Sunday 13 November 2016

All characters of Hamlet( Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia)

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Name:-Baraiya Priyanka.J
M.A:- Sem 1
Roll No:- 28
Enrollment No:- 2069108420170002
Paper No:-1
Unit:-1
Topic:- All characters of Hamlet( Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia)
College :- Department of English (M.K.B.U)
Email:-priyankabaraiya8895@gmail.com




Hamlet:- Characters of Ophelia, Hamlet and Gertrude
Introduction:- William Shakespeare has universalized his literary work. He wrote many sonnets, comedies, tragedies and tragic comedies. Usually his female characters are strong but in it we go Hamlet we find feeble through.
Female characters in Shakespeare’s Drama:-
In the play ‘Macbeth’ the lady Macbeth is very forceful .
Her force many difficulties in jungle but through her intellectuality she impressed us.
She succeed in defeating forces against her. In ‘King lear’ the youngest daughter of the king is one of the strongest women . Characters of Shakespeare she had to leave the kingdom for truth. In most of Shakespeare drama women are virtues , beautiful are praised for their qualities . But in Hamlet both the women are feeble. Gertrude is Hamlet’s mother who maries Hamlet’s uncle within few months of his husband’s death. Other female is Ophelia who is Hamlet’s beloved. She is shown very innocent lacking the intellectual ability.

Character of Hamlet:-

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare at an uncertain date between 1599 and 1602. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet is called to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, by the ghost of Hamlet's father, King Hamlet.
Role in the play
The play opens with Hamlet deeply depressed over the recent death of his father, King Hamlet, and his uncle Claudius' ascension to the throne and hasty marriage to Hamlet's mother Gertrude. One night, his father's ghost appears to him and tells him that Claudius murdered him in order to usurp the throne, and commands his son to avenge his death.
Claudius sends for two of Hamlet's friends from Wittenberg, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to find out what is causing Hamlet so much pain.

Views of Hamlet

Perhaps the most straightforward view sees Hamlet as seeking truth in order to be certain that he is justified in carrying out the revenge called for by a ghost that claims to be the spirit of his father. The 1948 movie with Laurence Olivier in the title role is introduced by a voiceover: "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."
T. S. Eliot offers a similar view of Hamlet's character in his critical essay, "Hamlet and His Problems" (The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism). He states, "We find Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone...".



Character of Gertrude:-


In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Gertrude is Hamlet's mother and Queen of Denmark. Her relationship with Hamlet is somewhat turbulent, since he resents her marrying her husband's brother Claudius after he murdered the King (young Hamlet's father, King Hamlet). Gertrude reveals no guilt in her marriage with Claudius after the recent murder of her husband, and Hamlet begins to show signs of jealousy towards Claudius. According to Hamlet, she scarcely mourned her husband's death before marrying Claudius.

Role in the play

Gertrude is first seen in Act 1 Scene 2 as she tries to cheer Hamlet over the loss of his father, begging him to stay at home rather than going back to school in Wittenberg. Her worry over him continues into the second act, as she sides with King Claudius in sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to raise the spirits of her son. Also, rather than ascribing Hamlet's sudden madness to Ophelia's rejection (as thought by Polonius), she believes the cause to be his father, King Hamlet's death and her quick, subsequent marriage to Claudius: "I doubt it is no other but the main; His father's death and our o'erhasty marriage."[1] In Act three, she eagerly listens to the report of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on their attempt to cheer him, and supports the King and Polonius' plan to watch Hamlet from a hidden vantage point as he speaks with Ophelia, with the hope that her presence will heal him.

