10 Years After

Message In A Bottle

I tried to post Friday. However, something must have been up with blogger because instead of posting the entry to my blogger I was then signed into someone else's account. Freaky. And to make matters worse, Friday's post had some stuff from earlier in the week. I'll try to be brief and might add the longer entry to my other Blog - not just due to length, but also because it sort of digresses.

Hamlet without the Prince
Tuesday morning in Literary Criticism we talked mostly about T.S. Eliot's criticism style (New Criticism). I didn't realize he was not a fan of Hamlet in Hamlet (he preferred the character Ophelia) and that he preferred the play King Lear over Hamlet. The reson: he felt that King Lear utilized an objective correlative (image or moment in the plot to show emotion rather than directly speaking of it). Eliot felt that Hamlet does too much jabbering about his indecision rather than Shakespeare utilizing the structure of the play to display this indecision. In contrast to Hamlet, Ophelia's death/suicide is an example of a objective correlative of her sadness. The maddness of King Lear is depicted in King Lear rather than mentioned directly by King Lear.

Allison in my class who became very defensive of Hamlet. It was quite strange. It was as if she took Power-Beck's recitation of Eliot's points to be personal attacks. She commented that King Lear was "Blah, Blah, Blah, then he's dead. What is the point of the play?" (my paraphrase.) After class I asked her what she liked about Hamlet so much. Her answer was that there was so much ambiguity to Hamlet. I walked down the stairs and over to the Library (she was going to Roger Stout) while asking her to elaborate. I didn't see what she was taking about and told her that I found Hamet to be rather straight forward. According to her Hamlet has some sort of Oedipus complex with his mother, father and step-father (My take is that this sexual tension between Hamlet and Ophelia is never hinted to). She also stated that whether Gertrude was aware of Hamlet's father murder is ambiguous.

My reaction to these were that there didn't seem to be anything in the play to support that the play is ambiguous in that there are passages that could be read either way. She referred me to the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet and, as she described it, "Hamlet dry humping the tapestry to get to his mother." I believe I recall the writhering she is referring to, but I thought it was some sort of nervous motion displaying Hamlet's inner turmoil and not some sort of sex act. In either case, I don't recall any stage call for such undulations.

Similar to this I recall back when Dawn was taking classes at Northeast State she wrote an essay about Ophelia drowning herself due to becoming pregnant. However, I never held that position to have much providence.


I consider(ed) such things to be inventions of the reader's own mind rather than some sort of double meaning from the text. I guess in literary criticism this would be considered reader-response rather than structural to the play.

I asked a few people for their comments. I'll include their comments on my other Blog soon.