Finish Watching Hamlet

Why do you think Shakespeare kills off all of the main characters off (except Horatio)?

After watching:
Get students into groups of three. 
In groups of three, act out the following conversation/debate: 
Student A: You think everything is Hamlet’s fault. Say why. 
Student B: You think everything is Claudius’s fault. Say why. 
Student C: You think everything is the Ghost’s fault. Say why. 

February 14( Tuesday) Feb 14: 
Period 1: Lib Rm B - work on papers
Period 2: Lib Rm E - work on papers

Feb 15: 1st draft due Wednesday - peer feedback
Writing in 1st person: From "They to I" 

February 16 (Thurdsay): Refine and improve paper in DC

February 17, Friday: Peer Reviews of draft 2

February 21, Tuesday: Next-to-final peer review

February 22: Wednesday -  Final Paper due


HW: What 's your angle? What topic in the play do you connect with?

Brainstorming Tips for a Topic:  The trick to this paper is to find something you give a damn about. What is going on in your life right now? What gives you joy?  What stresses you, gets you mad, drives you crazy? What do you feel strongly about? What do you feel confused about?  

Brainstorming Tips for Connections: What recent conversations which you have been involved in touched either directly or indirectly on your topic? What current events or news items speak to your topic in some way? What poems, short stories or novels somehow speak to your topic?

Brainstorming Tips for finding quotes: Search your notes and annotations.  Also, don't be afraid to use the internet to search for pertinent quotes from the play.

Homework: Brain dump.  Write, rant, riff about your topic without attempting to write anything polished or include any direct quotes from the play. Bring the paper in tomorrow for a visual check.  Fill up at least two sides of a paper.

Demonstrate your own style as a writer: Attempt to use several literary/rhetorical Devices to bring texture and variety to your paper.

Metaphors

Allusions

Repetition

Rhetorical Questions

Simile

Anecdote

Personification

Alliteration

Knowledge of the novel: Citations should not be just dropped into your paper but should be explained and discussed, shared and integrated into your sentences. You need to demonstrate your knowledge of the novel….you should reference what happens and you should make reference to characters and their feelings/beliefs/behaviors. You should have at least 4 citations from the novel in your paper.  Be sure that their relevance to your point is clear.

Connections outside of the novel:  This is a personal essay containing your unique personal insights or connections.  Your text should reflect that.  Include a total of combination of touches that make this a paper that only you would write.  Use at least two of the following techniques: personal anecdotes; quotes from conversations/communications with friends, families, acquaintances; allusions/references to literature, music, film; allusions to current events/news.

Student Example # 1:

23 February 2016      

 “Haters are my Motivators”: The Story of Hamlet’s Life

            A few weeks ago, my best friend and I were talking about our futures. As I started talking about environmentalism and expressed my passion about my goal to educate people in developing countries on water conservation, she said to me, “Yeah, I just don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t know, I just think it’s too late to do anything now. We’re doomed.” I was so shocked; she knows me better than anyone, yet she brushed off my passion like it was nothing. During this time, I was also reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and I realized that he went through the same thing I’m going through: his feelings about his father’s death were treated like they didn’t matter at all.

            Throughout the play, I couldn’t help but notice that nobody takes Hamlet seriously. As a 17-year-old with big plans and a lot of ambition, I can definitely relate. He comes home to a dead father and a remarried mother, but about three days after his father’s funeral, Claudius (his new stepfather—previously known as “Uncle Claudius”) asks him “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” (Act 1, Scene 2) After that, Hamlet reaches his breaking point. He dedicates his whole life to avenging King Hamlet’s death, but throughout the whole process, everyone in the kingdom is weary of him because he is “as mad as the sea and the wind.” (Act 4, Scene 1) In reality, Hamlet is simply grieving, but his passion is neglected by everyone he wants at his side. It reminds me of the time my uncle, a college-dropout, urged me against environmental science and instead asked if I’ve ever considered a majoring in Business.  

            “To be, or not to be. That is the question.” (Act 3, Scene 1) Hamlet becomes so discouraged that he contemplates suicide, but eventually overcomes his doubts and continues to fight for the legacy of his father. To me, these ten infamous words emphasize the fact that there’s a difference between existing and living. I want to be. I want to help people that don’t have the things that I have, I want to explore new cultures and ecosystems, I want to be well-known for my actions. I understand that I’m young, that I have my whole life ahead of me, but who is anyone to tell me what I can and can’t do? If I’m willing to work hard and educate myself, who is going to stop me? This is the same mentality that Hamlet has when he thinks about Claudius; he is willing to risk his life for his cause, and he lets absolutely nobody stop him. 

            To me, the most upsetting part of Hamlet is not when everyone dies at the end, but rather when King Claudius tells Hamlet that going back to school was “most retrograde to [his] desire.” (Act 1, Scene 2) My parents have always told me that I have my own life and I can do whatever I want with it. They have always supported me in making my own decisions, and until after I read Hamlet, I didn’t realize how lucky I am to have two supportive parents that will love me no matter what. Hamlet doesn’t have a strong support system; Gertrude is distant at best, Claudius takes over the kingdom and kills Hamlet’s father, and Ophelia, the love of his life, thinks Hamlet is nuts. The only real friend Hamlet has is Horatio, but at one point, even he doubts that the ghost of King Hamlet is real and “will not let belief take hold of him.” (Act 1, Scene 1) The fact that Hamlet is on his own for most of the play but persists in his attempts to pull off the killing of Claudius is inspiring.