Performances

Women were almost exclusively banned from appearing as actresses on the stage until approximately 1660 and in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, troupes appeared that were composed entirely of boy players. Indeed, they are famously mentioned in Hamlet, in which a group of travelling actors has left the city due to rivalry with a troupe of "little eyases" 


Influences

Gertrude and Claudius, a John Updike novel, serves as a prequel to the events of the play. It follows Gertrude from her wedding to King Hamlet, through an affair with Claudius, and its murderous results, until the very beginning of the play. Gertrude also appears as a character in Howard Barker's Gertrude—The Cry, which uses some of the characters from Hamlet.
Hamlet has played "a relatively small role" in the appropriation of Shakespeare's plays by women writers. Margaret Atwood's "Gertrude Talks Back", in her 1992 collection of short stories Good Bones, sees the title character setting her son straight about Old Hamlet's murder: "It wasn't Claudius, darling, it was me!"
The character of Gemma Teller Morrow on the FX show Sons of Anarchy which incorporates plot elements from Hamlet, is influenced by and shares many traits with Queen Gertrude.

Character of Ophelia:-

Ophelia is a character in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and potential wife of Prince Hamlet. She is one of two female characters in the play.
She is beautiful, faithful, and obedient. She is sweet lovely, innocent and a saint like figure. Her character is totally dependent on male character. She is epitome of goodness. Ophelia loved her father, brother and lover deeply. She clings to the memory of Hamlet when he left her.
Gertrude chose a brother over a dead Hamlet. Here we can see that she is additionally preserves unlike Gertrude .
Ophelia has good response to be harsh realities of life. She dies drawing in the river amidst of garbands.   
Frailty thy name is women:-
Hamlet feels betrayed by Gertrude is far more apparent with the addition of Ophelia to the play. Hamlet’s feelings of rage against his mother can be directed towards Ophelia in his estimation. Hiding her base nature behind a guise of the impeccability and if women are harlots then they must have their procurers .Gertrude has been made a whore by Claudius, and Ophelia has been mad a whore by her father.
 Hamlet’s estimation is her sexual use by not one man but by more than one man. What seems to avenge in the nunnery interlude is that Ophelia has put her sense of love and duty for him, just as Gertrude put her sense of love and duty . Her new husband above her sense of love and duty for her old.


Ophelia : Epitome of goodness.
Ophelia represents something very different to those who are not blinded by hurt and rage. Ophelia is the epitome of goodness very much like Gertrude. Young Ophelia is child like and naïve. Unlike queen Gertrude , Ophelia has good reason to be unaware of the harsh realities of life . She is very young, and lost her mother possibly at birth . Her father polonius and brother gives her very pain.
Even though her love for Hamlet is strong, she obeys her father when he tells her not to see Hamlet again or accept any letters that Hamlet writes .
Her heart is pure when she does do something dishonest , such as tell Hamlet that her father has gone home when he is really behind the curtain, it is out of genuine fear. Ophelia clings to the memory of Hamlet treating her with respect and tenderness. She defends him and loves him to the very and despite his brutality . She is incapable of defending her self , but through her timid responses we see clearly her intense suffering.
      Hamlet: I did love you once.
      Ophelia: Indeed my lord you made me believe so.
      Hamlet: You should not have believed  me I loved you not.
      Ophelia: I was the more deceived.
Feminist:-
In the 20th century feminist critics opened up new approaches to Gertrude and Ophelia. New historicist and cultural materialist critics examined the play in its historical context.
Ophelia is also deafened by feminist critics. Most notably Elaine showalter Ophelia is surrounded by powerful men. Her father, brother and Hamlet .Hamlet abandons her and Polonius dies . Feminist theorists argue that she goes mad with guilt because when Hamlet kills her father.
He has fullfield her sexual desires to have Hamlet kill her father so they can be together. Showalter points out that Ophelia has became the distraught and hysterical woman in modern culture. The bawdy songs that she sings in front of laerts , Gertrude and Claudius are somber reminders that the corrupt world has taken his its toll on the pure Ophelia. They shows us that only in her insanity does she live up to Hamlet’s false perception of her as a lascivious woman.
Comparison between Ophelia and Gertrude:-
          In the Hamlet both the female characters are weaker in the comparison of other females of Shakespeare . They lack virtues . Through Ophelia we witness Hamlet’s evolution or devolution Gertrude has been made whore by Claudius while Ophelia by Polonius
Analysis of love – hate relation between Hamlet and Ophelia.
This consideration occupied with others as to Hamlet’s state of mind. Seem to be point to two two types they suggests first that Hamlet’s love, though never lost , was after Ophelia’s apparent rejection of him.
Hamlet’s love, they seem to show not only mingled with bitterness it was also like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deepen by his melancholy . It was far from being extinguished. Probably it was one of the causes which prove him to force his way to Ophelia it awake and the circumstances being what they were tormented him.
   Theatrical experience:- He knew that the not observe how unnatural it was that a man deeply in love and forced not only to remove but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when he was alone.
This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare . Tones , gestures and by play how far Hamlets feigned harshness to Ophelia  was mingled with real bitterness, and again hpw far his melancholy had dead ended his love.
In last seen Ophelia gone mad because her love is not success.
Conclusion:-
Character of Hamlet and Ophelia are very sensitive .
Gertrude and Ophelia both are shown as weaker sex.
Females are given lower category.
They are symbols of ingratitude and infidelity.
Both are powered bye man and lack of freedom.










