Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
attempt to capture the essence of reality in artificial form. In his book Poetics,
he gives clear instructions as to which elements are considered necessary to
conceive a successful tragedy,
Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal
agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character
and thought; from which actions spring ... Hence, the Plot is the imitation of
the action- the arrangement of the incidents. By Character I mean that in
virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents. Thought is required
wherever a statement is proved, or, it may be, a general truth enunciated.
Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its
quality- namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. These
elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact,
every play contains Spectacular elements as well as Character, Plot, Diction,
Song, and Thought (Aristotle, 12).
In applying the Aristotelian concept of Tragedy to Hamlet, it can be said that
the play contains all six parts:
A plot with which includes:
a beginning that would start the cause and effect chain leading to the
incentive moment, (from Act 1 to Act 3)
a middle, or climax, that would be caused by earlier incidents, (from Act 3
to Act 5)
an end, or resolution that would be affected by the preceding events and
solve or resolve the problem created during the incentive moment. It is
also called, in modern terminology the dnouement.
Such plot would, according to Bradley, generate immediate interest,
suppose you were to describe the plot of Hamlet to a person quite ignorant of
the play what impression would your sketch make on him? Would he not
exclaim: 'What a sensational story! Why, here are some eight violent deaths,
not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad woman, and a fight in a grave! If I
did not know that the play was Shakespeare's, I should have thought it must
have been one of those early tragedies of blood and horror from which he is
said to have redeemed the stage'? (Bradley, 38)
Aristotle also states that the plot must be free of deus ex machina, or an
external intervention, and, preferably, of a complex kind. By complex he
explains that it is one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal,
or by Recognition, or by both (Aristotle 20). Aristotle explains that a
peripeteia (Reversal) occurs when a character produces an effect opposite to
that which he intended to produce, while an anagnorisis (Recognition) is a
change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the
persons destined for good or bad fortune. (Aristotle 21) In Hamlet, reversal
or peripeteia would happen when Claudius is praying and Hamlet cannot find
the strength to murder him, and he says:
Hamlets anagnorisis would take place when he realizes that Fortinbras, his
enemy, is seeking revenge. He then recognizes his faults in his soliloquy:
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. (4.4.33-35)
______________________________________________________________________
For Hamlet "the rest is silence." The tragedy is summed up in the
contrast between those four mysterious words and Horatio's Goodnight, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy restl
Fortinbras, who has now entered, gazes around him as on a battlefield:
This quarry cries on havoc. 0 proud dea1ch!
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
And Horatio promises to tell, in explanation,
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaught(~rs,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads.
The Ghost's words sounded eloquen
[Harold_C._Goddard]_The_Meaning_of_Shakespeare,_Vo(BookFi.org)
______________________________________________________________________