Hamlet Study Guide

● Fool/Knave

○ Polonium is cast as a fool when Hamlet exposes him to be a yes-man.

○ Claudius is a knave (knave=villain or rascal). Hamlet calls him an “arrant knave,”

and Claudius is the prominent antagonist.

○ Hamlet also refers to himself as an ‘arrant knave.”

● Senses—Particularly hearing

○ The ears and the act of hearing is a motif that runs throughout Hamlet, which

enhances the theme of “appearance versus reality.” Words and conversations are

used as forms of manipulation. Claudius uses manipulation to improve his social

status and power. This is also symbolic of the poison in her ear.

● Structure of Text:

○ Like all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet is written mostly in verse, but over

30% of the lines are in prose, which is the highest percentage of any of the

tragedies. One reason for the high amount of prose is that Hamlet has more comic

scenes than any of Shakespeare’s other tragedies. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,

the gravedigger, and often Hamlet himself all make jokes, while Polonius has

jokes made at his expense in almost every one of his scenes. Shakespeare

preferred to use verse when he was tackling serious themes, and prose when he

was writing comedy, so in Hamlet he switches often, sometimes in the middle of a

scene.

○ Hamlet’s frequent switching between verse and prose is part of what makes the

style of the play feel evasive. Hamlet’s facility with both prose and verse, and
 tendency to alternate between the two styles, also underscores the sense of him as

a character who is of two minds, or who is not quite sure who he is, so adopts

different speaking manners trying to figure out how to really sound like himself.

○ Another reason why Shakespeare switches between verse and prose is to mark the

difference between careful speech and disordered speech. In Act III, Scene 1,

Hamlet begins by speaking in verse. His famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be”

(III.i.), expresses a complex, ordered thought which Hamlet seems to have been

mulling for some time. When Ophelia enters and tries to return the presents

Hamlet has given her, he switches abruptly to prose. His switch to prose shows us

that Hamlet is no longer thinking clearly, and we understand that Ophelia has

surprised and upset him.

○ One reason Hamlet has more prose than most of Shakespeare’s tragedies is that

Hamlet spends a large part of the play pretending to be crazy. In those scenes,

Hamlet is deliberately speaking in a disordered way, so he speaks in prose.

Likewise, when Ophelia actually goes mad, she too speaks in prose (when she’s

not singing). The effect of a character speaking prose when mad is also evident in

Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth speaks in nonsense prose as she loses her grip on

reality at the end of the play, and also in King Lear, where Lear speaks in

disordered, unintelligible prose as he wanders on the heath in a deranged state.

○ Another function of prose is to mark the speech of lower-status characters.

Members of the nobility, like Claudius, almost always speak in verse, but

commoners like the gravedigger use prose. When Hamlet speaks in prose to

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—who are high-status enough to speak verse with

with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but he does not trust or respect them enough

to express himself seriously, using verse.

● Foil characters:

○ Hamlet to Fortinbras/Laertes—Both Prince Fortinbras and Laertes are everything

Hamlet is not. (We can hear the Ghost now: "Why can't you be more like

Fortinbras, Hamlet? You're such a disappointment.") Both Fortinbras and Laertes

also need to avenge their fathers, and they both take care of business in a big way:

Fortinbras tries to wage a war against Denmark, while Laertes runs home from

Paris to stage a revolution in his dead father's honor. Contrast this with Hamlet’s

continuous inaction.

○ Hamlet-Claudius-Gertrude to Ophelia-Polonius-Laertes—Hamlet's plot revolves

around two families: Hamlet-Hamlet Sr./Claudius-Gertrude, and

Ophelia-Polonius-Laertes. There are two sets of fathers (Hamlet Sr./Claudius and

Polonius), and two sets of children (Hamlet and Laertes/Ophelia). What we are

trying to say here is that family #1 is a foil for family #2. The relationships

between parents and their children are portrayed in two different ways: first,

Hamlet's relationship to his father's ghost contrasts to Laertes' relationship with

his father (lots of advice involved, the question of revenge), and second, Polonius'

misunderstanding of Ophelia reflects Gertrude's misunderstanding of Hamlet. The

parallels are by no means perfect, but the mirroring structure can raise questions

about the universality of the kinds of relationships the play depicts. Doesn't
 everyone have a parent who misunderstands them? Doesn't everyone receive

long-winded and occasionally embarrassing advice from his father?

