Bài tập lớn môn văn học Anh Mỹ

1.What three languages were spoken in England in the 11th 13th centuries, and whom were they spoken by? 2.What is a romance, a fabliaux, a bestiaria? In what language were they written? Part II. William Shakespeare: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark 1.Collect other researchers’ viewpoints and studies about the literary works. 1.Collect other researchers’ viewpoints and studies about the literary works. 2.Analyze the related historical background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas. 3.Analyze the related literary trends and background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas. 4.Identify the author’s message (intentions), his literary talents and give comments.

ĐỀ VIẾT TIỂU LUẬN KẾT THÚC HỌC PHẦN (Hệ từ xa theo phương thức E-learning ) MÔN: Văn Học Anh Mỹ – (Mã) EN 16 Mã đề: 02 Part I What three languages were spoken in England in the 11th - 13th centuries, and whom were they spoken by? - Three main languages were in use in England in the later medieval period – Middle - English, Anglo-Norman (or French) and Latin The Middle English was spoken in England, some parts of Wales, south east Scotland - and Scottish burghs, to some extent Ireland Anglo-Norman, also known as Anglo-Norman French (Norman: Anglo-Normaund) (French: anglo-normand), was a dialect of Old Norman French that was used in England and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Great Britain and Ireland during the Anglo-Norman period Anglo-Norman had emerged as a distinct dialect of French after the Norman Conquest in 1066 established a French-speaking aristocracy in English It was still dominant in the mid-thirteenth century when Robert of Gretham - wrote his advice on moral conduct, the Mirur The Catholic church used Latin in its services, so all liturgical books were written in this language until the Reformation in the sixteenth century The theologian John Wycliffe began to translate the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century What is a romance, a fabliaux, a bestiaria? In what language were they written? 2.1 A romance - In the strictest academic terms, a romance is a narrative genre in literature that involves a mysterious, adventurous, or spiritual story line where the focus is on a quest that involves bravery and strong values, not always a love interest However, modern definitions of romance also include stories that have a relationship issue as - the main focus In the 21st century the Romance languages are all written in the Latin alphabet, with certain modifications, though until the mid-19th century Romanian was normally written in Cyrillic (used in Moldova until 1989), and, in the Middle - Ages, Arabic script was used for some Spanish dialects 2.2 A fabliau The fabliau is defined as a short narrative in (usually octosyllabic) verse, between 300 and 400 lines long, its content often comic or satiric Fabliau (plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between c 1150 and 1400 They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes—contrary to the church and to the nobility Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined According to R Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism - in Europe Fabliaux, after all, are comic tales written in French between the 12th and 14th centuries 2.3 A bestiaria - A bestiary (from bestiarum vocabulum) is a compendium of beasts Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson This reflected the belief that the world itself was the Word of God and that every living thing had its own special meaning For example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living - representation of Jesus The bestiary is also reference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature Medieval bestiaries contained detailed descriptions and illustrations of species native to Western Europe, exotic animals and what in modern times are considered to be imaginary animals Descriptions of the animals included the physical characteristics associated with the creature, although these were often physiologically incorrect, along with the Christian morals that the animal represented The description was then often accompanied by an artistic illustration of the animal as described in the bestiary Part II William Shakespeare: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601 It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother Hamlet is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".[1] It was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime[2] and still ranks among his most performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879.[3] It has inspired many other writers— from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and Iris Murdoch—and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella" Collect other researchers’ viewpoints and studies about the literary works Hamlet was a very real success in its own day An unauthorized quarto, Q1, was published in 1603, so corrupt and abbreviated that it prompted the publication in 1604 of a quarto (Q2) that was, according to its title page, "Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy." Other quartos followed in 1611 and some time before 1623, suggesting a strong demand by the reading public The classical scholar Gabriel Harvey lauded the play as having the capacity "to please the wisest sort." Anthony Scoloker, in 1604, described true literary excellence as something that "should please all, like Prince Hamlet." Ben Jonson, though he faulted Shakespeare for having "small Latin, and less Greek," and for too often ignoring the classical unities, generously allowed, in his commendatory tribute in the Shakespeare Folio edition of 1623, that Shakespeare was worthy of comparison as a tragic writer with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and without a rival as a comic dramatist even in "insolent Greece or haughty Rome." During the Restoration in 1660 and afterwards, Hamlet was accorded the unusual respect of being performed without extensive adaptation, though it was substantially shortened Samuel Pepys, in his Diary, greatly admired the play, as performed repeatedly by Thomas Betterton from 1661 until 1709; in 1688 he praised the role