Msbalt's List: English IV Unit III

• Hamlet, the Pirate’s Son
• ndeed, some scholars have deemed the sea-voyage a barbaric “folk-tale” relic and a “serious artistic flaw” (Lawrence 61; Wentersdorf 434).2 And when no
• Yet  critics who have taken a historical approach to the play directly  challenge the assumption that the pirates are patently implausible  when they point to England’s relations with Denmark in the late  sixteenth century and to the genuine presence of pirates in the North  and Baltic Seas
• anachronistic, Ha
• • 
     
   
  • If we  stress these elements of Hamlet’s sources, Shakespeare’s  pirate rescue may still look providential but it also gestures  towards Hamlet’s personal and national heritage. Symbolically,  perhaps, Hamlet faces another version of his father at sea: not only  are the “thieves of mercy” reminiscent of Horwendile but they  also bring to mind the pirate conquerors of Denmark’s primitive  “Viking” history. The pirates function as the literary and  historical ghosts of Hamlet’s ancestors, on the margins of the  play, outside the staged action, but crucial to his volte-face.  Critics seem to agree that Hamlet returns from his sea-voyage in Act  5 a transformed man, but there is no consensus on why or how he has  changed. The soliloquies are gone and Hamlet makes his only public  declaration of his status, “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane”  (5.1.250-51). The curiosity of this statement is why the prince would  be compelled to characterize his royal identity in this way.15 Indeed, what Hamlet literally asserts is the recuperation of his  ethnic identity—a recuperation that may be connected to his  adventures at sea. 
• melancholy

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• anachronistic - msbalt on 2012-12-10

• She is most frequently analyzed in relationship to   Hamlet, and her motivation seems dominated by the characters with whom she   interacts until she is spins free in her madness. Otherwise, she seems to   be a sympathetic and engaging pawn of the drama. The Freudian critic, Jacques   Lacan provides us with an excellent example.
• A central obstacle to affirming Ophelia's existence as an independent character   is that she appears to have no past. With Hamlet, we know through exposition   of his father, his childhood and his education, and we see him in relationship   to old friends. However, we have none of these cues to give us a sense of   Ophelia's past.
• Shakespeare gives us very little information from which to imagine   a past for Ophelia. She appears in only five of the play's twenty scenes;   the pre-play course of her love story with Hamlet is known only by a   few ambiguous flashbacks.  - Elaine Showalter,   "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities   of Feminist Criticism" in Susan Wofford (ed.), Hamlet, St.   Martin's Press, Boston, 1994. p. 221.
• standard inherited in our traditions.
• representative   of a repressive double
• In an effort to conceive of Ophelia as a character with her own richness   and integrity, interpreters of the role have often felt obliged to ascribe   a past to her which is not evident from the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet   itself. This was particularly true of Victorian interpretations which represented   a period of great fascination with Ophelia. Like many critics, the Victorians   went to the extant sources of the Hamlet story which were the probable progenitors   of the Shakespeare version -- to Saxo Grammaticus' Historia Danica   (printed 1514) and to François de Bellforest's The Hystorie of   Hamblet (1576). Employing a mixture of these texts and imagination,   they came up with their own portraits of Ophelia - including a past.
• I pictured Ophelia to myself as the motherless child of an elderly   Polonius. His young wife had first given him a son, Laertes, and had   died a few years later, after giving birth to the poor little Ophelia.   The son takes much after his father, and, his student-life over, seeks   his pleasures in the gayer life of France; fond of his little sister   in a patronizing way, in their rare meetings, but neither understanding   nor caring to understand her nature.

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• Ophelia as the archetypal mad woman
• Ophelia as the impossible subject
• Ophelia as the exiled feminine
• Textual Analysis: Madness as Sexual Excess

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