Hamlet Essay (incomplete)

Hamlet has always been looked at as a confused teenage boy who gradually goes insane by the prospect of killing his murderous uncle. It's fair to say that he is. "The Performative Utterance" provides some insight into how Hamlet may have become disillusioned with himself through the process of "self-overhearing," or listening to oneself speak and discovering knowledge about themselves. While Hamlet may have started out as a normal teenage boy, a part of him that the reader doesn't see much of as Hamlet is given his revenge assignment early on, by the end of the play he has changed drastically--more than he's told his friends he will.

The Performative Utterance

Honestly, I thought that "The Performative Utterance" was really boring. It had some interesting things in it but as a whole it was way too long and the guy who wrote it could put his time to better use. The analyzing of how Shakespeare wrote felt like it was overanalyzed and like they were trying to look for meaning where there maybe was none. It felt too complicated.

Today's Discussion

Today we talked about the conservativeness of American culture versus Europe and the first amendment. I thought it was interesting. We talked about how certain speech is not protected under the first amendment, like hate speech or speech that calls on people to do bad things. But what if someone says something that, when people hear it, they think, "They're getting arrested for sure" but no one physically reacts in anyway to what was said. Then they can't be arrested. So, technically, all speech is okay unless you're threatening someone with their life or unless someone is stupid enough to do whatever they were told. Also, on the topic of American conservativeness in the media, in particular, if you watch European commercials they are way more explicit than what is allowed here. I don't have any idea why that is, and I don't know if that has anything to do with Shakespeare having his characters make dirty jokes.

Literary Fiction and Empathy

Reading fiction can help you to understand others because you're imagining people's facial expressions as a situation is happening. Because so much is left up to the readers to figure out, we can apply those skills to real life. If you go people watching, you can sometimes come up with a pretty good idea of what's going on with the person over there who doesn't look very happy, even if you can't hear what they're saying. People give away a lot with their facial expressions even though they aren't trying to.
But when a piece of lit doesn't give you clues as to someone's facial expressions like in...oh, say.. Hamlet, for example, it's up to the actor (if it's a play) to interpret it as they will. If it's a book, then again, it's up to the reader to imagine what the character looks like given the details of the situation. Reading the dialogue and understanding the situation can give us an idea of what the character is feeling, so that's when we start to understand other people in real life. We see things from their point of view. In Hamlet, we may never understand why Gertrude hastily married Claudius after a happy union with Hamlet, but we can definitely see why Hamlet Jr. isn't happy about it.

Act I Scene I

• Starts out with two guards outside the palace. Then two more guards show up and they start talking about how one of them saw a ghost.
• The ghost shows up, and it turns out to be the late King Hamlet. They try to get him to talk to them, but he goes away.
• They think that the ghost is there to warn of an impending attack
• Not much really happens in the first scene. The guards decide to tell Hamlet of what they saw because they think it'll talk to him

Act I Scene II

• Claudius talks about the recent death of his brother. He says that despite how sad it is, they should be thinking of themselves and get through it together. (cognitive dissonance used--putting two things together to make you wonder). Claudius is trying to distract everyone by saying "Focus on Fortinbras, not what's going on with me."
• "A little more than kin, and less than kind."
• Hamlet says in his own way "You don't know what I'm feeling" and he doesn't approve of the marriage
• Claudius tells Hamlet that it's unnatural for him to be grieving for so long. He doesn't trust Hamlet because he won't let him go to university
• Hamlet gives his long monologue thing and it allows us to see how angry he is. He's suicidal in a way, but not because he's depressed. He just doesn't want to have to see what's going on in his family. He doesn't want to be a part of it in any way. He curses his mom
• Horatio and Marcellus show up and tell Hamlet about how they saw his dad. Hamlet tells them to say nothing about it to anyone else.

Blog experiences (Hamlet)

Shakespeare Geek Blog-- This blog talks a lot about Shakespeare (obviously) so I posted a comment saying something about wanting to discuss Hamlet with whoever would be willing to, but my comment can't post until my comment is okay'd by the person running the blog. Or something.

I found a high school blog kind of like the one we use for this class and I was going to post on it but  I felt like the students who saw it would think I was just some pervert so I didn't post anything. I looked around for some more Hamlet/Shakespeare blogs but there aren't too many around.