of Hamlet as "the best part, I believe, that ever man acted." The Earl of Shaftesbury appears to have spoken on behalf of other eighteenth-century observers when, in his Characteristic Advice to an Author (1710), he praised Hamlet as "almost one continued moral, a series of deep reflections, drawn from the mouth upon the subject of one single accident and calamity, naturally fitted to move horror and compassion." Hamlet "appears to have most affected English hearts, and has perhaps been oftenest acted of any which have come upon the stage." Thomas Hanmer, in Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1736) similarly found an instructive universality in the play that demonstrated brilliantly how it conforms with the demands of poetic justice Samuel Johnson commended Shakespeare for his "just representation of general nature." These comments are notably consistent in their view of the play as morally instructive and universal Romantic criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries turned in quite a new direction, toward a study of character and emotion Goethe was perhaps the first to focus on Hamlet's hesitation to act "Amazement and sorrow overwhelm the solitary young man," wrote Goethe in his Wilhelm Meister, 1778 and 1795 Many critics have wondered if Goethe was not talking at least partly about the brooding melancholic protagonist of his own autobiographical meditation, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) The same suspicion lingers in an appraisal of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, 1808, where the author frankly admitted that to understand Hamlet fully "it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds." "I have a smack of Hamlet in myself," Coleridge wrote The writer who was addicted to laudanum and who, according to legend at least, composed his "Kubla Kahn" following an opium-induced dream and then left it unfinished, might be expected to see Hamlet as one who "vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve." The critical sentiment is all the more powerful in that it reflects Romantic sensibility in many other writers Charles Lamb wrote (On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, 1811) of his desire "to know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be moved." William Hazlitt declared, in 1817, that "It is we who are Hamlet," most of all in the way in which his "powers have been eaten up by thought." For August W von Schlegel, in 1809, the burden that Hamlet faces "cripples the power of thought." This fascination with character as the central concern of drama spilled over into other characters in Hamlet as well, most of all with Ophelia "Poor Ophelia!" wrote Anna Jameson "Oh, far too soft, too good, too fair to be cast among the briers of this workingday world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life!" (Characteristics of Women, 1832) Critics like Thomas Campbell lambasted Hamlet for his insensitivity in his dealings with Ophelia A new interest in women was to be seen everywhere Her drowning, as described by Gertrude, became the subject for many paintings by John Everett Millais (1852), Henry Tresham, Richard Westell, and others Mary Cowden Clarke imagined what the girlhood of Ophelia might have been like in her The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines(1851-2) Helen Faucit similarly wondered about the afterlife of Ophelia in On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters, 1885 George Eliot, in Mill on the Floss, 1860, proposed that "we can conceive of Hamlet's having married Ophelia" and then managing to get through life "with a reputation for sanity." The characters of Hamlet, as with Falstaff and Cleopatra and other legendary figures, took on lives of their own Critics delighted in wondering what it would have been like to know these characters and to pursue their destinies outside the bounds of the plays as Shakespeare had written them The interweaving of author, character, reader, and viewer was seen as a fundamental quality of dramatic creation through which Shakespeare had become so intensely personal Shakespeare had become England's great national poet through whom the nation could celebrate its cultural and political greatness in the nineteenth century Hamlet stood as his quintessential play at the center of this cultural triumph A landmark of literary criticism of Hamlet in the early twentieth century is A C Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904 Hamlet is, for Bradley, one of the four "great" Shakespearean tragedies, along with Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth Hamlet is, like the others, "great" in its embrace of universal issues: good and evil, temptation and sin, selfknowledge and betrayal Hamlet stands revealed in this broad moral context as an idealist, deeply sensitive, vulnerable to the shocks of a father's murder and a mother's hasty remarriage He generalizes philosophically in ways that resonate with our longing to understand ourselves and the universe in which we find ourselves Bradley deftly incorporates the resources of "character" criticism that the nineteenth century had found so compatible and enlightening Character criticism continued to pursue its aims, especially in Ernest Jones's Hamlet and Oedipus (1910 and 1959), where this disciple of Sigmund Freud enlarged upon the psychoanalytical thesis that Freud had himself propounded in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), namely, that Hamlet is driven subconsciously by an incestuous desire for his mother which complicates his task of avenging the murder of his father; how can he kill the hated uncle for having taken sexual possession of the mother whom Hamlet himself yearns for? Gilbert Murray, in Hamlet and Orestes (1914), pursued a parallel method of psychological and anthropological analysis by studying Hamlet as a kind of ritual drama that is profoundly related to ancient tribal customs and ceremonies This approach owed much to the work of Carl Jung Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and other studies proposed that drama can be seen as a response to mythic patterns that include the seasonal changes of the year: Hamlet, in these terms, is autumnal, wintry, melancholic Maynard Mack's "The World of Hamlet" (Yale Review, 1952), sees the play as dominated by the interrogative mood, by questions, riddles, enigmas, and mysteries At the same time, critical responses to "character" criticism were emerging One of the most insistent was that of historical criticism Practiced in good part by academic scholars motivated by a new professionalism in their ranks, the method insisted, as did Sir Walter Raleigh (a Professor of English Literature at Oxford, not related to the courtier named Raleigh or Ralegh who served Queen Elizabeth and James I), that "A play is not a collection of the biographies of those who appear in it," nor is it a moral play (Shakespeare, 1907) Instead, a play is a kind artifice arising out of a particular historical milieu E E Stoll's Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (1933) adroitly captures this critical point of view Hamlet, for Stoll, is not a study of psychological types; it is a revenge play, the resources for which are provided by the conventions of a dramatic type Hamlet's delay is, in these terms, necessary in order that Hamlet may test whether Claudius is indeed the murderer that the Ghost has declared him to Be Lily Bess Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1952) declares by its title its commitment to historical circumstances, and especially to Elizabethan understanding of melancholy John Dover Wilson, in What Happens in Hamlet (1935) locates the play in the Elizabethan playhouse as a way of asking, among other matters, whether Hamlet perceives that he is being overheard by the King and Polonius during his painful interview with Ophelia Theodore Spencer, a Professor at Harvard, looks closely at Shakespeare's indebtedness to innovative and heterodox thinkers in the Renaissance like Copernicus, Montaigne, Mirandola, and Machiavelli (Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 1942) Historical criticism continues to this day The 1930s saw another critical revolution, this time vested as a critique of historical criticism The so-called "New" critics, such as G Wilson Knight, Derek Traversi, and L C Knights, insisted that historical criticism was too often dry and philological in its quest for factual information about writers' biographies an other historical concerns Surely, criticism should turn its attention instead to close reading of texts, to image patterns, to the sounds of poetry Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935) catalogued Shakespeare's images in related clusters: diseases, poison, ulcers, blisters, and the like Maurice Charney's Style in "Hamlet" (1971) turned the new interest in imagery to the theater, where stage picture, gesture, props, and all that is scenic could be seen as creating a language of theatrical gesture Historical critics quickly realized that they could contribute to such theatrical insights rather than simply allowing themselves to be pilloried as academic pedants Andrew Gurr (Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 1987) and Ann Jennalie Cook (The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 15761642 (1981) provided a wealth of new information and insight about those who came to see the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries In the cultural upheaval brought about by protests against the Vietnam War, racial conflict, social unrest, the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and so much more in the 1960s and afterwards, literary criticism of Hamlet found several new forms of expression One was the so-called "New Historicism," championed by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, and others like Stephen Orgel and Richard Helgerson who were more or less loosely allied to the movement The new historicists owed much in theoretical terms to Clifford Geertz's Negara, 1980, and to Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965), where critics could find eloquent models of how public ceremonials of statecraft offered themselves as myths about the creation and manipulation of political power Prompted by their resistance to the governorship of California and then the U.S presidency of Ronald Reagan, the new New Historicists formed a close relationship with the Cultural Materialism of English and continental critics that included Raymond Williams, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Terry Eagleton, and others Together, they devoted their energies to politically radical interpretations of texts as expressive of rapid political and social change They took sustenance from the galvanizing new insights offered by Jan Kott, a Polish political activist who viewed Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays against the apocalyptic background of a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain after World War II Hamlet was for Kott "a drama of political crime." Its protagonist was one who was "deeply involved in politics, sarcastic, passionate and brutal"; like James Dean he was a young rebel intent on "action, not reflection" (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1964) Kott was visibly indebted to the absurdist drama and existential philosophy of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus Hamlet was thus a bleak comedy of the absurd through which "we ought to get at our modern experience, anxiety and sensibility." Feminist criticism took on new energy in these late twentieth-century years of experiment and rebellion Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 1975, was an inspirational study that brought the feminist concerns of the nineteenth century into a new political context Lisa Jardine's Still Harping on Daughters, 1983, with its title derived from Polonius's response to Hamlet's "mad" discourse about daughters who should not be permitted to "walk I' th' sun," turned the focus of feminist criticism in Hamlet to animadversions against patriarchal interference in the lives of young women Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his The Elementary Structures of Criticism, 1949, offered a bracing model of new ways of thinking about family relationships, in which men are so often the controlling force, making use of daughters as resources to be pawned and traded in commercial and political negotiations among men