The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare

Hamlet was likely composed between 1600 and 1602.

GENRE - can be classified both as a tragedy and as a classic revenge play, in which the tragic hero, Prince
Hamlet, fails to resist to the corrupting forces of madness, suspicion, and revenge. Hamlet's quest to avenge his
father's murder drives a block between him and every other character in the play, including his once beloved
Ophelia.
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world
literature.
Shakespeare used a play within the play, The Murder of Gonzago, both to dramatize the death of King Hamlet,
which happened before the play began, and to develop the character of Claudius, whose reaction to the play
reveals that he is indeed a murderer.
THEMES
- uncertainty - the ghost poses a great deal of uncertainty for Hamlet. He is uncertain about the ghosts purpose:
it could be a manifestation of Hamlets own conscience, an evil spirit provoking him to murder or his fathers
spirit unable to rest;
His uncertainty delays him from taking action, which ultimately leads to the unnecessary deaths of Polonius,
Laertes, Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
-madness emerges as one of the most important themes of the play. Throughout the play, Hamlets insanity is
questioned, whether or not he is truly mad, or only pretending to be.
- revenge is central to the plot of Hamlet. Hamlet's quest to uncover the truth of his father's death is fueled by his
desire to seek revenge on Claudius, who poisoned his brother, King Hamlet, in order to assume the throne. Hamlet
initiates his scheme to attain revenge in order to gain a perfect opportunity to kill the murderer, Claudius.
Place - Elsinore in eastern Denmark (the castle, a plain and a churchyard);
Time - the late medieval period, though the plays chronological setting is notoriously imprecise;
tone dark, ironic, melancholy, passionate, contemplative, desperate, violent;
The weather is drowsy, cold, winter, yet sometimes sunlight appears
motifs incest and incestuous desire (Hamlets overpowering, maybe even borderline incestuous, passion for his
mother); ears and hearing; death and suicide; darkness and the supernatural; misogyny (Hamlets despiteful
remarks against Gertrude demonstrate his hatred and cruelty towards her; Gertrude's actions destroy Hamlets
faith in women, which is perhaps why his feelings toward Ophelia become ambivalent.)
SYMBOLS
- the ghost - the spiritual consequences of death; is an embodiment of Denmarks growing social unrest. This is
because the bloodline of the monarchy has been unnaturally disrupted by Claudius, an immoral and power-hungry
king causes appearance versus reality: the appearance of the supernatural, something that only some people
believe in;
- the fog emphasizes the idea of uncertainty;
- Yoricks skull - a former court jester, which Hamlet finds with Horatio in the graveyard near Elsinore in Act 5
the physical consequences of death;
As the drama continues, there are numerous attributes regarding the atmosphere and mood which cause the setting
to play a large part. For example, as stated, an atmosphere of evil and darkness pervades the play from the start,
for Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. (1:4:89). Hamlet believe that he is living in a world of
corruption, as he is being deceived by everyone around him.
The imagery of disease, destruction and decay help contribute to the madness in Denmark, as well as the darkness.
The aura of tragedy is completely present from when the play begins, to when it finishes, as even the comedy in
the gravediggers scene is morbid.

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe (1719)

genre adventure story; novel of isolation;
point of view Crusoe narrates in both the first and third person, presenting what he observes. Crusoe
occasionally describes his feelings, but only when they are overwhelming. Usually he favors a more factual
narrative style focused on actions and events.
The author produces this impression of complete reality by employing three main methods: 1. the using of details;
2. the form of biography or the first person narration; 3. the nautical language;
tone mostly detached, meticulous, and objective; he generally avoids dramatic storytelling, preferring an
inventorylike approach to the facts as they unfold. He very rarely registers his own feelings, or those of other
characters, and only does so when those feelings affect a situation directly, such as when he describes the
mutineers as tired and confused, indicating that their fatigue allows them to be defeated.
the idea of individuality The story is about a man who is stranded alone on a desert island for 28 years. With
the supplies he's able to salvage from the wrecked ship, Robinson Crusoe eventually builds a fort and then creates
for himself a kingdom by taming animals, gathering fruit, growing crops, and hunting.
Robinson decides his way through life according to his own thoughts and inclination. He is overambitious. He
wants to get rich quicker. He is not satisfied with the quiet middle station of life. He seeks self-realization, so he
refuses to lead a stable life or to remain inactive for any length of time, and as a result, he rejects his fathers
advice to accept the middle position of life. His desire to go to the sea pushes him to leave home and go on
voyages. He is seized by an overwhelming desire to travel abroad. He goes on a voyage bound for London against
his fathers will.
He manages to create a world out of these simple available things and sources. He is a well-organized practical
man. He takes advantage of everything even if it is small and trivial. He makes use of everything available to him.
He manages to survive on this island.
- the ambivalence of mastery - Crusoes success in mastering his situation, overcoming his obstacles, and
controlling his environment shows the condition of mastery in a positive light, at least at the beginning of the
novel. Crusoe lands in an inhospitable environment and makes it his home. His taming and domestication of wild
goats and parrots with Crusoe as their master illustrates his newfound control. Moreover, Crusoes mastery over
nature makes him a master of his fate and of himself.
SYMBOLS
- the footprint - Crusoes shocking discovery of a single footprint on the sand suggests his conflicted feelings
about human companionship. Although he confessed how much he misses companionship, the evidence of a man
on his island sends him into a panic. Immediately he interprets the footprint negatively, as the print of the devil
or of an aggressor. He never for a moment entertains hope that it could belong to an angel or another European
who could rescue or befriend him.
- the cross - the passing of days is marked with his knife upon a large post, in capital letters, and making it into a
great cross showing how important this cross is to Crusoe as a timekeeping device and thus also as a way of
relating himself to the larger social world where dates and calendars still matter.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bront (1847)

