0
Hamlet
Includes questions specifically asking about this Shakespeare play. Questions about the movie version should be placed under "Movies." Questions about Shakespeare should be placed under his category under Authors and Poets.
2,117 Questions
Who did King Gonzago represent in Hamlet?
The play which Hamlet orders the players to perform is called "The Murder of Gonzago". Hamlet intends that the play (already similar in many respects) should be made even more similar to "The Murder of King Hamlet by his brother Claudius" so as to "catch the conscience of the king" Gonzago represents King Hamlet, Hamlet's father, while Claudius is represented by "Lucianus, a nephew of the king"
Does Hamlet pretend not to love Ophelia for his plan?
It's very possible that Hamlet distances himself from Ophelia for strategic reasons. He may have assessed her as a potential ally and rejected her (all that holding her at arms length in her closet stuff) as being unsuitable because she is a weak person. He may have sensed her dependence on Polonius and have pushed her away because if she knew anything about him she would give him away. He may have kept her at arm's length to protect her from the danger he knew would come to him. Or the idea of being a loner may have suited better with the picture he was trying to create of himself as being unbalanced and possibly suicidal. Any combination of these is possible.
On the other hand one can make a consistent reading where Hamlet doesn't actually love Ophelia at all and all his "I loved Ophelia! Forty thousand brothers with all their quantity of love could not make up my sum." is just bravado fueled by his jealousy of Laertes' genuine love for Ophelia.
Is Ophelia guilty of any of the womanly sins of which Hamlet accuses her in Hamlet?
There's little evidence that she is. Part of Hamlet's rant is purely misogynistic, though, and would apply to all women, so in that sense she can't help but be guilty. Some interpretations do argue that the two of them have slept together, or that she's been trying to seduce or tempt him.
What was the set like in the original production of Hamlet?
This is a brief comment on the set of Hamlet from the Wikipedia article on Hamlet: "Shakespeare provides no clear indication of when his play is set; however, as Elizabethan actors performed at the Globe in contemporary dress on minimal sets, this would not have affected the staging." See link.
The Elizabethan playhouses did not have scenery as we think of it today. The stage itself served as a permanent unit set, with features that allowed for rapid movement from one area of the façade to another, and along with conventions, helped the audience understand what they needed to know about location. There was an upper level for scenes that required them, such as the Balcony Scene in Romeo & Juliet. Some theaters had a tapestry known as an Arras hanging between the stage doors Stage Right and Stage Left from which most entrances and exits were made. Many playhouses included a roof or awning over the rear half of the stage called the Heavens, which may have included machinery for flying effects in some theaters. Most had columns or pillars holding up the roof which could double as the trunks of trees in outdoor scenes. So in a way, the stage was the set.
Why is old king hamlet so upset about his untimely death?
He knew that he was murdered by his brother and his wife
How does Claudius treat laetes differently from Hamlet in act 1 scene 2?
Laertes wants to go to Paris, he's allowed to go to Paris. Hamlet wants to go to Wittenberg, and what he gets is "As for your desire to return to school in Wittenberg, it is most retrograde to our desire." Hamlet has to stay at home so his uncle can keep an eye on him.
What scene is hamlet is the phrase to be or not to be taken from?
It isn't "taken" from anywhere, Shakespeare wrote it.
Hamlet hesitates killing King Claudius, because at the time Claudius was praying for forgiveness and if Hamlet killed him then Claudius would go to heaven and Hamlet to Hell. But his chance to kill him without doing wrong was still there, he just didn't stick around long enough to hear the rest of the agony. Claudius amended "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go." Hamlet missed his opportunity to save the lives of many and that would made for a short and heroic play without so much tragedy. Less entertaining too.
What important metaphor is introduced in Hamlets soliloquy that will be developed later in the play?
"'Tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature posess it merely." The images of rottenness pop up throughout the play: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, Do not spread the compost on the weeds, My offence is rank, it smells to heaven, How long will a man lie i' th' earth before he rot.
King Claudius likes to have trumpets sound and cannons fire when he drinks. In I ii he says "No jocund health that Denmark drinks today, but the great cannon to the clouds shall tell." In Act V he's still at it: "let the kettle to the trumpet speak, the trumpet to the cannoneer without, the cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth, 'Now the King drinks to Hamlet'". Horatio asks if it's a custom and Hamlet bitterly replies "Ay, marry, is't but to my mind though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance." that is there would be more honour in not keeping this custom than keeping it.
What do you think Hamlet means when he says mother you have my father much offended?
Hamlet is referring to his real father, who is dead, not his step-father. He means that his mother has insulted the memory of her late husband, the deceased king, by marrying Hamlet's uncle soon after the late king's death.
A hamlet is a small community within a town. Qualifications for a hamlet vary by country but the best example of a hamlet would be a suburb in a city.
Who are Claudius's bodyguards?
The Swissers.
Check Act4 Scene5:)
They are mentioned in Claudius's line.
