Essay Topic and Winter Break Homework

You will write an in-class essay on one of the following. The outlines will be due in advance. Once your essays are finished, you will revise them over the break. Your final should include your outline, your draft (in-class essay), and your final, typed paper.


TOPIC CHOICES:
1) Hamlet’s madness: faked, real, or situational? So what? Does the text give clear indications, or is the issue left up to the actor and director?--- you will need to trace Hamlet's dialogue from start to finish to determine your pov on this topic. You should analyze and pay particular attention to each soliloquoy

2) Is Hamlet a tragic hero? (See me for a snippet of Aristotle’s Poetics if you choose this topic.) Consider what Ophelia, Claudius, and others say about his character.

3) Deception / Appearance and Reality
Hamlet has been called a "claustrophobic" play because of the ways the different characters spy on one another, but "spying" is only one form of deception in the play. There is also Claudius, the incestuous fratricide, playing the part of the good king, and Hamlet himself decides to "put an antic disposition on" (1.5.189). In a way, it is Hamlet's job to see through all of this deception and to discover the truth, although, to discover the truth, Hamlet himself must use deception. What point is Shakespeare trying to make by introducing all of the deception, lying, and false appearances into his play?

4) Melancholy, Madness and Sanity
Hamlet tells his mother that he "essentially [is] not in madness, / But mad in craft" (3.4.204-205) and claims to "put an antic disposition on" (1.5.189), but does he ever cross the line between sanity and insanity in the play? To complicate matters, the world of Hamlet seems insane: the king is a murderer; the queen lusts after her dead husband's brother; friends spy on friends; and one character (Ophelia) really does go insane. Could Hamlet really be sane in an insane world? And what about Hamlet's melancholy? From the beginning of the play, Hamlet is depressed, and he considers suicide several different times. What is the real cause of his melancholy? Does he ever break out of his melancholy?

Theme of Decay and Corruption
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (1.4.98). In fact, many things are rotten in the state of Denmark, and images of decay, corruption, and disease are common throughout the play. Following the conventions of tragedy, many of the characters become corrupted in some way, and, by the end of the play, all of the corrupt characters must be eliminated so that Denmark can once again be set right. Many characters in Hamlet die. In what ways is each of these characters "corrupt"? What images in the play suggest decay, corruption, or disease?