-Bloom considers this self-overhearing the "royal road to individuation" (xvii),the process which allows characters to realize their own utterances and in doing so realize themselves.
-It might be said that a man incapable of realizing the power of his own agency, but fully capable of using the spoken word, could come to learn of his agency by realizing that his speech has power to create actual change in the world.
-Shakespeare was a dramatist, his creations plays meant for performance..
-The problem is that Hamlet does not swear to avenge his father, if we read closely. Having been told of his father's murder, he "writes in his tablet"-- which is a purely metaphorical "tablet of the mind"-- and then swears to remember his father, saying, "Now to my word:/ It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me/ I have sworn't" (1.5.110-12). The ghost has indeed asked Hamlet to remember him, and doing so lies within Hamlet's duty, but surely thisduty is secondary to what the ghost compels Hamlet to do at the beginning of his speech, to"[r]evenge his foul and most unnatural murther" (1.5.25). -Hamlet swears only to remember, an entirely cognitive act and one subject to no outside verification
-Hamlet is at this point merely the student and philosopher, and his ability to physically enact revenge is stillborn. We might imagine him overhearing himself and being confronted by performative utterances that lack the power they might have had.
-the playacting of the characters in hamlet gives the characterization of the characters more depth because of the fact that the characters are speaking aloud to an audience- This echoes Hamlet's evaluation of the Player King's emotional state through the proxy of his physical visage, and we could make the simple connection of physical demonstrations of emotion to belief in the presence of that emotion to belief in the authenticity of the speaker's words
-This progression is important, as belief inauthenticity or truth in language has great consequences for human behavior
-This importance of the perceived legitimacy of the emotional context of utterances to the power of those utterances is a problem in the world of Hamlet
-It could be said with only a little exaggeration that the central problem of the play is that people represent their feelings and their intentions in ways that are contrary to reality*I believe that the feelings the characters
-The playing of a particular role not on the clearly defined space of the stage but rather out and about in "real life" is central to the plot of Hamlet and contains the potential for more unhappy performative utterances
-mimetic act in the play is Hamlet's antic disposition, a play at madness designed to hide Hamlet's murderous intent, to cover his investigation of his uncle's crime and to inoculate him from punishment for his various small sins as he progresses towards his duty.
-Polonius is vulnerable to Hamlet because of this mechanistic vision of human nature; madness, for him, is "madness," and decent, sane behavior is as formalized and conventional as the various ceremonies of state that orbit around him. Polonius approaches his evaluation of Hamlet's supposed madness like a detective seeking out clues to a crime, trying to apply Hamlet's situation to others that match his understanding of what drives men to distraction and bizarre behavior
-Hamlet's shifting identities suggest that all of us create" utterly different yet self-consistent" visages of ourselves every day
-Even at the end, Hamlet is compelled by those around him, powerful in mind but still at the mercy of the will of those around him. Only when he is literally dying, poisoned, does he take up his agency and apply it to his stated desire. Hamlet's long performance over, he gives himself to the physical realization of his long delayed revenge; a character previously incapable of doing what he intended grasps his personal agency and expresses it in the most extreme way possible. Mimesis at an end, the paralysis of the cognitive at an end, self-actualization and performance and agency become all one, and consummation comes.
-What happens in the end? Does Hamlet, himself, get revenge on Claudius, or does he have someone else do his dirty work?
-Does Gertrude live? Hamlet? Polonius? Ophelia?????
- I liked this article very much because I feel like it gave me a whole other perspective on the play, way different from the one I have as of right now
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