Click the image to zoom in on the presentation schedule.
Friday, August 28 (6) - The Thief and the Dogs; Over the weekend, read 1.1.1-20 (shorthand for Act 1, scene 1, lines 1-20) of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Read the corresponding section of this scene-by-scene analysis BEFORE you read Shakespeare's text. Consult no other reading guides; this is as good as it gets. As you read this very short section, think about what, textually, establishes the uncertainty/anxiety/tension/suspense of the moment. Then watch the first two minutes of this RSC production, noting what the film does to pick up on the text's suggestions. Come to class ready to think about what actors and directors do to take a production from page to stage (film).
Monday, August 31 (1) - Who's there?; Tension, Anxiety, Suspense in the first 20 lines of the play; Set presentation assignment; Tonight, finish reading 1.1. Remember to read the corresponding section of this scene-by-scene analysis BEFORE you read Shakespeare's text. (1) Is Horatio superstitious? He says that the presence of the ghost is “a mote to trouble the mind’s eye.” How does Horatio come to conclusions? (2) Horatio’s thoughts and feelings change. He speaks five times about the ghost. Mark the lines and the range of emotion he shows.
Tuesday, September 1 (2) - Hamlet 1.1.21-end; You'll begin 1.2 tonight (the first 128 lines). Consider: (1) Claudius, honest or devious? Define the characteristics of Claudius’s speech, his word choice/diction, syntax, etc. What does his language suggest to you? Think, too, about his position and the occasion of the speech. (2) Hamlet, the master listener: Everything Hamlet says in the play reveals his acute sensitivity to language. How do his early interchanges already reveal this trait? Why do you think it matters? (3) Exploring motives and feelings: Why does Claudius rebuke Hamlet so strongly for his grief? Why does he not declare Hamlet as his heir? Why does he refuse Hamlet’s request to return to Wittenberg? What does Claudius feel toward Hamlet? Is Hamlet’s agreement to obey his mother sincere? Does Claudius really believe that Hamlet gives a "loving and a fair reply?"
Wednesday, September 2 (3) - Hamlet 1.2.1-128; Tonight, look carefully at Hamlet's first soliloquy ("Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt..."). Then watch Rory Kinnear, Kenneth Branagh, and David Tennant perform it (below). In each performance, what is it that is really bothering Hamlet about what has happened since his father's death? How would you describe the tone of each Hamlet's feelings? Detached, impassioned, rational, ironic, or what? (Boyer, SXU). Soliloquies follow a character as he or she thinks. List Hamlet’s thoughts in his first soliloquy and decide whether you see a logical series of thoughts. Do you? What of that?
Rory Kinnear at the National Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner, first broadcast to cinemas in 2010.
Kenneth Branagh in 1996
David Tennant in the role of Hamlet, 2009.
Thursday, September 3 (4) - Hamlet 1.2.129-159; Over the weekend, in addition to reading through the end of 1.2, read this short article on the nature of ghosts in Shakespeare's England. It's important to establish the premise that an Elizabethan/Jacobean theatregoer thought ghosts were all too real, and that they appeared to the living to make known the nature of their deaths. How has Hamlet's attitude changed even in the short time since his first soliloquy? Look especially closely at the last four lines of the scene: Horatio assumes the appearance of the ghost means trouble for Denmark, but Hamlet senses something else is amiss. The truth must out. NOTE: Your next vocabulary quiz will be Wednesday, September 16, and it will cover units 1-2.
Friday, September 4 (5) - Mass of the Holy Spirit (NO CLASSES)
Tuesday, September 8 (6) - Set Hamlet paragraph; Grading notes and body paragraph instruction; A reminder that next Wednesday you'll have your first vocabulary quiz of the year, so be sure you have a copy of the vocabulary book and Sentence Composing for College by Monday (at the latest). By Wednesday, read pages 50-53 in the Killgallon, Sentence Composing for College book. Be familiar with the characteristics of absolute phrases. Then, complete Practice 3, numbers 3-5 AND Practice 8, numbers 1-4. These must be hand-written on loose-leaf paper, ready to be handed in at the end of your vocabulary quiz.
Wednesday, September 9 (1) - More body paragraphs; blending quotations; MLA review
Thursday, September 10 (2) - Hamlet 1.2.160-end; (1) Advice to a sister. Laertes uses images of treasure, war, masks, and disease to warn Ophelia about Hamlet and his intentions and her risks. Is Laertes pompous, caring, loving, tender with Ophelia? What impression does his language make? (2) Ophelia. What impression do you get of her in 1.3? How does she respond to and interact with her brother? Why, do you think? What kind of language does she use? (3) How strong a relationship do Laertes and Ophelia have? How close are they?
