http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/plays/incest.html
Is Gertrude's remarriage to her husband brother incest?
- "Hamlet: My Mother: Father and Mother is man and wife: man and wife is one flesh, and fo my mother"
- If they are one flesh then to marry your dead husband's brother is to marry your brother- incest.
Sources for Hamlet
- based on Norse legend by Saxo Grammaticus
- tell of the rise and fall of the great rulers of Denmark
- Similarities between Hamlet and legend:
- brother kills the king
- marries his brother's wife, the queen
- the son feigns madness and plans revenge
- Difference:
- In the legend the son becomes the new and rightful king of Jutland, but in Hamlet he dies.
- Shakespeare's Hamlet based his play on Thomas Kyd's play, Ur-Hamlet, which was based on the legend.
- In Ur-Hamlet there is a character named Hamlet and a ghost who cried "Hamlet, revenge!"
Revenge Tragedy
- Aristotle defines tragedy in the Poetics "as an imitation of a single, unified, action that is serious, complete, and has a certain magnitude.
- Tragedy: fall of a good, believable and consistent character caused by and error or frailty.
- Revenge tragedy: depicts a son's revenge for a father's murder, which is revealed by the murdered man's ghost- inspired by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy
- Plot may include:
- hesitation of hero
- real of pretended insanity of hero
- hero's contemplation of suicide
- multiple levels of intrigue
- an able scheming villain
- abundance of philosophic soliloquies
- the sensationalized of murder on stage or the exhibition of dead bodies
- dynamics of revenge:
- the offense
- the antagonist
- clarification of strategies
- series of delays, obstacles, diversions, mistakes
- the showdown
Connections
When reading about the typical ideas included in a revenge tragedy plot it mentioned the great amount of soliloquies, which I remembered noticing while reading Hamlet.
Pass. Nice job finding links too. Everything was concise but very thorough
ReplyDelete