - The corruption linked to power; - The existence of God and a life after death; - The meaning of the theatre itself.

Structure

THE PLAY-WITHIN-THE-PLAY

The play-within-the-play is present in the third act and is the only real thing in the play: it is put on purpose by Hamlet to bring out his father's killer. This transforms the actors themselves into an audience, which is split between the real audience and the audience on stage. This audience on the stage is made up of the actors of the play, the people who watch the play and The murder of Gonzago.

HAMLET AND THE TRAGEDY OF REVENGE

REVENGE IN THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

A NORMAL TRAGEDY OF REVENGE

Contrary to what someone might think, in the Elizabethan age everyone considered revenge sinful, but at the same time everyone enjoyed seeing it in plays. Furthermore, all the tragedies of revenge come from the Greeks, then the rules for writing them were established by Seneca.

In most, if not all revenge tragedies, a sexual or violent crime is committed against a member of the hero's family and normally, for various reasons, justice never punishes him.

In this way the hero is forced to take revenge as no one can legally help him. Usually the hero has a long time in which he thinks of a complex plan to make it happen.

OTHER FEATURES

There is a bloody action and many deaths occur throughout the intire play.

The appearance of a ghost to get the avenger to carry out the task

The avenger has very close relationships with the audience through soliloquies and asides. He becomes more isolated as the play develops.

CAN HAMLET BE REGARDEDAS A REVENGE TRAGEDY?

Yes, it has all the credentials to be. This is evidenced by many typical elements of the revenge tragedy: a violent crime committed against a member of the hero's family, the hero's period of doubt and complex planning, the presence of a ghost, the avenger, soliloquies and asides, his isolation and besides there is a bloody action and many deaths.

ABOUT HAMLET

In this case, in Hamlet, Shakespeare decided not to go out of balance and to follow the conventions, but by analyzing them. In fact, the play shows a lot of the work that is done psychologically through the reflections of the hero and his relationship with the outside world. In this way, by treating common themes of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare wanted to shake certainties that were already established. In fact, in the end he decided to bring the only important theme for him: doubt and uncertainty.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

It is part of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

This is the first Scene of the 3rd Act.

This is the most famous soliloquy on life and death.

Before Hamlet enters, the king and his chancellor Polonius hide to spy him and he reveals some things..

To be or not to be expresses a doubt of Hamlet: life or death? He doesn’t know what to do, but he thinks that the life is very difficult and the suicide could be an option to save himself. He considers the life like a fight, where there are only negative things, so the death could put an end to suffering. But there is a problem: what is there after the death? This is a problem that gives fear to Hamlet. Another problem is that he is afraid of being considered a coward.

WHY DOES HE PRETEND TO BE MAD?

He thinks if he pretends to be mad, his father’s killer will stop hiding the truth for him… ...but some of the crazy things Hamlet says actually make sense, so Polonius says: “THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS, YET THERE IS METHOD IN’T”

Today it’s still used and the modern version of it is: “There is method in his/her/my madness”. It means that there is a plan toward a goal in a series of actions that may initially look random

example of the expression today:

Your bedroom is a mess!

Yes, but there is a method in my madness, though: I know perfectly where everything is!

“I must be cruel, only to be kind”

Hamlet is angry with his mother because she has married his uncle Claudius, very soon after his father’s death. He tells his mother cruel things to shock her to realise the marriage is wrong. He says she can be a better person if she leaves her new husband, that’s why he says: “I MUST BE CRUEL, ONLY TO BE KIND”

In modern English, Shakespeare’s phrase is shortened to: “I MUST BE CRUEL TO BE KIND”, or just “CRUEL TO BE KIND”.

People say it when they do something unkind that will actually benefit someone.

example of the expression today:

I know I upset her when I told her to get a haircut, it was such a mess! I had to be cruel, to be kind.

Martin Luther King Jr.

HERE WE CAN SEE A TIMELINE WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS OF HIS LIFE:

Martin had an essential role in the American civil rights movement, struggling for justice and equality for African Americans.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held in Washington D.C., on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, final speaker Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.Here we can read part of this famous speech:

"I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.""I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream . . . I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

The non-violent resistance

Having learned of Mahatma Gandhi's theory of non-violence, he decides to assume it to their own model of life and struggle for equality. His sermons get more and more consensus, he begins to have many followers, he organizes public demonstrations in which it regularly mobilizes millions of citizens and takes sides of the weakest. This causes him to be imprisoned several times, but also leads him to obtain the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.In the late 1960s, these struggles lead to considerable gains for the Americans.

The murder

At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. During King’s funeral a tape recording was played in which King spoke of how he wanted to be remembered after his death: “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others”.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

For me, a leader is a person that guides people with the force of his words, sharing his ideas and thoughts, being open-minded and being at the forefront. A leader has to make sure that the country or the group he leads is in a situation of equity in every area.When a person that pretends to be a leader starts showing off his muscles and using his force (militar or else) towards citizens, becomes someone more similar to a repressor. By that, I don't want to say that a leader mustn't punish, I mean that he has to tempt the citizens to demonstrate their ideas, not to cover them. When the people you are leading understands that you are interested in their ideas and that you are not commanding, you're guiding, they will follow you with more happiness and will be motivated, knowing that their ideas are important, just as yours.