genre gothic novel (designed to both horrify and fascinate readers with scenes of passion and cruelty;
supernatural elements; and a dark, foreboding atmosphere); realist fiction (incorporates vivid circumstantial detail
into a consistently and minutely thought-out plot, dealing mostly with the relationships of the characters to one
another);
- the novel challenges strict Victorian ideals of the day regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and
gender inequality;
narrative technique multiple narrators: Lockwood, Nelly Dean, Isabella, Catherine;
Lockwood, a newcomer to the locale of Wuthering Heights, narrates the entire novel as an entry in his diary. The
story that Lockwood records is told to him by Nelly, a servant, and Lockwood writes most of the narrative in her
voice, describing how she told it to him. Some parts of Nellys story are narrated by other characters, such as
when Nelly receives a letter from Isabella and recites its contents verbatim.
point of view Most of the events of the novel are narrated in Nellys voice, from Nellys point of view, focusing
only on what Nelly can see and hear, or what she can find out about indirectly. Nelly frequently comments on
what the other characters think and feel, and on what their motivations are, but these comments are all based on
her own interpretations of the other charactersshe is not an omniscient narrator.
As a young girl, she works as a servant at Wuthering Heights for the owner of the manor, Mr. Earnshaw, and his
family.
time Lockwood arrives in the late winter months of 1801, rents a manor house called Thrushcross Grange in the
isolated moor country of England; leaves Yorkshire in 1802.
protagonists Heathcliff, Catherine
themes the destructiveness of a love that never changes; the precariousness of social class
motifs doubles, repetition, the conflict between nature and culture
The novel begins with the year 1801 marks the beginning of a diary, century, romanticism and Victorianism.
- flashbacks and backforwards (anticipates what is going to happen next);
- mirroring technique: copying the destiny of another character;
SPACE one of the important themes of the novel;
- the opposition: Wuthering Heights nature, wilderness, raw
Thrushcross Grange - education (tame), cooked (food), the dogs attack people, closed space
refinement, convention, and cultivation.;
- windows protection, safety, people staying indoors should feel protected; her name is marked there;
- the ghost (Catherines spirit) - symbolizes the manifestation of the past within the present, and the way
memory stays with people, permeating their day-to-day lives;
- moorland unstable round, romantic element, primal instinct, space that will be always natural, feelings are
real, pure, people feel free to express their love, it is a free space, without limits;
3 different names of her identity, but her daughter is the opposite:
old Catherine: Catherine Earnshaw Catherine Heathcliff Catherine Linton
young Catherine: Catherine Linton Catherine Heathcliff Catherine Earnshaw
-the transition from Romanticism: Isabella, Frances
Victorianism: young Catherine
Modernism: old Catherine
NAMING
Joseph religious name, in the Old Testament, he is the 11th and favourite son of Jacob;
Catherine religious name meaning pure, clean, chaste
Heathcliff heath (ierburi) and cliff (stnc), both aspects related to nature, being the only character represented
to it, not only does it speak to location but to parentage and even to passion. The name perfectly captures the
haunted, wild, untameable, unforgiving landscape
Frances Christian name, Italian
Wuthering Heights - tempestuous, stormy, which perfectly describes the wild, windswept chilly location of the
Heights farmhouse at the top of the moors and perfectly characterizes most of the inhabitants. The place seems
cursed.