Arnold Van Gennep (The Rites of Passage, 1960) and Victor Turner (The Ritual Process, 1969) offered further anthropological models for exploring the transitional moments in human life—birth, puberty, marriage, death—that made for such compelling and threatening conflicts in the lives especially of women Both Ophelia and Gertrude provided splendid materials for analyses by Coppélia Kahn, Lynda Boose, Marjorie Garber, Madelon Sprengnether, Jean Howard, Gail Paster, Phyllis Rackin, Dympna Callaghan, Jyotsna Singa, Marianne Novy, Carol Neely, Valerie Traub, and many others Some feminist critics like Ania Loomba brought to this lively discourse the perspective of third world experience Still others, like Kim Hall and Margo Hendricks, looked at gender in terms of race relations Same-sex relationships became the concern of Bruce Smith, Laurie Shannon, Jonathan Goldberg, Mario DiGangi, and still others Hamlet was a central text in all these explorations Post-structural criticism, or deconstruction, arrived on the scene at more or less the same time in the late twentieth century It owed its philosophical and critical origins especially to the linguistic and semiotic work on the Continent, notably in France, of Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida For such thinkers, "meaning" and "authorial intent" were protean and indeterminate concepts, best understood as arbitrary signifiers in a complex system of difference Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (1985), showed how infinitely supple Shakespeare's poetic language could be, with its incessant play of words and its delight in punning Hamlet, viewed in this light, could be seen as superb practitioner in the art of verbal play Deconstruction has led to new and challenging insights in editing, as well, by insisting, in Foucaultian fashion, that texts are multiple and evolving, especially in the theater Hamlet, with its extensive differences between the second quarto and the 1623 Folio, and then even more remarkably by the variations embodied in the unauthorized quarto of 1601, continues to be a battleground for rival textual theories as to how this great work came into being and then evolved Analyze the related historical background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas The story of Shakespeare's Hamlet was derived from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by the 16th-century scholar Franỗois de Belleforest Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet, though some scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the UrHamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet that exists today He almost certainly wrote his version of the title role for his fellow actor, Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time In the 400 years since its because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain Shakespeare went far beyond making uncertainty a personal quirk of Hamlet’s, introducing a number of important ambiguities into the play that even the audience cannot resolve with certainty For instance, whether Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudius’s guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III; whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes riding on some of these questions are enormous—the actions of these characters bring disaster upon an entire kingdom At the play’s end it is not even clear whether justice has been achieved By modifying his source materials in this way, Shakespeare was able to take an unremarkable revenge story and make it resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that began in fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to the Middle Ages The scholars who enthusiastically rediscovered these classical texts were motivated by an educational and political ideal called (in Latin) humanitas—the idea that all of the capabilities and virtues peculiar to human beings should be studied and developed to their furthest extent Renaissance humanism, as this movement is now called, generated a new interest in human experience, and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of human understanding Hamlet’s famous speech in Act II, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297) is directly based upon one of the major texts of the Italian humanists, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to a better understanding of how to act, and their fondest hope was that the coordination of action and understanding would lead to great benefits for society as a whole As the Renaissance spread to other countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, a more skeptical strain of humanism developed, stressing the limitations of human understanding For example, the sixteenth-century French humanist, Michel de Montaigne, was no less interested in studying human experiences than the earlier humanists were, but he maintained that the world of experience was a world of appearances, and that human beings could never hope to see past those appearances into the “realities” that lie behind them This is the world in which Shakespeare places his characters Hamlet is faced with the difficult task of correcting an injustice that he can never have sufficient knowledge of—a dilemma that is by no means unique, or even uncommon And while Hamlet is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be answered because they concern supernatural and metaphysical matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the difficulty of knowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence, their motivations, their feelings, their relative states of sanity or insanity The world of other people is a world of appearances, and Hamlet is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty of living in that world Identify the author’s message (intentions), his literary talents and give comments 4.1 Author’s message Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a prose work by the French writer Franỗois de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne The prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain Shakespeare went far beyond making uncertainty a personal quirk of Hamlet’s, introducing a number of important ambiguities into the play that even the