○ Ophelia to Gertrude—There are only two women in the play: Hamlet's mother,

Gertrude, and Hamlet's love interest, Ophelia. How convenient: a "virgin-whore"

dichotomy to establish the two women as foils to each other. Ophelia is a maiden

and an obedient daughter to Polonius; Gertrude (in the eyes of Hamlet, anyway)

has a sexual "appetite" and "hasty" remarriage that mark her as promiscuous and

unfaithful. Is that fair? Probably not. We only get Hamlet's perspective on

Gertrude, and he's biased. What really makes these ladies foils is that they're both

women who die because of the power machinations of men who control them.

● Great Chain of Being:

○ The main concept of the Great Chain of Being is that every existing thing in the

universe has its “place” in an outlined hierarchical order. Where it is placed

depends on the amount of spirit and importance in society it has. The chain

commences at God and progresses downward to angelic beings, kings, princes,

nobles, regular humans, animals, plants, and many other objects of nature.

According to this theory, all existing things have their specific function in the

universe, and causing any kind of disorder on the higher links of this chain courts

disaster. In Hamlet, Shakespeare dwells on the idea of a disheveled natural social

order which restrains human beings’ ability to live peacefully.

○ Hamlet is jeopardizing his place on the chain by contemplating suicide or the

murder of Claudius.
 ○ Claudius moved up the chain of being through killing King Hamlet and taking his

place.

○ Fortinbras plans to take over Denmark, significantly increasing his position and

influence.

○ Hamlet says in his Act IV soliloquy, “What is a man if his chief good and market

of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”

○ Hamlet says in his Act I soliloquy, “O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason

would have mourned longer!” Comparing Gertrude to less than an animal (several

steps down from her position in the chain) because of her lack of remorse for

King Hamlet’s death.

● 5 Stages of Grief:

○ DENIAL: Though Hamlet does not go through the stage of denial, it is evident

starting in act one, scene two, that the royal family is very much in denial of how

much they should be affected by the loss of their king.

○ ANGER: Anger is the second phase of Kubler-Ross' five stages which is

characterized by loss of judgment and simple rage at either the event in which

they are grieving, others, and/or themselves. Anger is often associated with

madness as it impedes the objective observation skills and, like insanity, can cloud

the mind with anything but the truth. (Santrock, 57) The angriest character in all

of Hamlet is the title character himself, Hamlet. Hamlet's anger is especially clear

in his rash dealings with his family, which he is supposed to be bonding with

over this shared grief, his visions of his father as a ghost, and his violent outbursts

against the denizens of his kingdom. When he enters his mother's chambers in act
 three, scene four, he shows many signs of madness and anger, including visions of

violence inciting figures, lashing out against his mother, and the murder of

Polonius behind the veil.

○ BARGAINING AND DEPRESSION: Bargaining and Depression are slightly

similar stages of grieving that as seen in Hamlet, can happen at the same time.

Bargaining is characterized by an attempt at negotiating with fate, while

depression understands the imminence of death. This being said, there is no

reason why Hamlet could not have been experiencing both of these stages at once.

In fact, Hamlet seems to have drifted in and out of these stages in between going

through anger and acceptance. (Santrock 58, 59) In act one, scene two, Hamlet

demonstrates bargaining and depression by almost asking the all-powerful to take

his life away completely, because he is too saddened and maddened by all of this

outrageous behavior that he would rather die.

○ ACCEPTANCE: Acceptance is the bittersweet end to grieving in which

individuals come to terms with the fate they are handed, whether it be death, loss,

or a reminder of their mortality. (Santrock, 60) The final scene before Fortinbras

arrives at Elsinore, it is almost as if each character is asking for forgiveness

through their passing through the stage of acceptance. Every action, the voluntary

drinking of the cup that Claudius does, Laertes' last words to Hamlet, Gertrude's

voluntary drinking of the cup so Hamlet would live a bit longer, they all seemed

to be actions of final absolution.