GENDER APPROACH
- cultural, sociological aspect limited and restricted by society;
- the society sets up some convenient needs and the children have to obey it, imposes them how to think, to dress,
to act;
- identity is restricted by boundaries;
The Earnshaws - rest on much shakier ground socially. They do not have a carriage, they have less land, and their
house, as Lockwood remarks, resembles that of a homely, northern farmer and not that of a gentleman.
The Lintons are relatively firm in their gentry status but nonetheless take great pains to prove this status through
their behaviors.
The shifting nature of social status is demonstrated most strikingly in Heathcliffs trajectory: from homeless waif
to young gentleman-by-adoption to common laborer to gentleman again.
woman: should be coquetry, fragile, beautiful, maternity, the other features are negative, wasn't allowed to go in
public spaces, weak, sensitive, limited;
man: hunter, traveller, physical strength, intelligence to defeat the prey, connected to public spaces, capable of
seeing things and accumulate experience;
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot (1917)
FORM - of a dramatic monologue in verse and the reader plays the part of the silent listener; often it is freighted
with irony, as the speaker is partially unaware of what he reveals.
Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the
twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I challenged cultural notions of
masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing
the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as
fractured, alienated, and denigrated.
Eliot's poetry sought to revive the literary past and it is peppered with allusions to the Greeks, Shakespeare, the
Metaphysicals, and more.
The poem reflects the feelings of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from World War
I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners.
At the beginning of the poem, he asks an unknown "you" to accompany him on a walk through the red light
district.
SYMBOLS
-the etherized patient - reflects his paralysis (his inability to act) while the images of the city depict a certain
lost loneliness.
-the fog - seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women "talking of Michelangelo" (13). Unable
to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and we can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring,
physical contact in much the same way (albeit with far less agility).
- appears weak, non-confrontational, and afraid to enter the house
- nymphs of the sea - free and beautiful, calling him. Reality intrudes in the form of human voices, perhaps
those of the art-chattering women, and he is drowned in his empty life.
Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in and out of a room, talking of Michelangelo
(14), and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms.
TITLE - is about one man's desire (and his failure to achieve it). Prufrock appears to be a sensitive, intelligent
man with a talent for poetry, but his anxieties prevent him from talking to women he finds attractive and enjoying
even the simplest pleasures, like eating a peach. In denying himself pleasure and beauty, Prufrock isolates himself
from society, limiting his social interactions and all but ruining his romantic life. Prufrock allows his anxieties to
take control, leaving him pinned "and wriggling on the wall" because he can't connect with others.
TIME - evening is like a very sick person awaiting an operation; the dusk over the city is anesthetized and spread-
eagled on an operating table.
SPACE - the urban images are just as grim, a town of cheap hotels and bad restaurants. The streets appear sinister;
they seem to threaten the people walking in them, bullying them with pointed questions. The urban landscape is
made even more ominous by a yellow fog that, catlike, rubs against windows and licks the corners of the
evening.
- the images of the city are sterile and deathly and speak to some part of Prufrock's personality.
Prufrock knows that he cannot be the hero of anyones story; he cannot be Hamlet (Shakespeare's famous tragic
hero from the play of the same name, is literature's other great indecisive man).
Hamlet waffles between wanting to kill his stepfather and holding off for a variety of reasons. The allusion is
somewhat ironic, since Prufrock is not even as decisive as Hamlet is. Instead, he is more like the doddering
Polonius of Hamlet or only a bit player, even a Fool.
He imagines himself growing old, unchanged, worrying about his health and the risks of eating a peach. Still,
he faintly hears the mermaids of romance singing in his imagination, even though they are not singing to him.
The epigraph from Dante's Inferno suggests that Prufrock is descending into his own Hell.
The only thing in Prufrock's life not paralyzed is time; it marches on, and Prufrock laments "I grow old . . . I grow
old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled". The rolled trouser, a popular bohemian style at the time,
is a pathetic attempt to ward off death. While he continues to be anxious about the future, Prufrock now seems to
regard the future, paradoxically, from a future standpoint.
In the last three lyrics, by changing the pronoun I to We - forces us to accompany him, hoping that we will not
be able to return to the mermaids on top and shame him by repeating his story. He has unattainable, frustrated,
paralyzed desire for all women who reject him; they are all inaccessible, and any reminder of the social world
("human voices") drowns him - and, he hopes, his reader-as-Dante - deeper in his watery Hell.

Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot

Introduction
- the play was first published in French (En attendant Godot) in 1952.
- one important idea is that of circularity and similarity, creating the impression of almost perfectly repetitious
structures.
- the acts happen in the same place, at the same time in consecutive days, thrusting the characters in the
mechanisms of a very exact machine that never fails to repeat a cycle (of their existence).
- the beauty of the play consists in the variety of interpretations (or rather speculations) that have been offered, in
an almost inexhaustible undertaking.