audience cannot resolve with certainty For instance, whether Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudius’s guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III; whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes riding on some of these questions are enormous—the actions of these characters bring disaster upon an entire kingdom At the play’s end it is not even clear whether justice has been achieved By modifying his source materials in this way, Shakespeare was able to take an unremarkable revenge story and make it resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that began in fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to the Middle Ages The scholars who enthusiastically rediscovered these classical texts were motivated by an educational and political ideal called (in Latin) humanitas—the idea that all of the capabilities and virtues peculiar to human beings should be studied and developed to their furthest extent Renaissance humanism, as this movement is now called, generated a new interest in human experience, and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of human understanding Hamlet’s famous speech in Act II, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297) is directly based upon one of the major texts of the Italian humanists, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to a better understanding of how to act, and their fondest hope was that the coordination of action and understanding would lead to great benefits for society as a whole As the Renaissance spread to other countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, a more skeptical strain of humanism developed, stressing the limitations of human understanding For example, the sixteenth-century French humanist, Michel de Montaigne, was no less interested in studying human experiences than the earlier humanists were, but he maintained that the world of experience was a world of appearances, and that human beings could never hope to see past those appearances into the “realities” that lie behind them This is the world in which Shakespeare places his characters Hamlet is faced with the difficult task of correcting an injustice that he can never have sufficient knowledge of—a dilemma that is by no means unique, or even uncommon And while Hamlet is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be answered because they concern supernatural and metaphysical matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the difficulty of knowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence, their motivations, their feelings, their relative states of sanity or insanity The world of other people is a world of appearances, and Hamlet is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty of living in that world 4.2 Shakespeare’ talents Shakespeare played a huge role in expanding the expressive capacity of the language, especially in the verbal representation of thinking and subjectivity But the language, written and spoken, relied on expansion through borrowing from Latin and the European vernacular tongues Such borrowing, we now realize, was and continues to be a major reason for the expansiveness of English For writers like Shakespeare, the ready absorption of foreign words must have been a powerful stimulus to stylistic and intellectual invention The massive and relatively sudden explosion of great literary creativity during Shakespeare’s lifetime supports this supposition, as does the appearance of works such as Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (1582), which devotes itself, in part, to the defense of English as a literary tongue Mulcaster believed that English had entered upon a formative golden age: “Such a period in the Greke tung was that time, when Demosthenes lived, and that learned race of the father philosophers: such a period in the Latin tung, was that time, when Tullie [Cicero] lived, and those of that age: such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies.” Shakespeare’s own religious views cannot be known with certainty But his plays suggest a deep interest in the efficacy of ritual and the status of symbolic language, matters clearly related to theatre as a representational art In Shakespeare’s day, performance of public plays required state licensing—the express permission of a court officer known as the Master of the Revels—and punishment for violating theatrical censorship could be severe Such censorship, it has been argued by such scholars as Annabel Patterson, is a powerful stimulus to developing “a system of communication in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural force of considerable consequence.” Shakespeare became a master of such ambiguity, and, if his plays encode topical allusions to religious controversy, as scholars have sometimes argued, they so without sacrificing their purchase on timelessness It is clear, then, that good timing was also involved in the arrival of William Shakespeare in London sometime in the late 1580s, when public theatrical performance by professional actors in purpose-built playhouses was an emerging commercial enterprise looking for talent and as hungry for content as today’s cable TV and World Wide Web England had a rich theatrical heritage, not only of the religious plays produced by civic guilds that Shakespeare might have seen in his boyhood but also of theatrical performances in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and entertainments by players who, as members of noble households, regularly toured the countryside Theatre historians of the period have found a wealth of evidence in private libraries, guildhalls, and public record offices all over England of provincial performances of all kinds Playwrights must write within the governing theatrical conventions of their time, and this fact would have been axiomatic for a consummate man of the theatre like Shakespeare Theatre is perhaps the most collaborative and social of the arts, requiring a well-orchestrated network of artisans, financiers, actors, playwrights, playhouse functionaries, and, of course, paying audiences It is important to recognize the inspiration that Shakespeare must have found in the other actors, his fellow playwrights, and the audience too With the benefit