Friday, September 11 (3) - PARAGRAPH WORD COUNT UPDATE: UP TO 350 WORDS IS FINE; Hamlet presentation 1.3.1-51 (Moore, Goetz, Taylor, Nwachukwu, Granberry, Hebert, Leach, Reid); Over the weekend, finish your Hamlet paragraph assignment AND finish reading 1.3. (1) How does the mood of the scene change when Polonius enters? How would you characterize the way he speaks throughout the scene? Is Polonius a loving father or a strict authoritarian? Is any of his advice good advice, or is it merely empty rhetoric? (2) What do Laertes and Ophelia think of their father? How do they react to him in the David Tennant production? (3) Notice how Ophelia breaks her promise to Laertes almost as soon as he exits. What of that?
Monday, September 14 (4) - Hamlet presentation 1.3.52-end (Alston, Mulligan, Montes, Parsley, Graff, Sullivan, Rice, Henning); Tonight you're reading 1.4, wherein Hamlet first encounters the ghost. (1) After you read line 16, turn to page 356 in the Oxford edition to read a speech not found in the First Folio ("This heavy-handed revel east and west"). Then read the note (ii) at the bottom of page 356. Why do most productions cut this speech? Doesn't this provide greater insight into Hamlet? (2) Move carefully through Hamlet's speech, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!", thinking about how Hamlet's language differs from just his previous speech. (3) In 1.2 Horatio and Marcellus were encouraging Hamlet to speak to the Ghost; now they're begging him not to. How do you account for such a change? Is it a reflection on the Ghost, themselves, or Hamlet?
Tuesday, September 15 (5) - Hamlet presentation 1.4 (Dias, Dizon, Borland, Okeke, Finley, Glynn, Neiers); Remember that by tomorrow you're to read pages 50-53 in the Killgallon, Sentence Composing for College book. Be familiar with the characteristics of absolute phrases. Then, complete Practice 3, numbers 3-5 AND Practice 8, numbers 1-4. These must be hand-written on loose-leaf paper, ready to be handed in at the end of your vocabulary quiz.
Wednesday, September 16 (6) - Vocabulary Quiz, units 1-2; Killgallon; Tonight you finally get to hear the Ghost speak! (1) An agent of the devil? Most of the audience in Shakespeare’s day were Protestants would have good reasons to believe the ghost an agent of the devil: Protestants to not believe in Purgatory; and the Protestant church judged revenge to be a sin, for which the revenger’s soul would be damned. But the ghost’s speech is thrilling. What makes his language so exciting? Define at least two characteristics of it. (2) Like Hamlet, in his soliloquy in 1.2, the ghost seems little interested in affairs of state. His mind is consumed with family matters at first. He expressed revulsion at Gertrude’s sexual relationship with Claudius; he is sickened by the thought of her betrayal; and he speaks bitterly of “garbage” and “lust.” But after the ghost vents about his wife, he also laments about the moral state of Denmark, perhaps adding a moral push for revenge itself. Does he suggest that the ends justify the means? Can they? (3) Lastly, compare Brian Blessed's Ghost in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet to Patrick Stewart's Ghost in Gregory Doran's. Video to the left.
Thursday, September 17 (1) - Hamlet presentation 1.5.1-113 (Medina, Longino, McStravick, Duff, Montalvo, Lauinger, Barloon); Tonight you're finishing the first Act. (1) “To put an antic disposition on.” Hamlet tells Marcellus and Horatio that his future behavior might appear odd, even mad. List at least two reasons why you think Hamlet would chose such a course of behavior. (2) "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right." How do these lines perfectly reflect everything we know about Hamlet thus far?
Oliver Ford Davies as polonius
Friday, September 18 (2) - Hamlet presentation 1.5.114-end (Baratta, Koehler, Fennessy, Watson, Chinedo, Voyles, Kenneally, Vennix); Over the weekend you're reading 2.1. I'll be presenting on Monday. (1) Polonius loses the drift of his argument. Is he just old? Is he dim? Is he abstracted? Is his memory bad? What do you think? And what has this moment to do with how an actor might portray Polonius? (2) Can you find any justification for Polonius’s spying on his son? Where else in the play have we seen spying? Why does Polonius think spying is necessary? Does Laertes seem the type of young man to trust? (3) Polonius comes to an interpretation of the cause of Hamlet’s madness. Is he right? Why does he think he is?
