NOTE: No class on Monday. I have to cancel--check your e-mail for details. We'll pick up the reading and questions below for Wednesday.
For next week, after Fall Break, be sure to read Chapter 8 of Poole, "Timing" to dovetail with our discussion last time of Hamlet, Act 5. We'll return to some ideas in Act 5 a well. Enjoy the break!
Answer two of the following:
Q1: Poole writes that “it’s all in
the timing” (97). Why is timing particularly important for tragedy,
particularly for at what moment a tragedy begins? With Hamlet, why don’t we
begin with the murder of the king? Or much later? After all, couldn’t the
entire Act 5 be the play itself?
Q2: Poole notes that the word crisis
comes from the Greek word for "justice," and climax comes from the
Greek word for "ladder" (102). Why might tragedy then suggest that
you need to climb to the top of the ladder to find justice? How might this
explain the events of Hamlet? What 'climax' do we have to reach (and on
how many rungs?) to achieve justice? And what kind of justice is it?
Q3: Poole reminds us that tragedies are about rites of
passage, and specifically, rites such as weddings, coronations, death,
funerals, etc. He goes on to note that "These things can go wrong. And
tragedy represents the moments when they do, when the rites are challenged,
thwarted, violated, aborted" (107). How is Hamlet a tragedy
about aborted/thwarted rites? What rites? And how do they go wrong? Whose fault
is it that the rites don't work as planned?
Q4: Quoting the critic Gail Holst-Warhaft (what a name!),
Poole notes that tragedy “is, at least in part, an appropriation of the
traditional art of women and we sense in its language, its inscrutable echoes of
music and dance, an older body of ritual, a sub-stratum which informs and at
times intrudes itself into an urban, male art” (106). What do you think she
means that tragedy combines the female art of lamentation (since women
traditionally were mourners of the dead) with the male art of war/action?
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