Hamlet

• Norton- Revengers have to act outside social and legal norms
• Norton- Tragedies explain corruption
• Revenge is a kind of wild injustice
• Protagonists begin as morally righteous but they end up implicated in corruption
• Freudian theory
• Mcevoy- a shift in sympathy
• Hogle- Ophelia “accepts the patriarchal order and dictates of her culture”
• Rosenburg- hurtful language
• Katharine Wilson- “the play’s women are victims of men’s violence, not its perpetrators”
• Gordon McMullan- “women have no power to act on their own behalf”
• McEvoy - monarchs were meant to be virtuous as God’s representation on Earth
• Niccolo Machiavelli argued that a country needed a ruler who could ensure safety and prosperity of his people
• There’s a shift in sympathy as Claudius condemns his own sin in the strongest terms and attempts to pray
• McEvoy - Claudius displays a measured rationality and knows how morally ugly his actions are
• Taine- the story of moral reasoning
• Gertrude and Ophelia are used as pawns, reflecting the relatively powerless position of women in patriarchal Renaissance society.
• “Hamlet" belongs to the genre of Revenge Tragedies, which were popular in Shakespeare’s day, but Hamlet is a more complex character than many Elizabethan revengers.
• The play explores themes such as revenge, madness, corruption, appearance versus reality, betrayal, guilt, and the nature of mankind.
• Shakespeare uses soliloquy to reveal Hamlet's inner thoughts and feelings, allowing us to understand him better.
• The Great Chain of Being, where everything has its place in the divine order, was a widely accepted ideology in Shakespeare’s time. Disruptions to this order can lead to chaos and destruction