Name: VYAS NUPUR HITESHBHAI.

Roll no: 43

Paper No: 1 - The Renaissance Literature

Topic – Formalist approach in “Hamlet”

Year- 2015-2017

Sem- 1

Submitted to M.K.B.U. Department of English.

Date- 14\09\15

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Introduction about Formalist approach:                                   Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of particular text. It is the study of text without taking into account any outside influence.

                      In literary theory, Formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, and interpret or evaluate the inherent features of text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and trope.  The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical and cultural context. 

 The formalist approach in “Hamlet”

Dialectic as a form: The trap metaphor in Hamlet

                 ‘ My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; and like a man to double business bound, stand in pause where I shall first begin, and both neglect’

         The words are not those of Hamlet. They are spoken by claudius as he tries to pray for forgiveness even as he knows that he cannot give up those things for which he murdered his brother his crown his fulfilled ambition and his wife. But the words may easily have been hamlet's for he too is by “double business bound” Indeed, much of play centers on doubleness. In that doubleness lies the essence of what we mean by “dialectic” here- confrontation of Polarities. A consequence of that doubleness of the characters is that they are apparently caught in a trap a key metaphor in the Play or in another image “Hoist with [their] own perfard”[s]. Polonius indudiciously uses the metaphor to warn ophelia away from Hamlet’s “Holy vows of heaven”  that he says are “springs to catch wood-cocks”. More significant is Hamlet’s deliberately misnaming of “The murder of gonzages” he call it “The mousetrap” because it is as he says elsewhere “the thing wherein I will catch conscience of the king”. Claudius feels that he is trapped: “O limed soul the struggling to be free \art more engaged.” Hamlet in the hands of plotters, finds himself “thus be netted round with villainies”. One of whom Claudius has “Thrown out his angle [fish hook] my proper life”. The dying Laertes echoes his father’s  metaphor when he tells osric that he is as a woodcock to mine own spirit here we have a pattern of trap images-springes, lime, nets, mousetraps, angels or hooks no traps are usually for animals but we are dealing with human beings people who are trapped in their own dilemmas in their own question in very questioning of the universe.

2] The  Cosmological trap:- Hamlet's first scene of Act 1 to realize that it is a disturbed world, that a sense of mystery and deep anxiety pre-occupies the soldiers of the watch. The ghost has appeared already and it is expected to appear again. The Guards instinctively assume that apparition of the former King has more than passing import; in their troubled question to Horatio  about the mysterious preparation for War the Guards show how closely They  regard the connection between the unnatural appearance of Dead king and the Welfare of the state. The guards have no answers for the mystery their un certainly or their premonitions.  Their quandary is mirrored in abundant question and minimal answer a rhetorical phenomenon that recurs throughout the play even in the soliloquies of Hamlet in other words, an instance of dialectic.

                          Hamlet a goodly one; in which there are many confines words dangerous Denmark being the one o’th worst.  These remarks recall assertion not marcelleus as Hamlet and the ghost go offstage: “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” Indeed, Hamlet acknowledges that rottenness of Denmark pervades all of nature this godly frame the earth seem to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent cancopy, the air look you, this brave over hanging fireman this majestical roof fretted with Golden fire why it appereth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” Much earlier before his encounter with the ghost, Hamlet expressed his extreme pessimism at man’s having to endure earthly existence within nature’s unwholesome realm:

How weary, stale, flat and

unprofitable seems to me all the uses of this world!

fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeds garden, That grows to seed things went and grows in nature possess it merely

As he speaks these lines Hamlet apparently has no idea of the truth of his father's death but is dismayed over his mother’s hasty marriage to the new king he has discovered seeming paradox in the nature of existence the fair, in nature and human inevitably submits to the dominion of the foul. His obsession with the paradox focuses is his attention on Denmark as model of nature human frailty. Thus as a pattern of increasing parallels between Denmark and the Cosmos and between man and nature develops question and answer dialogue and soliloquy ,become a verbal Unity repeated words and phrases looking forward to larger thematic assertion  and backward to earlier about adumbration. 

                                 The play constitutes a vast poems in which speculation about nature, human nature, the health of the state and human destiny intensifies into a passionate dialectic mystery, riddles Enigma and the metaphysical question complicated questions that have obsessed protagonist from Sophocles Oedipus to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and guildenstern what begins with the relatively simple question of the soldiers of the watch in Act 1 is magnified and rarified probes of the maddening gulf between reality and appearance proliferate. Moreover  the contrast between what is simple man cheerfully accepts a face value and what the thoughful man is driven to question calls into doubt every surface of utterance, act, or things.

