Hamlet

Hamlet Seminars
Note: where Hamlet is allocated three sessions, there will be some condensation of the following outline scheme.

In the introductory session, we will look at

- connotations and cultural barriers of the terms 'Shakespeare' and 'Hamlet'
- 'dating' the play and the light this may shed on the circumstances of its production and its thematic concerns
- Shakespeare's sources (intro)
- the difference between plot and theme(s)
- Hamlet's procrastination (or not)
- E.Jones's Freudian reading based on the Oedipus complex
- some interesting play or film interpretations
- the first 3 scenes, with particular attention on the wider significance of the opening lines.

In the second session, we will look at

- good and bad quartos and the first folio
- soliloquies and their function
- Shakespeare's sources (what Kyd adds to Saxo/Belleforest)/ revenge tragedy
- whether Hamlet's imagery runs counter to his apparent resolve
- watchers and the watched: Denmark as surveillance society
- Polonius's famous advice;
- Hamlet's 'madness'- and treatment of Ophelia
- 'To be or not to be.....'


In the third session, we will look at

- clarifying the critical: new historicist/psychoanalytical/biographical/romantic and other approaches to the text
- stasis and disruption
- iambic pentameter/disease imagery/ streaming imagery
- The Mousetrap (and other traps)
- the 'closet' scene
- two soliloquies (Claudius 'O my offence is rank..'; Hamlet 'Now might I do it pat..', two villains or one and an agent of Divine Justice?

In the fourth session, we will look at
- a 'presentist' reading
- famous Hamlet portrayals/acting 'points'
- Ophelia's death, Hamlet's return, the rest is silence
- Hamlet and Horatio; and Laertes
- Hamlet's problem: finally, what do we think it is? (Consideration will be given to the legitimacy of the ghost and of the revenge task; Hamlet the thinker vs doer;Hamlet the traumatised; Hamlet the Oedipal; Hamlet the paranoid; Hamlet the man on the cuspof historical/political change ....etc?)



Return to
Hamlet index
Winterslow Diary - a record of our seminar discussions

I Curr 2010