Monday, September 21 (3) - EC reminders; Set Fall final essay, part 1; Set What's in a word? / Film comparison assignment; Hamlet 2.1; Tonight read 2.1.1-167, the first part of the longest scene in the play. Notice how careful Claudius is being. Why is he using so many euphemisms to tell R & G what is happening to Hamlet? Do R & G have an moral qualms / reservations about what Claudius is asking them to do? And then back to Polonius: Can this scene help us narrow our understanding of Polonius? What are meant to think of him?
Tuesday, September 22 (4) - Hamlet presentation 2.2.1-167 (Restrepo, Cano, Bastian, Baizan, Dorman, Viancos, Sotis); (1) At what point in 2.2 does Hamlet realize Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were "sent for?" (2) Hamlet's speech -- "I have of late, but wherefore I know not..." -- is one of my favorite speeches in the play, but not for the reasons you might think. Is this speech a profound expression of melancholy or is it part of Hamlet's antic disposition? How could we possibly know?
Wednesday, September 23 (5) - Hamlet 2.2.168-413; Tonight, read Focus 7 (Appositive Phrase) in your Killgallon text, pages 65-67. What are the characteristics of appositive phrases? How does the focus of a sentence change when you place the appositive phrase at the beginning, between the subject and verb, or as a closer? Then, complete Practice 3, numbers 3-5 AND Practice 8, numbers 1-4. Again, they are to be hand-written on loose-leaf paper. This time, completion of the exercises will be for extra credit. You're welcome.
Thursday, September 24 (6) - Vocabulary Quiz, units 1-4; Killgallon; Hamlet's second soliloquy, "Rhapsody in Blue". Read definition 3a of the OED, rhapsody. You'll see later on in Act 3, Hamlet refers to a "rhapsody of words" (3.4.47). In whats sense is Hamlet's second soliloquy a rhapsody of words? How many movements do you see in this speech. Work your way through systematically, breaking the speech up into its intellectual and emotional components. I find 6 movements. How many do you see?
Friday, September 25 (1) - Hamlet 2.2.414-end; Over the weekend, read to be or not to be. Why do you think director Gregory Doran swaps the two soliloquies in his production with David Tennant? What does the sequence in your text suggest about Hamlet that the production does not? What makes this speech so memorable?
Monday, September 28 (2) - Hamlet presentation 3.1.1-91 (Harrison, Medrano, Duffner, Britton, Nino, Cashiola, Ona); (1) Again we come back to trying to decipher why Hamlet acts the way he does toward Ophelia. Is he legitimately concerned for her future? Is he angry with her because of her betrayal? Is this part of his antic disposition because he knows he's being watched? How can we know (2) Does Hamlet know that he's being watched? Does he determine that during the scene? Can you spot a place where he might? (Remember how he changed his way of talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.) Who is the "one" referred to in "all but one" (3.1.147)?
Tuesday, September 29 (3) - Hamlet 3.1.92-end; Hamlet paragraph revision due Monday, October 12. Remember the requirements for revision; (1) How does Hamlet behave with Ophelia? (And with Claudius. And with his mother?) Why so strange? Has Hamlet’s “transformation” continued or his he acting? Can the question be posed so simply? (2) Does Hamlet react to Claudius’s guilt as you might expect? Define and explain his reactions. What do they show you about Hamlet? (3) Hamlet’s final speech seems to take a different tone than his speech throughout the scene. What is that difference? What is the subject of the speech?
Wednesday, September 30 (4) - Hamlet 3.2; (1) What does Claudius admit in his attempt to pray? Has the play actually had an effect on him? Why can't he ask for forgiveness? (2) Yes, Hamlet's delay becomes increasingly frustrating, but here, somehow, I don't mind so much. How is this decision not to act different from ones previous to this? (3) What do you think is going to happen during the conversation with his mother?
Get ready. October 15 is approaching.