Subject matter
- presents the monotony and meaningless of life and the way in which people are (more or less consciously)
caught within this trap;
- the technique for achieving such a frame is the elimination of plot and the creation of a timeless universe,
the human memory almost fails to remember them, in which life moves in a permanent present day, in a
succession of permanent nows;

- the human condition is pictured as one of:

- ignorance (of their own position and role);
- delusion (their fixed false belief into the coming of Godot);
- self-delusion (the disguising of their purposelessness in life behind the illusion of having a goal);
- paralysis (their inability to come out of their monotonous existence despite repeated attempts and
mutual urgings);
 - wit (see the surprising aphoristic observations of one or other of the characters in the very middle
of incoherent flow of line and speech);
- traces of human sympathy

Interpretations: a wide gamut of religious issues being debated in the play:

- sin the sin of having been born from which they can never atone;
- repentance;
- salvation and damnation;
- Hell;
- bearing ones cross;
- reading the Bible as literature not as dogma;
- the use of the symbol of the tree reminding of the Tree of Knowledge;
- the relationship between characters related to that of Cain and Abel who are even mentioned in the
play.

The waiting for Godot was associated with the waiting of God as a presence to fill our souls or our empty lives:
political issues the context brought in front of the audience is that of the post-war political state
whose actors in various circles have been stripped of their identities;
other issues: suicide, questioning ontological/ religious/ philosophical issues in life, death vs.
living (living a dead life), complementary living, coping with an ageless age in a meaningless existence,
the practicality of life vs. the dream.
Characters
- are presented in couples or pairs, a device whose main function is that of presenting at work the principles of
power; domination; exploitation; friendship and mutual help or compelementarity;
- Vladimir: the practical, the pragmatic, the persistent reminder of the past
- Estragon: the dreamer, the spiritual, the volatile, a denier of the past or of the utility of remembering
- Pozzo: the master;
- Lucky: the servant;
Godot was interpreted in many languages as:
- English: God
- French: godillot (boot) - transmits probably the message that the characters are waiting for the right pair
of boots to take them far away;
- German: tod (death);
- Irish: go deo (eternity) alluding to the (pseudo)eternity the characters are caught in;

4. Time
-the characters feel a wide gap between the present moment and the past, meaning that their existence seems to
have been lived up to a present moment at which it stopped into an ever repetitious spiral which does not give
them the possibility to distinguish differences anymore;
- they either feel regret for what was once or they cannot remember;
- the stretching of time into a permanent present, into a series of nows: meant to give the characters the illusion
of an active waiting;
5. Space
- Beckett felt the need to create a narrower space in which he could control better both the location and movement
of the characters as well as other devices which contribute to the building of the space: light; the possibility to
foreground a character and background another; exploiting low or up positions, etc.
- however, not the narrowness of the space creates the feeling of oppression upon the characters, but their
inability to move beyond the imaginary limits of such a space that leads to their helplessness.

6. Motifs
The tree - a means of measuring time optimistically;
- knowledge as a revival of the archetypal tree from the Garden of Eden which would only mean the
bringing of mortality;
- a gallows-tree (perfect for hanging);
- paradoxical mutual exclusive symbol for both change and stability;
- the Cross;
- a false hiding place (contributing to the characters self-delusion of finding a solution to escape their
plight);
- the name of a yoga balancing exercise;
- a symbol of sorrow.
The rope - a means of controlling and subduing humans (in the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky);
- the tying of the characters to a spatial dimension or to a temporal axis (or better said to temporal dot
on the time axis) suggesting the idea of entrapment;
- the tying of the characters to an idea so as to give them the illusion that they have a purpose, stability;
- death;

Experimenting with language

Niklaus Gessner identified ten different modes of disintegration of language:
1. misunderstandings;
2. double-meaning answers;
3. monologues as an indication of the inability to communicate;
4. clichs;
5. repetitions of synonyms;
6. inability to find the right words;
7. chaotic nonsense;
8. elegraphic style of shouted commands;
9. the loss of grammatical structure and the use of elliptical structures
10. the dropping of marks of punctuation.

Silence a new type of language - there is a classification of different types of silence and pauses:
silences of inadequacies (characters cannot find their words);
silences of repression (characters are verbally benumbed by the attitude of their interlocutor or by the incapacity
of breaking a social taboo);
silences of anticipation (characters await the response of the other);
silences in which the reader/ spectator can intervene creatively and speculate upon meanings and continuations.
Naming characters through linguistic labelling
The names of the four characters have been interpreted as representatives of the great four powers of the world in
the immediate context following World War II:
- Vladimir (a Slavic name, probably Russian);
- Estragon (with French origins);
- Pozzo (bearing an Italian musicality);
- Lucky (a typical English name) seem to render the absurd relationships in which these four great
nations were engaged at the times the play was written.

Estragons and Vladimir names have been interpreted as marking even better the complementarity between them:
- Estragon may be a perversion of the term estrogen (the feminine);
- Vladimir means etymologically to rule over, to be strong (the masculine).
Their nicknames Gogo and Didi could be a reference to: their childishness; two clown-like names and
characters all together.