            I believe that pursuing your dreams is one of the truest forms of bravery and strength. It’s not going to be easy to become an environmentalist; it takes intelligence, dedication, and sacrifice. At the same time, it isn’t easy for Hamlet to finally kill Claudius. He has to set up an intricate plan. He has to go through losing Ophelia to suicide, his mother to the love spell of his uncle, and Laertes to Claudius’s manipulations. However, in the end, he achieves his goal. Hamlet is the bravest and strongest character in any play I’ve ever read; he stands his ground and sticks to his plan no matter what anyone thinks of him.

            Whenever I become discouraged about my future or take something someone has said too personally, I always remember to “shake it off, shake it off.” After all, “the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.” Taylor Swift’s lyrics remind me of when Polonius says to Laertes, “to thine own self be true.” (Act 1, Scene 3) No matter what happens, I have to remember that life is meaningless until you find your own meaning in it. Once you find your meaning, something that drives you, I believe that sticking to that will allow you to achieve your goals. Hamlet’s drive is his father: when he drops everything to avenge King Hamlet’s death, he eventually fulfills his goal of killing Claudius. My drive is the hope that one day, I can preserve our planet in a more sustainable and healthy way. I am willing to do whatever it takes, and no matter what anyone tells me, I have to remember that this is my life and I get to choose what I do with it. I look forward to the day that I can say I’m living, not just existing. After all, if you follow your dreams, “thou canst not then be false to any man.” (Act 1, Scene 3)

Student Example # 2 (with The Great Gatsby)

Evaporating

One of my most distinct childhood memories is the scent of arugula. My backyard in Denver was this vast expanse of territory, full of different terrains and trenches and rock formations. There was the pine forest to the right of the house, the desert behind it with a birch oasis in the center, and the rugged gravel pits just beyond. No matter where I stood in this small world, I could always smell the arugula from our garden. I undoubtedly had some of the best and most carefree days of my life in that backyard. Simply being a kid is the most envious state, and a setting such as this only furthered my delight. But why are these memories so fleeting and distant? Why does my backyard seem so much smaller in pictures than it ever did in person, and why do I feel overwhelmingly sad whenever I smell arugula?

Time, I have concluded, tends to distort perception. I found this thought to be true while reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald as well. While the aroma of a common garden vegetable does not come close to his trials, I’d like to think Fitzgerald experienced similar feelings of nostalgia during his life—from his failed marriage to the one that got away—that prompted a novel deeply rooted and intent on recreating the past, in attempts to vocalize his own shortcomings and his inherent want to somehow fix them.

Jay Gatsby mirrors this want as the poster­child for nostalgia. He attempts continuously throughout his last five years to “recover something, some idea of himself perhaps… if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was” (110). Gatsby’s feelings toward his time with Daisy drive him to “recover” this former version of himself. He has the pleasant memories but the emotions associated with them are the exact opposite. He feels taunted by the past rather than content with what has happened, just as I get a hollow ache when thinking about my time in Colorado. And I loved it, just as Gatsby loved Daisy. But time warps these feelings into regret and wistfulness, challenging former emotions and entangling them beyond recognition.

Similarly, I often find myself thinking about former friendships. I’ve definitely had my fair share of these relationships end. Sometimes there’s a specific reason, but more often, and in turn more painfully, they just fade without reason. I’ll pass someone in the hall and suddenly find myself pouring over details from years ago and wondering why it’s impossible to even make eye contact.

My best friend from third to eighth grade, Marie, is the worst instance of this. Gatsby’s array of newspaper clippings and photographs of Daisy (93) could never compare to the multitude of pictures of Marie and me. From all the photographic evidence, it would appear that we were physically attached to one another throughout the course of our friendship. In all my yearbook photos, she sits in a desk beside me. In all my birthday pictures, she is sitting next to me as I open presents, identical radiant smiles plastered across our faces.

In moments like these I can understand why Gatsby kept clippings in Daisy’s absence. Even though it’s arguably more painful to look at them than to forget, there is always an internal hope that time will correct itself, that it will make up for itself, or reverse completely. Nick Carraway puts it best after Gatsby’s initial encounter with Daisy: “I think we all believed for a moment that [the old clock] had smashed in pieces on the floor” (87). Everyone, to some extent, falls victim to the passage of time. In my case it is Marie who brings this out, causing me to falter over memories.

However, where I’d like to think I diverge from Gatsby is the way I externally deal with these lapses in logical judgement. I’m simply content to wallow in regret and self­pity whereas Gatsby attempts to construct a meticulous empire to recreate his past. When Gatsby started going off the deep end, no dark humor intended, is when I began to feel a disconnect with his character. Although this disconnect is frustrating at times, it forces me to objectively consider Gatsby. It’s one thing to wistfully remember a better time in life but to fully submerge into the past is another. It’s obsessive, it’s unhealthy, and most of all impossible because time doesn’t forcefully rewind. It doesn’t simply stop, backtrack and repeat itself. It’s the most final of all restrictions, greater than anything else explored in Gatsby.