Do you refer to the queen in Hamlet as the queen or the Queen?
The Queen. Government titles, or titles instead of names, always require a capital letter. Such as "The President of the United States", or "Doctor John Smith".
Hope that helps.
How does Hamlet react when he learns of Ophelia's death What does he claim for the first time?
Hamlet's line is "What? The fair Ophelia?" which could be delivered in a lot of different ways depending on how actor and director feel about what he is really feeling. Shortly thereafter he is so offended by Laertes' ridiculous and melodramatic show of grief that he shows himself, saying "Who is he whose grief bears such an emphasis?" He is not thinking about Ophelia here but rather about Laertes. It is only in the context of comparing himself to Laertes that he says for the first time "I loved Ophelia." Again it is up to director and actor to decide how sincere he is in saying that.
Why does aksionov did not avenge makar?
Aksionov was pleased of Makar Semyonich honesty admitting the truth and after that he had lost the longing for his home. He just wanted to spend his last hour in prison. :))))
Why does T.S. Eliot describe hamlet as an artistic failure?
Eliot, in his essay Hamlet and his Problems, written in 1921, states that the purpose of all art is to express emotion, that "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'", and that there is no "objective correlative" to Hamlet's emotions. By "objective correlative" he means something happening in the real world which will induce that particular emotion, and to the appropriate extent. The main problem with this cockamamie theory is that the purpose of art goes far beyond expressing emotions, and that furthermore people do express emotions which are way more violent than the circumstances warrant (road rage, for example). Hamlet may he extreme in his condemnation of his mother, but that means that there is something else causing this rage, and the search for that something else is part of the fascination of his character. Basically if Hamlet and his Problems had been written by someone other than Eliot it would have been dismissed ages ago as an inept undergraduate effort.
Why does Hamlet show Gertrude the two portraits?
He's asking her to compare his father and Claudius. In Hamlet's mind, his father was a paragon and his uncle a satyr. There is actually no reason to imagine that Hamlet is accurate in his assessment of the two brothers; in this play, we are constantly being drawn into Hamlet's own fantasy world and his warped perception of the people around him. Hamlet wants Gertrude to enter into his fantasy perception of Claudius and her relationship with him. But one of his remarks seems to have hit home: "Almost as bad, dear mother, as kill a king and marry with his brother." "As kill a king?" she asks, incredulous. And it seems as if she has never before contemplated the possibility that her first husband may have been murdered and her second husband did it. She is trying to get her head around this when Hamlet is going on about how wrong it is for her to have a sex life.
When Horatio meets Hamlet what did Hamlet say about the food?
"Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." Hamlet says that the reason Claudius and Gertrude got married so soon after King Hamlet's death was to save money, since they could use the leftovers from the funeral for the wedding feast. Hamlet's tongue is firmly in cheek here.
Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern successful?
They are. If they weren't, Hamlet wouldn't have sent them to their death. They had the opportunity to betray him when they were out of his sight. It seems the king didn't completely take them into his confidence, though, so perhaps their loyalty wasn't total.
It's an old theory about Hamlet that he is "a man who couldn't make up his mind", (this simpleminded statement is made at the beginning of Laurence Olivier's 1948 Hamlet movie), and that his indecisiveness is what keeps him from revenging himself on Claudius at the beginning of Act II. Hamlet himself supports this in his soliloquy "How all occasions do inform against me."
It is an even older idea that Hamlet is a dilletante, for whom taking action is all too sordid. This is the Hamlet painted by Delacroix and loved by the Victorian romantics.
A newer idea is that Hamlet has developed a modern ethic in which revenge is wrong, and that he suffers conflict between his duty to his father and his belief that what he has been commanded to do is wrong.
In all of these cases there is a notion that Hamlet has some kind of genetic flaw which prevents him from executing the revenge with alacrity. But an example of any other revenge tragedy reveals that the revenger does not rush in in act two and consummate his revenge--he lays some devious and complicated plot which takes most of the play to work out. Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy or Kyd's Spanish Tragedy are good examples. So in this sense, Hamlet's cautiousness about completing the revenge is typical of all revenge tragedy heroes and makes him most suitable for the role. (They all suffer as well).
A further approach would jettison the notion that characters in plays never develop and have some permanent and incurable flaw which does them in. Basically, this means chucking Aristotle in the bin (where, in the opinion of Fintan O'Toole and your answerer, he belongs) and recognising that people change and that plays about people who change are more interesting than those about unchanging caricatures. In this view, Hamlet starts out as a self-absorbed and somewhat ineffectual man who, as the play goes on, goes through periods of self-doubt and control freakiness to become the kind of man who can turn the tables on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, leap aboard a pirate ship, confront Laertes at Ophelia's funeral and ultimately to "defy augury" and to accept his fate. And through this process he becomes the kind of man who can indeed be the protagonist in a revenge tragedy, which he of course is--the protagonist in the greatest revenge tragedy ever.