Thursday, October 1 (5) - Hamlet 3.3
Friday, October 2 (6) - Set Hamlet thematic essay; Killgallon catch-up (absolute and appositive phrases); This weekend you're reading the most important scene in the play, in my mind. Spend extra time with the text. (1) Hamlet acts! Ah, but wrongly. How do you see his killing Polonius? Premeditated revenge? Impulse? Excitement? Passion? Does Hamlet think he’s killed Claudius? What insights into Hamlet’s character does the killing offer? (2) What is Hamlet’s intent in his diatribe and in the scene with his mother. (Let’s not forget that she is his mother.)? (3) How much does Gertrude know about Claudius and about what’s been going on? Decide from her lines in this scene. (4) Hamlet rejects his mother’s accusation that he is mad. Is he right? Does he prove that he is not or that he is? Answer this question in part by looking at the images in his speech. (5) Do you see a changed Hamlet in this scene? List the changes, in all their forms. But be sure to consider his attitude toward his actions and their consequences. If you remember, when he first wants to follow the Ghost in 1.4, he says, “My fate cries out….” Do you see fate/destiny/Providence at work in the play?
Monday, October 5 (1) - Hamlet 3.4; Due Wednesday: Read this essay that thinks in topics, noting in the margins the function of each paragraph. Does it respond to the previous paragraph? Does it establish information or define terms necessary to understand the rest of the essay?
Tuesday, October 6 (2) - Hamlet presentation 4.1-4.3 (West, Markley, Longwell, Mangin, Weinheimer, Oyolu, Sander, Villarreal); You'll notice that 4.4 is surprisingly short in the Oxford edition. This is because the editor has based his edition of the play on just one of the three, substantive, early publications of Hamlet. For a more complete picture of the character, though, I want us to read a crucial part of the scene that only appears in another, earlier publication. So, after you finish reading the first part of 4.4 on page 296 of the Oxford edition, turn to page 362 to finish the scene, which ends with Hamlet's exit at the top of page 365. Like the first player, the captain is another spur to prick the side of Hamlet's intent. What does Hamlet vow in his soliloquy? Can we believe him this time? What, textually, marks a change in Hamlet once and for all?
Wednesday, October 7 (3) - Beyond the 5-paragraph essay
Thursday, October 8 (4) - Openers
Friday, October 9 (5) - Closers
Monday, October 12 (6) - Hamlet thematic essay, first draft due - Peer revision - Bring 5 hard copies of the essay -- 10% penalty
Tuesday, October 13 (1) - HARD COPY OF FINAL DRAFT DUE NEXT MONDAY; Revision, revision, revision; Hamlet 4.4-4.7
Wednesday, October 14 (2) - NO CLASSES (TESTING DAY)
Thursday, October 15 (3) - Next Tuesday you'll have your next vocabulary quiz, focusing on units 5-6. I'd also like you to read the selection of your Killgallon text associated with participial phrases (80-83). Then, complete Practice 3, numbers 3-5 AND Practice 8, numbers 1-4. These must be hand-written on loose-leaf paper, ready to be handed in at the end of your vocabulary quiz; Hamlet presentation 5.1 (Brill, Lilly, Boyer, Dotson, Erwin, Frazier, Lucas)
Friday, October 16 (4) - Hamlet 5.2.1-195
“I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”
Remember your extra credit opportunity: See a screening of the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet at the Barbican in London. Click the image for ticket information.
“In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases — probably recollections from more tender years of schooling — as ‘his style is simple’ or ‘his style is clear and simple’ or ‘his style is beautiful and simple’ or ‘his style is quite beautiful and simple.’ But remember that ‘simplicity’ is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple... This story is Tolstoy’s most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement... Tolstoy’s style is a marvelously complicated, ponderous achievement.”
Study Links
"6 reading habits from Harvard"
Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction"
Questions for analyzing novels
Below are 5 of my annotated pages from various texts and 1 of David Foster Wallace's copy of DeLillo's Players. The pages of the texts that you will be working with most closely should look just like these.
Due Dates
Monday, September 14 - Hamlet paragraph
Wednesday, September 30 - What's in a word? / Film comparison
Monday, September 28 - Choose text for final essay
Monday, October 12 - Hamlet paragraph revision
Monday, October 12 - Hamlet thematic essay first draft
Monday, October 19 - Hamlet thematic essay
Monday, October 26 - In-class, exploratory essay
Friday, October 30 - Hamlet EC assignment
Monday, November 9 - Thesis of final essay
Monday, November 16 - Draft of final essay
Monday, December 7 - Final essay
"Plumbing the depths of Shakespearean listservs, we find similar arguments. Harvard’s Eric Johnson-DeBaufre suggested, for example, that “ ‘fat’ is Shakespeare’s truncation of ‘fatigate,’ an adjective [meaning weary] in regular use during the period,” including in texts Shakespeare likely read.