To illustrate this point, even if the extent is limited, people have control over their wealth and social status. Gatsby proved both of these with his self­built fortune and elaborate lifestyle. In this, Fitzgerald cleverly portrays that time is the one factor that we have absolutely no control over. I recognize Fitzgerald’s own pain in this realization.

Of course, this seems like such an obvious statement. Why wouldn’t time be final? How could it possibly be perceived otherwise? We all have broken­clock moments, unfortunately. Time has a way of disfiguring things while remaining shockingly consistent with itself. With repeated recitation I’ve begun to stomach this reality. I’ve considered its profound impact on the way I perceive my life: as I change, so do my reactions to recollections. And as a logical person who thrives on reasoning and patterns, the thought of giving up control to some intangible force scares me more than anything else.

I sense that it is the same innate fear that drives Gatsby to near insanity. It causes him to perpetually extend himself towards that green light, to act as though “the past [was] lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand” (110) as he tries to convince himself of Daisy’s solidarity. And until the end, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to­morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther” (180). Fitzgerald leaves me with this surprisingly personal and harsh statement regarding time. He tells me that we won’t stop, “boats against the current,” and will continue to yearn for something, anything, because the present will never suffice. Nostalgia is ever­present, a constant and singular reminder of the encompassing control of time. I find this a difficult concept to agree with, though.

So now I turn to music for reassurance and a second opinion, as usual, in these lyrics (translated from Portuguese) from Evaporar by Little Joy:

We've got as much time as we give it

Whatever happens

Whatever it takes

We give as much time as we have

It takes the things that happen

Whatever the things that happen cost

Only now I realize that what I got from the time I lost

Was learning how to give

And I still chase that time

I was able not to run from it

[I was able to] Find myself

Ah, it didn't move

Hummingbird in the air

The river stays there

The water that ran [into the sea] gets to the tides

[The river] becomes sea

It's as if dying was like debouching

Like spilling over the sky

Like a self­purification

Like leaving behind salts and minerals

Like evaporating.

It is in these broken­clock moments, I have ultimately concluded, that time distorts perception. It is in these moments when time simply hangs there like a “hummingbird in the air.” For Gatsby it’s when he thinks about Daisy. For me it’s when my mind races back to Denver with the tangy aroma of arugula and the pine and birch trees suddenly extend their limbs towards me. It’s when I can’t quite mimic the smiles on my face in pictures with Marie because the emotions are forever locked in the frame. Evaporar gives me closure that Gatsby failed to provide. It reveals that time does indeed control us, but it’s only when we concede to this fact that memories can fade. This voluntary surrender is what Gatsby failed in and why I felt so disconnected from him. I now know that eventually, unlike Gatsby, I will allow these memories to gradually dissipate and be replaced. I’ll leave them behind like salts and minerals; evaporating.

Professional Example Essay

Here is an example of a personal response to Hamlet written by Meghan O'Rourke for Slate Magazine. The link is provided here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/grieving/features/2011/the_long_goodbye/hamlets_not_depressed_hes_grieving.html

The Long Goodbye: Hamlet’s Not Depressed, He’s Grieving

By Maghan O’Rourke

I had a hard time sleeping right after my mother died. The nights were long and had their share of what C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed, calls "mad, midnight … entreaties spoken into the empty air." One of the things I did was read. I read lots of books about death and loss. But one said more to me about grieving than any other: Hamlet. I'm not alone in this. A colleague recently told me that after his mother died he listened over and over to a tape recording he'd made of the Kenneth Branagh film version.

I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate. When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" It reminded me of the friend who said, 14 days after my mother died, "Hope you're doing well." No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.

Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn't murdered.

I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had "lost all my mirth." My colleague put it better: "Hamlet is the grief-slacker's Bible, a knowing book that understands what you're going through and doesn't ask for much in return," he wrote to me. Maybe that's because the entire play is as drenched in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia's grief at Hamlet's angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes' grief that …(Mr. Wesley deleted the spoiler part of the sentence). There is Gertrude and Claudius' grief, which is as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about his dad, you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have disintegrated so quickly!

Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting. Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet's soliloquy captures that numb exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us, this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does.

The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between like things without distinguishing fully between them—"to die, to sleep" and "to sleep, perchance to dream." He resorts to puns because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.

And Hamlet's madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, "… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.

Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own "change in disposition" is connected to a distinct event. Most of the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I used to. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") Pessimists, after all, are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world than optimists.

The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by George Herbert called "The Flower." It opens:

How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;

       To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                   Grief melts away

                   Like snow in May,

       As if there were no such cold thing.

       Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart

Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone

       Quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown;

                   Where they together

                   All the hard weather,

       Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

Quite underground, I keep house unknown: It does seem the right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its wonder as my own.

Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor. She was previously an editor at The New Yorker. The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother's death, is now out in paperback.