of a more or less stable company of actors developing their talents over time, Shakespeare could write demanding roles such as Hamlet or Othello with the confidence that they could be performed by Richard Burbage, the company’s leading actor Though we not know the names of the boy actors who played Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It or Viola and the lady Olivia in Twelfth Night, we can recognize—as Shakespeare must have—the histrionic talent required to perform those multilayered comic roles with grace and power Finally, we cannot divorce Shakespeare’s unique preeminence from the historical sweep of British imperialism If the greatness of the English language comes in part from its permissive borrowings from other tongues, the worldwide recognition of Shakespeare’s greatness arises in part from the global spread of English, and now American, culture English is now the world’s lingua franca Shakespeare has inspired not only British and American actors and directors but also performers and filmmakers the world over His plays are never appropriated by other cultures without change and transformation, but that too is a sign of their remarkable humanity Identify the author’s styles of writing together with his/ her strong and weak points Hamlet, like Shakespeare's other plays, is written in a combination of verse (poetry) and prose (how we talk every day) But, as Polonius would say, there's method in the madness Verse In Hamlet—like in most of Shakespeare's plays—the nobles typically speak in unrhymed "iambic pentameter" (also called "blank verse") Don't let the fancy names intimidate you —it's pretty simple once you get the hang of it An "iamb" is an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one "Penta" means "five," and "meter" refers to a regular rhythmic pattern So "iambic pentameter" is a kind of rhythmic pattern that consist of five iambs per line It's the most common rhythm in English poetry and sounds like five heartbeats: ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM Let's try it out on these two lines from Hamlet: and BY opposing END them? To DIE to SLEEP; no MORE; and BY a SLEEP to SAY we END Every second syllable is accented, so this is classic iambic pentameter Well—not quite classic You smarty-pants(es) in the audience probably noticed that there's a shift in the meter of the first line, so that two unaccented syllables follow each other That's a little bit of poetic license there Poets (and playwrights) hardly ever write in perfect meter, because perfect meter sounds like a nursery rhyme Varying the meter draws attention to certain words (like "die" and "sleep" in this case) and helps the verse sound a little more natural That takes care of iambic pentameter Since these lines have no rhyme scheme ("melt" and "dew" don't rhyme), we call it "unrhymed iambic pentameter," which is also known as "blank verse." Blank verse is a pretty formal way to speak, so it's reserved for nobles and formal situations, like Claudius' address to the court in Act I, scene ii Hamlet's soliloquies are in verse too, but he also speaks a lot of prose—which we think has something to with how much role-playing he does Prose Characters who aren't so high-class—like the gravediggers—don't get to speak in verse; they just talk Hamlet himself, however, sometimes speaks in prose, even when he's being awfully poetic Take, for instance, the following line: How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (2.2.327-332) That's high on the Poetry Richter scale yet it's written in prose Style in Hamlet frequently functions as an extension of character: the way characters speak gives us insight into how they think This observation is especially true for Hamlet himself, who speaks more than one-third of the play’s total lines, and whose linguistic style changes—often rapidly—depending on context For example, whenever he’s alone, or thinks he’s alone, Hamlet speaks patiently and at length, and his words frequently take on a philosophical quality Hamlet is at his most philosophical when he delivers the monologue that begins with his famous question, “To be, or not to be?” (III.i.55) This monologue continues for nearly 35 lines, in which Hamlet pontificates on the suffering inherent in existence and considers the pros and cons of committing suicide The gravity of his subject matter and the philosophical weight of his diction reveal the heavy burden of sadness he carries from the very beginning of the play In other moments of solitude Hamlet’s style proves less blatantly philosophical but equally discursive This means that his speech has less philosophical gravitas, but remains fluent, full of rhetorical flourish, and characterized by interruptions of thought Hamlet’s first monologue, where he rages against his mother’s marriage to Claudius, provides a touchstone example: Frailty, thy name is woman!— A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears Why, she— O God, a beast that wants discourse of reasons Would have mourned longer!—married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules (I.ii.146–53) Here an angry Hamlet attempts to make sense of his mother’s decision to remarry after such a short period of mourning Shakespeare makes the rapid twists and turns in Hamlet’s thought evident in a couple of ways First, he has Hamlet move quickly between low and high registers, such that he delivers cutting insults and alludes to Greek mythology in the same breath Second, he includes dashes to indicate quick interruptions of thought Hamlet begins the third sentence with a thought about his mother, but interrupts himself after two words to compare her unfavorably to “a beast” who “would have mourned longer.” Then, instead of returning to his original thought about his mother, Hamlet concludes by reflecting on the vast dissimilarity between his father and Claudius Though a fiercely intelligent man, Hamlet’s speech sometimes indicates a lack of focus in his thinking Hamlet adopts yet another style when he’s in the company of others Although he still demonstrates his wit through his command of language, Hamlet’s interactions with others often feature a kind of double-speak in which he conceals his own meaning He frequently does this in Polonius's presence by feigning