3] seeming and being:- An index to form looms in the crucial qualitative difference between hamlet's mode of speech and that of the Other inhabitants of his strange world because Hamlet’s utterances and manners are  characteristically  unknown inventions. The Other major characters assumes that he is mad or atleast temporarily deranged conversely, because they do speak the simple, selectively safe language of ordinary existence, he assumes that they are hiding twisting the truth. No one who is easily settles for semming is quite trustworthy to the man obsessed with the pursuit of being. Even the ghost’s nature and origin must be tentative for Hamlet  until he can settle the validity of the ghost’s revelations  with “the play within the play” even ophelia must be treated as possible tool of claudius and Polonius. The presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not to mention their mission on the journey of England arouses Hamlet’s deepest suspicious. only Horatio show is extempt from dis trust and even to him Hamlet cannot divulge the full dimension of his subversion yet though hamlet seems to speak only in riddle and to act solely with the von, his utterances and acts always actually bespeak the full measure of his feelings and his increasingly single minded absorption with his inevitable mission.The important qualification of his honesty lies in his full knowledge that others do not comprehend his real meanings and that others are hardly vitally concerned with deep truths about the state, mankind or themselves. When the demands some explanation for his  extraordinary melancholy, Hamlet replies, “ I am too much in the sun”. The reply thus establishes although Claudius does not perceive it, Hamlet’s judgment of and opposition to the easy acceptance of “ things as they are” and when the queen tries to reconcile him to the in-evitability of death in the natural scheme and asks “why seems it so particular with thee?”. He responds with a revealing contradictory between the seeming evidences  of  mourning and real woe- an inadequate condemnation of   the     Queen’s Apparent is easy acceptance of his father's death as opposed to the vindication of his refusal to view that death a merely an occasion  for a ceremonial mourning duties. To the joint extreaty of Claudius and gertrude that he remained in Denmark he replies only to his mother “I shall in all my best obey you madam” but in thus  disdaining  to answer the king he has promised really nothing to his mother although she takes his reply for complete submission to the Royal couple again we see that every statement of Hamlet is dialectic that is it tends toward double meaning the superficial meaning of the word of the world of Denmark and the subtler meaning for Hamlet and  the readers.

                          As  we have observed Hamlet’s overriding concern even before he knows of the ghost’s appearance, is the frustration of living in an imperfect world.  He sees, wherever he looks,the pervasive blight in nature, especially human nature. Man, out-wardly the acme of creation, is susceptible to “some vicious mole of nature,” and no matter how virtuous he otherwise maybe the

“dream of evil” or the “stamp of one defect” adulterates nobility. Hamlet finds that “one may smile and smile and be a villain”. To the uncomprehending Guildenstern, Hamlet emphasizes his basic concern with the strange puzzle of corrupted and corrupting man.  

what a piece of work is a man how Noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how  express an admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the Paragon of animals! and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me- no, nor  woman either, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

 This  preoccupation with the paradox of man, recurring as it does throughout the play, obviously takes precedence over the revenge order by the ghost. Instead of the ideal world Hamlet seeks, the real world that he find is his father’s death, his mother's re- marriage and the defection of his supposed friends, and the fallen state of man.

              Reams have been written about Hamlet reasons for the delay in carrying out his revenge; for our purpose, however, the delay is not particularly important, except in so far as it emphasizes  Hamlet’s greater obsession with the pervasive blight within cosmos.

4] “seeing and knowing” :

                 The design of the play can be perceived in part in the elaborate play upon the words “see” and “know” and their cognates. whereas the deity can be understood as “Looking before and after”, the players King points out to his queen that there is hiatus between what  people intend and what they do: “our thoughts are ours,  their ends none of our own”. Forced by Hamlet to consider the difference between her two  husbands Gertrude cries out in anguish against having to see into her own motivations

O Hamlet, speak no more.

Thou  turn’st mine eyes into my very soul ,

And there I see such  black and grained spots

As will not leave their tinct.

But she does not see the ghost of her former husband, nor can she see the metaphysical implications of Hamlet’s reason in madness. The blind eye sockets of Yorick’s skull once saw their quota of experience, but most people in Denmark are quite content with the surface appearances of life and refuse even to consider the ends to which  mortality brings everyone. The intricate weavings of images of Sight thus become a kind of tragic algebra for  the plight of a man who “seemed to find his way without his eyes” and who found himself at last “placed to the view” of the “yet unknowing world”.  The travelling players had acted out the crime of Denmark on another stage, but their  play seemed to most of audience only a diversion in a pageant of images designed to keep them from really knowing themselves or their fellows to be corrupted by nature and doomed at last to become “my Lady Worm’s, chapless   and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade”. The contexts of these words assert a systematic enlargement of play’s tragic  pronouncement of human ignorence in the midst of appearances. Formally, the play progresses from the relatively simple speculations of the soldiers of the watch to the sophisticated complexity of metaphysical inquiry. There may not be final answer to the questions Hamlet ponders, but the questions assume a formal order as their dimensions are structured by speech and action- in miniature, by the play within the play ;in extension ;by the tragedy itself. 

                     Ophelia, in her madness, utters perhaps the key line of the play: “Lord,  we know what we are, but we know not what we may be”. Hamlet has earlier said that if the king reactes as expected to the play within the play, “I know my course”; that is he will spring the trap. But he is not sure of his course, nor does he even know himself- at least not until the final act. In the prison of the world and its myriad traps he can only pursue his destiny, which, as he realizes before the duel, inevitably leads to the grave. The contest between human aspiration and natural order in which Hamlet finds himself is all too un equal: idealism turns out to be a poor match for the prison walls of either Denmark or the grave.

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