The Biographia Literaria by Samuel Coleridge.


Please click here to evaluate my blog assignment.
Name:-Baraiya Priyanka.J
M.A:- Sem 1
Roll No:- 28
Enrollment No:- 2069108420170002
Paper No:-3
Unit:-4
Sub:- Literary theory and criticism
Topic:- The Biographia Literaria by Samuel Coleridge
College :- Department of English (M.K.B.U)
Email:-priyankabaraiya8895@gmail.com




Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. 
In the wonderful “ Ode to Dejection” from which the above fragment is taken, we have a single strong impression of Coleridge’s whole life – a sad , broken , tragic life. In marked contrast with the peaceful extence of his friend Wardsworth for him self . During the greater part of his life . The poet had only grief and remorse as his portion, But for anybody else. For the audience that were  charred by the brilliancy of his literary lectures. For the friends who gathered about him to be inspired by his ideals and conversation, and for all his readers who found unending delight in the little volume which holds his poetry. He had and still has a cheering message full of hope and beauty and inspiration. Coleridge a man of grief who makes world glad.

Early life:-  
Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England.
Samuel's father was the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), the well-respected vicar of St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary and headmaster of the King's School, a free grammar school established by King Henry VIII (1509–1547) in the town. He had previously been Master of Hugh Squier's School in South Molton, Devon, and Lecturer of nearby Molland.
John Coleridge had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by the Reverend Mr. Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809),probably the daughter of John Bowden, Mayor of South Molton, Devon, in 1726.
 Coleridge suggests that he "took no pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself.
 After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school which was founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles.
In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read."
Throughout his life, Coleridge idealised his father as pious and innocent, while his relationship with his mother was more problematic.  His childhood was characterised by attention seeking, which has been linked to his dependent personality as an adult.  He was rarely allowed to return home during the school term, and this distance from his family at such a turbulent time proved emotionally damaging.
He later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem "Frost at Midnight": "With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace."

Literary criticism

                                                                            

Biographia Literaria



In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817.
The work delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth.
 Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text and into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical analysis and emotion. However, Eliot also criticises Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are not provoked by the work being studied.
 Hugh Kenner in Historical Fictions, discusses Norman Fruman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel and suggests that the term "criticism" is too often applied to Biographia Literaria, which both he and Fruman describe as having failed to explain or help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the rational process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking that makes the volume more of a biography than a work of criticism.[44]
In Biographia Literaria and his poetry, symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," Biographia Literaria is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life.

 Works of Coleridge’s:-
Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality.
As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A. O. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan.

Coleridge draft of the poem Kubla Khan
Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (again, usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us;He made and loveth all." Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional "Romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing."
In xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Conclusion:-
The work of Coleridge’s criticism and biographia literaria and lectures on Shakespeare are very important in our English Literature. He was influenced by many contemporary writers of his age. The influences which were most potent in shaping the views and theories of Coleridge and wordswarth.