Even if it’s not a printer’s error or a truncation, fat might not mean what we think it means. In Elizabethan times, fat also meant sweaty. Since Gertrude offers Hamlet her napkin to wipe his face, perhaps context reveals that fat refers to his perspiring brow. This begs the question: How can anyone ever definitively say what the meaning of a word is in Shakespeare?
I decided to get to the bottom of this with some help from John-Paul Spiro, a Shakespearean scholar who teaches at Villanova. According to Spiro, investigating the meaning of specific words in Shakespeare is particularly fraught because Shakespeare was the Ornette Coleman of language. Beyond inventing more than 1,700 words, Shakespeare was “deliberately coming up with new meanings of words, and opening up new conceptual spaces,” Spiro said. The play Macbeth invents the contemporary definition of the word success, for example, and Shakespeare was the first person to use crown as a verb.
In order to figure out what fat means at this specific moment of Hamlet, then, we must look not only at how Elizabethans understood the term, but how his contemporaries used the term, how Shakespeare uses it in his plays in general, and how Shakespeare uses it in Hamlet. To the Elizabethans, fat could indeed mean sweaty, but “sweaty in the way fatty meat is sweaty when you cook it,” Spiro said. “Even in Elizabethan times, you would never say, ‘I went for a run, and now I’m fat.’ ”
But how did Shakespeare use it? At my urging, Spiro dug out his concordance and looked up every single usage of the word fat in Shakespeare. Of the 80 or so times Shakespeare uses fat, there are two usages outside of Hamlet where the Bard could be referring to sweat, but in general “ ‘stuffed’ is really what it’s used to mean,” Spiro told me. “Not just heavy. Overfull, teeming, something fatted and overfed, like livestock.”
It has other connotations as well, particularly around clumsiness. “If you have a fatted goose, it’s not going to walk well,” he says. “If you go back to references to Falstaff and a few other characters, there’s also a hint of calling someone effeminate. You’re clumsy the way a very pregnant woman is clumsy.”
In Hamlet itself, fat is used in ways that reference fullness and death. Fat appears first in Act I, when the Ghost tells Hamlet that if he is not interested in the Ghost’s story, he will be “duller … than the fat weed/ That roots itself in ease,” on the banks of the river Lethe, which cleansed newly dead souls of their memory in Greek myth. In the Queen’s bedchamber scene, Hamlet expresses his horror at his mother sleeping with her husband’s brother/murderer, ranting, “forgive me this my virtue/ For in the fatness of these pursy times/ Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg.”* Hamlet is declaring Denmark so stuffed with corruption that virtue is subservient to vice.
The most explicit linkage of the word fat with both fullness and death comes in Act IV. When Claudius asks Hamlet—who has just murdered Polonius—where Polonius is, Hamlet responds that he is currently being eaten by worms, before saying:
Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.
Here we see Shakespeare’s joy in multiple meanings on glorious display, using fat as both adjective and verb to describe a grimly comic circle of life in which everything and everyone is doomed and, in a worm’s belly, equal.
Less than an hour later in stage time, Gertrude’s line about Hamlet’s fatness appears. According to Spiro, Hamlet’s use of the word in Act IV and Gertrude’s in Act V are connected. Claudius says that Hamlet will win, and Gertrude replies, in essence: “Look at him, he’s heavy, he’s not moving well, he’s already out of breath, he’s going to get carved up.” This line both recalls for the listener Hamlet’s speech about death and paves the way for Hamlet’s own demise. This link doesn’t work unless fat carries with it the connotations of overfull livestock about to die.
So most of the evidence indicates that when Gertrude uses the word fat referencing Hamlet, she means, well, fat. There’s even additional—although, of course, ambiguous—evidence elsewhere in the play that Hamlet is fat. Ophelia, who gives the most detailed physical description of Hamlet in the play, talks about a sigh “shatter[ing] all his bulk” while he’s pretending to be mad. The word bulk is used elsewhere by Laertes when he describes Hamlet’s love for Ophelia waxing and waning like the moon in its bulk. Yet not only is Hamlet’s fatness a minority position within Shakespeare studies, but in the past 15 years, only two high-profile productions of Hamlet—one with Simon Russell Beale, the other Paul Giamatti—have starred actors who weren’t svelte. Perhaps the more pertinent question, then, is why we assume—or even need—Hamlet to be thin."
"Is Hamlet Fat?: A Slate Investigation," By Isaac Butler, 11/20/15