Though the Ghost is impatient for revenge, there is plenty of time to murder Claudius. Action Story DriverĬlaudius’ murder of the king drives Hamlet to despair The Ghost’s appearance drives Hamlet to seek revenge Hamlet’s killing of Polonius drives Claudius to plot Hamlet’s death Ophelia’s accidental drowning (and Polonius’ murder) drives Laertes to seek Hamlet’s death and so forth. Hamlet tends to use male mental sex problem solving techniques as illustrated in his attempts to gather evidence that “there is something more deeply amiss than his mother’s overhasty marriage to her deceased husband’s brother.” (Bevington xx). Hamlet is a gifted thinker that is incapable of positive action-“the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.92-93). Only then may he begin to accept the knowledge as truth and act accordingly. Hamlet must stop mulling over the information given to him by his father’s ghost. Hamlet stops contemplating Claudius’ lies and treacheries and accepts the knowledge that Claudius is responsible for his father and mother’s (and his own) deaths. “Shakespeare did not intend the Oedipus motive.8 of the 12 essential questions Change Main Character Resolve “a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son” “ valued only for the roles that further other people’s plots” “ chiefly interesting in what she tells us about Hamlet” “Gertrude is caught between two mighty opposites” “Hamlet can’t kill Claudius without killing himself” It is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice” “Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark” “the moral uncertainty persists to the end Hamlet dies a revenger, a poisoner, but also a soldier and a prince” “the incertitude that informs the play is attributed to some split being seeming and being appearance and reality intellect and action, inside and outside” “Hamlet’s killing of Claudius is an act of restorative destruction” “Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women” “Her whole character is that of simply unselfish affection” “Gertrude chooses a brother over a dead Hamlet, Ophelia chooses a father over a living Hamlet” ” ‘Vengeance is mine: I will repay’ saith the Lord” “It is the sovereign’s failure to administer justice which inaugurates the subject’s quest for vengeance” “There is no sense in which Ophelia may be said to grow up in the course of the play” “To Aristotle, in contrast to Freud, the defining human urge is cognitive not sexual” “women were everything men were not: silent, submissive, powerless” “Gertrude believes that quiet women best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest” “the single characteristic of Hamlet’s innermost nature is the strong conflux of contending forces” “Hamlet cannot be comprehended except as a study of emotion” “a tragedy of thought his downfall is connected rather with his intellectual nature” “ everyone has used her not allowed to love, and unable to be false, Ophelia breaks” “ carnal attitudes have led her into deepest sin perhaps the frailty of women has embittered Hamlet to callousness” “ a character in the play in whom reason has swayed passion” “ only interesting when she loses the little wits she had” “ common conventions of Elizabethan Revenge plays” “Drowning was a typically feminine death” “We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet” “Hamlet was in love with his mother and inhibited from killing his rival” “The Ghost seeks to impose a stereotype on the prince, that of a dedicated revenger but Hamlet repeatedly displays a very credible resistance to that stereotype”
“Gertrude isn’t the stereotypical lustful woman of revenge drama, she’s far more sympathetic” “Hamlet’s reluctance to kill Claudius is that Claudius (by killing Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother) has enacted the prince’s own repressed desires” “Gertrude’s marriage provided a violent shock to moral being which caused him to sink into melancholy” “Daughters would have been expected to be entirely obedient to their fathers, yet Shakespeare’s daughters challenge patriarchal authority at every turn” “woman is an excellent ornament of man over which man may exercise his jurisdiction and authority”