madness But perhaps the best example of Hamlet’s double-speak is his first line in the play When Claudius refers to him as “my son,” Hamlet replies somewhat aggressively: “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (I.ii.65) Hamlet’s words play off a common English proverb that states, “The nearer in kin the less in kindness.” The original proverb indicates a close link between kinship and cruelty, but Hamlet complicates it His phrase “A little more than kin” implies that, through his uncle’s marriage to his mother, he and Claudius have become more closely related than they were before But then he cleverly reverses this claim Hamlet's use of the word “kind” has a double significance here In addition to meaning “considerate,” it also means “natural.” Hamlet, therefore, indicates that Claudius’ behavior has been inconsiderate and unnatural, which makes him not a true member of Hamlet’s family Identify the influences of the literary works on the other aspects of society, culture and reader’s viewpoints and psychology (the educational values) Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play Hamlet is one of the most-quoted works in the English language, and often included on lists of the world's greatest literature As such, it has proved a pervasive influence in literature For instance, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, published about 1749, merely describes a visit to Hamlet by Tom Jones and Mr Partridge In contrast, Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, written between 1776–1796 not only has a production of Hamlet at its core but also dwells on parallels between the Ghost and Wilhelm Meister's dead father.[5] In the early 1850s, in Pierre, Herman Melville focuses on a Hamlet-like character's long development as a writer.[5] Ten years later, Dickens' Great Expectations contains many Hamlet-like plot elements: it is driven by revenge actions, contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwitch and Miss Havisham), and focuses on the hero's guilt.[5] Academic Alexander Welsh notes that Great Expectations is an "autobiographical novel" and "anticipates psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet itself" About the same time, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss was published Scholar Marianne Novy suggests that Eliot "demythologises Hamlet by imagining him with a reputation for sanity", notwithstanding his frequent monologues and moodiness towards Ophelia.[8] Novy also suggests Mary Wollstonecraft as an influence on Eliot, critiquing "the trivialisation of women in contemporary society" Because, let me hasten to add, I point to Hamlet’s ethical deficiency not to condemn Shakespeare’s play I’m convinced, in fact, that Shakespeare calls us to notice the young prince’s loss of moral bearing Indeed, the proper response to the play’s conclusion is included within the play text itself: when Fortinbras encounters the grisly scene of death at the play’s close, his bewildered reaction furnishes an ethical model: “This quarry cries on havoc O proud death, / What feast is toward in thine eternal cell / That thou so many princes at a shot / So bloodily has struck!” (5.2.308-311) That we have been witness to the escalation of violence that leads to this horrific tableau should caution us to attend more carefully to moments when what seemed like simple, even straightforward, reprisal might become more complicated, compromised, or even corrupted If we think something like the events Hamlet dramatizes could never happen to us (wherein the ghost of one’s murdered father demands vengeance)—well, okay, we are probably correct about that in the particulars But we are often called upon not to care when certain lives are rendered disposable, and there are plenty of instances in our digital world where what initially seems like straightforward retaliation gets out of hand For the latter, one need only think of the practice of Internet shaming, some of the most highprofile cases of which have gone viral through social media Even after time passes, we might dimly remember Justine Sacco, or the “racist AIDS joke-/South Africa-woman,” as one of my friends called her, or Lindsey Stone, or “the Tomb of the Unknown Soldierrude gesture-woman,” as she’s known to some of her online enemies Jon Ronson is chronicling these cases, which seem new for their ability to reduce a person to a single online trespass nevertheless, to treat these lives as if they don’t matter, despite, or even on account of, their bare, fumbling foolishness, is to restage the collectivizing disregard that Hamlet cultivates to excuse his act of rash violence against Polonius It is not as if these people are murdered But, as the shame-and-troll cycle of Internet culture spins out of control, lives are ruined Some of these lives are lesser, we might think, because they are racist, sexist, or just unbelievably stupid Shakespeare’s Hamlet cautions us against espousing this attitude: it is not that we shouldn’t call out inane or wrong ideas—Hamlet is not mistaken to view Polonius as tedious, pompous, and overbearing He errs, however, when he acts as if Polonius’s very life doesn’t matter Shakespeare’s play shows us the violence inherent to a particular strain of folly, which, in no small irony, dangerously derives from moments when we are morally right, ethically just Hamlet is right in his conviction that his father’s murder needs to be redressed; his uncle Claudius is, as Hamlet exclaims, a “Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain!” (2.2.557-58) His mother Gertrude, too, needs to be recalled from moral blindness, since her “o’er-hasty marriage” makes her at least casually complicit in the treachery that led to her husband’s replacement (2.2.57) Hamlet feels just in his conviction “That one may smile and smile and be a villain” (1.5.109), because he is just in this conviction He goes astray, however, because of a funny little trick of being in the world, one that he’s probably more subject to than the rest of us, and one that the short-storyist George Saunders put best in a commencement speech to Syracuse graduates in 2013: we are all, Saunders explains, “born with a series of built-in confusions,” the most devastating of which, I would say, is