Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Notebook Entry - From Hamlet Journal


Act3:4 lines 182-188

“Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse, And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, Or padding in your neck with his damn’d fingers, Make you to revel all this matter out, That I essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft.”

Something I have picked up on while reading is that the women are told to trick the men, they are told to use their sexuality. Is Shakespeare saying that women are only necessary when it comes to using their bodies? However in a way he makes it so that they are powerful, being able to influence men so easily – being able to give men a sense of feminism because they are so easily influenced by so. They are powerful; Shakespeare makes them out to be weak because that’s how men see them as, ironic.


Act3:4 lines 34-38

“Peace, sit you down, And let me wring your heart, for so I shall –If it be made of penetrable stuff, If damned custom have not brass’d it so, That it be proof and bulwark against sense.”

I would connect this passage to my strand strumpet. Hamlet uses words such as penetrable, bulwark, and wring. This passage questions Hamlet’s actual relationship with his mother. He insults her by basically wringing her heart of all the pain she has suffered from –if she didn’t have such a cold heart she could show some real feelings. This brings up the idea of why does Hamlet resent women? Or why does he always insult them using their sexual nature? Perhaps it goes back to the Oedipus complex –he truly desires his mother, his maternal bond with his mother –unable to break from it. Also it could be the fact that she can create life, unlike himself going back to Portrait.

1 comment:

Katie S6 said...

The notes from my Hamlet notebook are just a little snippet of what i really had but here i tried to get into the core of the play more and really try to understand what Shakespeare wanted me to figure out.