HSC English band 6 Essays - Hamlet

By C. O Vega

Notes on how to survive difficult questions, ideas on important themes and two (full) band 6 essays - the prefect easy guide to finding your personal response to William Shakespeare's Hamlet!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483504391

Book preview

Hamlet

1

Theatre in Hamlet Notes

Theatre in Hamlet:

Consider the line,

"holds a seat in this distracted globe" (1.5.91 95-97)

Here globe could refer to:

Hamlet’s mind

The world

Globe theatre

- antic-disposition his feigned temperament of the fool and madman, is an objective correlative for the condition of his country and rile

- globe of hamlet the play is deliberately and insistently paralleled to the mind or globe of hamlet the man

- the distracted globe is also the mysterious world of the theatre, in which we sit as spectators

- theatrical or pictorial illusion, the plays and fictions of Hamlet nest inside one another, until we are no longer sure where to place the boundaries of reality and illusion

- Hamlet the play has itself become a mirror up to nature, like the glass of fashion and the mound of form that was Hamlet the prince

- in suggesting that these three worlds – the world of Hamlet’s mind and imagination; the physical, political and historical world of Denmark; and the world of dramatic fiction and play – are parallel to and superimposed upon one another, the play is about the whole question of boundaries, thresholds and liminality or border crossing: boundary disputes between Norway and Denmark, boundaries between youth and age, between reality and imagination, between audience and actor, but most importantly the most inexorable boundary possible would seem to be that between life and death.

- Metatheatre as befits a play about the purpose of playing in the widest sense, Hamlet provides an excellent guide to the use of the early modern stage, and to the thematic interchange-ability of stage and world.

"good Hamlet, cast thy nightly colour off" (2.1.68)

Hamlet quick to remind her of her that there is more than one kind of costume, and that to seem a mourner is not necessarily to be one, just as to seem a king may