the belief that, as Saunders puts it Now, if you are the protagonist in a drama entitled The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, you perhaps get more slack than the rest of us in pursuing your life as a self-centering endeavor Yet, and as I want to emphasize, Shakespeare’s play cautions us against seeing ourselves in such terms When we do, at minimum we miss out on the lives of others, even if we are right in our conviction that those lives are foolish, or ethically diminished in their outlook or conduct At worst, we find ourselves responsible for the destruction of those “lesser” lives Sam Biddle, the Gawker blogger who originally retweeted Justine Sacco’s disastrous “joke,” revisited his part in her online shaming: The internet is a mountain, and if you climb that mountain, waiting for you at the top will be the person with whom you need to make peace I climbed my mountain and a woman named Justine Sacco was there A year earlier Biddle had, without much thought, he claims, retweeted what he knew was a poorly worded missive by Justine Sacco: “Going to Africa Hope I don’t get AIDS Just kidding I’m White!” What Biddle could not have known, even if he recognized her tweet as one that would generate outrage, and therefore traffic, is that Sacco’s post would misfire so colossally that it would garner its own hashtag with a global following of enraged internet users Calls for Sacco to be fired were the least of it: by the time Sacco arrived in South Africa, several hours after she posted what many took to be a racist tweet, there were people waiting at the airport to take her picture—all the better to witness the moment as she was publicly humiliated As Biddle recounts it, what had started as casual condemnation of an inarguably stupid, arguably racist, remark had provoked a worldwide chorus of jeering, sometimes abusive, shaming Sacco’s life as she had known it was destroyed Biddle returns to his part in this drama because he regrets the damage his unthinking act caused As he explains, he had to apologize to Sacco, because, even if he’d convinced himself that his act was just, he couldn’t look at her and not feel sorry for the ruin he brought upon her Truth is, what Biddle did was not wrong: Sacco tweeted her remark, after all But Biddle’s reflective revisitation should cause all of us to pause before we casually subject another person to shame, even that which is deserved Identify the significance, the fame or the cultural typical identities of the literary works Like the many with whom we share our digitized world, we are not at the center of a drama of vengeance or retribution When we see stupid things or unjust things—even criminal things—our task is not to define ourselves in response to those things This is not to say that we should not respond We should practice justice, and see injustice in our midst punished But we shouldn’t extract purity of self by doling out punishment (even deserved punishment) against others Our identity should not be defined in relation to punishment, revenge, or shame The harder task, rather, is to figure out how to go on being open to the lives of others, even in a world that does not reward or even justify such behavior Hamlet’s first tragedy is his loss of openness Because he is at the center of his own revenger’s-plot, he cannot see those around him as deserving of his regard When Polonius asks him, “What you read, my lord?” he responds, “Words, words, words” (2.2.190-91) Words are never just words, especially in a world where digital culture makes what we say ephemeral and indelible at once This slight is casual, but it is a prelude to the devastating violence that follows “The Hamlet effect,” as I’m sketching it, then, is the distillation of self that results from punishing others Hamlet wants to be seen as a revenger, as someone who pursues the righteous path of retribution against corrupt others Yet, one of the things Shakespeare’s play shows us is the ethical insufficiency of pitting a solitary, self-centered individual against any number of others When we define ourselves in this way—as the just actor extracting vengeance from the corrupt—we lose what made us good in the first place When we pursue the punishment of another, we should so with the awareness that we will be sorry for what we have had to Sam Biddle, the Gawker blogger I mentioned earlier, comes up against this uncomfortable reality: when he hears from Justine Sacco, six months after his retweet set off an international storm of Internet shaming When that happens, when ghosts press us about committed wrongs, we should accept the charge, but not the identity, that goes along with righting the wrongs in our midst References: Leah Marcus's Puzzling Shakespeare (1988) Annabel Patterson's Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989) Janet Adelman's "Man and Wife is One Flesh: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body" (Suffering Mothers, 1992) Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) William Hamlin's Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England (2005) Linda Charnes's Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millenium (2006) Lars Engle's "Moral Agency in Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies, 2012) Richard McCoy's Faith in Shakespeare (2013) Andrew Cutrofello's All for Nothing: Hamlet's Negativity (2014) Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (London: Riverhead, 2015) Excerpts from the book, which offer different takes on Sacco’s and Stone’s stories, appear as: “How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times Magazine, February 15, 2015, p MM20: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweetruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0; and “’Overnight, everything I loved was gone’: the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone”: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-shaming-lindseystone-jon-ronson http://groupthink.jezebel.com/i-dont-feel-sorry-for-stupid-white-people-on-the-intern1685563608 http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/george-saunderss-advice-to-graduates/ This is the play’s title in the 1623 First Folio http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i-came-to-pea-1653022326