![summary of hamlet summary of hamlet](https://dhwwtar19mmjy.apowersoft.info/gitmind/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hamlet-chapters-summary.jpg)
Gertrude seems genuinely concerned about Hamlet’s condition when she tells Ophelia that she hopes that Ophelia will be able to heal Hamlet.
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Polonius and Claudius ask Gertrude to leave so they can spy on Hamlet and Ophelia. They request the king and queen to watch the performance. They are, however, happy to report that a theater troupe is visiting the castle and that Hamlet is taking interest in them. Hamlet has cleverly used wordplay to avoid giving straightforward responses to their questions. They confirm that they have been unable to identify the cause of Hamlet’s madness. There is an air of ‘inevitability’ about Lady Macbeth’s fate, thanks to the careful accumulation of images, stage-effects, and emotional details which precede her death.Rosencrantz and Guildenstern share their observations of Hamlet with Claudius and Gertrude. He defines this as ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’ Eliot provides an example from another Shakespeare play, Macbeth, arguing that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep is ‘communicated to by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions’. A recent review of Ralph Fiennes’ film adaptation of Coriolanus even quotes from Eliot’s essay, showing how his critical pronouncement has endured.Įliot justifies his analysis of Hamlet – and the play’s problems – by referring to what he calls the ‘objective correlative’ of the play: the ‘only way of expressing emotion in the form of art’, Eliot tells us, is by finding an ‘objective correlative’. Eliot’s view of Coriolanus continues to be one of the more famous things about the play. Championing a relatively little-read tragedy by Shakespeare (why not Macbeth, King Lear, or Othello?) is another way of getting people talking about you. There is a gulf between the emotion felt by the character and the way this is worked up into drama in the play.Įliot goes on to argue that Coriolanus, a late tragedy by Shakespeare, is, ‘with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success.’ This is a contrarian view and should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt: in 1919 Eliot wanted to stand out as a new critic on the literary scene, and slaughtering sacred Shakespearean cows is one way to get yourself noticed. So, far from being a literary masterpiece, Shakespeare’s reworking of the Hamlet story fails, according to Eliot, because Shakespeare attempted to do too much with the character and, as a result, Hamlet’s emotions in the play seem unclear. It’s as if a master analyst of the human mind, such as Dostoevsky, tried to rewrite the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a psychologically complex novel. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is too ‘big’ for the plot of the play and the ‘intractable material’ Shakespeare is being forced to work with. Shakespeare rewrote it and updated it for a later, more refined theatre audience – but the Bard failed to graft his more sophisticated reading of the character of Hamlet (notably, his odd feelings towards his own mother) onto Kyd’s more primitive version of the character.
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This earlier play contained many of the ingredients that appear in Shakespeare’s later rewriting of the story of Hamlet, but is a cruder example of the revenge tragedy. This bold revisionist claim is founded on several points, not least of which is the fact that Shakespeare inherited the original play-text of Hamlet from another writer (probably Thomas Kyd, who also wrote The Spanish Tragedy). In summary, Eliot’s argument in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ is that Shakespeare’s play is a ‘failure’, but the play has become so familiar and ubiquitous as a work of art that we are no longer able to see its flaws.