Formalistic Approach of Hamlet

Name: Sonal Baraiya.

Roll No: 34.

Subject: P.1 – The Renaissance Literature.

Topic: Formalistic Approach of "Hamlet".

                            

What is Formalism?

                            Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourses, and forms.

                           In Hamlet we seemed various approaches but we focuses only on formalistic approach – 

The Trap Metaphor in Hamlet such as:

1.    The Trap Imagery.

2.    The cosmological Trap.

3.    ‘‘Seeming’’ and ‘‘Being.’’

4.    ‘‘Seeing’’ and ‘‘Knowing.’’

         The formalist perspective is one of the best perspectives to use in the play Hamlet, prince of Denmark. It helps a person find the hidden meaning throughout the play in multiple ways, which allow a person to truly understand the play completely such way is like when Ophelia goes crazy after her father is murdered and Hamlet is sent away. She sings songs to the Queen and king of Denmark that at first glance are just songs. When looked at between the lines; however, the two songs she sings are of her father and Hamlet. The song about Hamlet talks not only about Hamlet but of her secret pregnancy with Hamlet’s child. This is also mentioned before Ophelia goes crazy and polonius, Ophelia’s father is still alive, and Hamlet is just beginning to act crazy. Hamlet mentions  something to polonius about not letting his daughter out because she might be or get pregnant. Such lines and places in the play like this at first seem to be nothing at all. However, if looked at between the lines then another completely different meaning is sent across. The formalist perspective allows people to view the play in this way getting hidden meaning in it while figuring out the plot.

         In Hamlet there are many different types of formalist perspectives but while reading think Shakespeare really focuses on tone in Hamlet. Hamlet states ‘‘he is going to come at him mom with words like daggers’’ and in doing that Hamlet is changing his tone from upset and disappointed to harming and hurtful while talking to his mother. During this scene Hamlet uses great word choice saying how disgusted his is with his mother and uncle for the acts of wrong that they have done. Hamlet is easily able to slip in and out of his role as being known as a crazy man which also adds to Shakespeare’s great use of perspectives.

            The formalist perspective truly gives insight in the true actions occurring in ‘‘Hamlet’’ by William Shakespeare. By Hamlet’s word choice in the first conversation with the king in act – 1 we can clearly see the distain that is already beginning to brew because of his uncle talking power and even more, taking Hamlet’s mother to be his wife.

                                             ‘‘A Little more than kin, and less than kind.’’

In this statement you can see the words shows the deeper meaning of the saying when Hamlet’s says this it is showing us as reader/ listeners that Hamlet really he is not really pleased that they are even family. To him it was bad enough that Claudius was his uncle now when Claudius says,

                                             ‘‘But, now my cousin Hamlet, and my son.’’

It is too much for Hamlet to take and through the formalist we are able to grasp that Hamlet distains this and wishes that he could remove himself from the situation that he has been placed in.

             Through the formalist perspective you can see deeper meaning in ordinary lines, such as this seemingly normal replay in act two; scene two, when he says,

                                                  ‘‘Not so, my loard; I am too much in the sun.’’

At first glance all we see is a slanted comment in self-defense but if you read the words closer in a formalist perspective. You are able to see the message Shakespeare, was trying to convey. This is, that Hamlet understands at least portions of what has happened while the rest of the castle is in the clouds on what has really happened and what Claudius is doing. As you can see the formalist perspective can really help you understanding grow and give you the tools to unlock the mysteries of Shakespeare. Here are some types of formalist perspective:

1.    The Trap Imagery:

                                  ‘‘My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; and like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first being, 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 the play centers on doubleness. In that doubleness lies the essence of what we mean by ‘‘dialectic’’ here – a confrontation of polarities. A consequence of that doubleness for many of the characters is that they are apparently caught in a trap a key metaphor in the play – or, in another image, 

                                ‘‘Hoist with own petard.’’

Let us examine that metaphor of the trap, for it leads clearly to our seeing how dialectic provides form in Hamlet. Several time in the play, but in varying images, we find allusions to different kinds of entanglement. Polonius injudiciously uses the metaphor to warn Ophelia away from Hamlet’s

                     ‘‘holy vows of heaven,’’

vows that he says are

                        ‘‘springs to catch woodcocks.’’

More significant is Hamlet’s deliberate misnaming of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’; he calls it ‘‘The Mousetrap’’ because it is, as he says elsewhere, ‘‘the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’’ Claudius feels that he is trapped and speak that ‘‘O limmed soul, that, struggling to be free, / Art more engaged Hamlet, in the hands of plotters, finds himself ‘‘thus be – netted round with villainies’’ and one for whom Claudius has thrown out his angle for my proper life. The dying Laertes echoes his father’s metaphor when he tells Osric that he is as a wood to mine own springe. Here we have a pattern of trap images – springs, lime, nets, mousetraps, and angles or hooks Now traps are usually for animals, but we are dealing with human beings, people who are trapped in their own dilemmas, in their own questions, in the very questioning of the universe.

2.    The Cosmological Trap:

                                          The first scene of act -1 to realize that it is a disturbed world, that a sense of mystery and deep anxiety preoccupies the soldiers of the watch. The ghost has appeared already and is expected to appear again. The guards instinctively assume that the apparition of the former king has more than passing import; and, in their troubled questions to Horatio about the mysterious preparations for war, the guards show how closely they regard the connection between the unnatural appearance of the dead king and the welfare of the state. The guards have no answers for the mystery, their uncertainty, or their premonitions; their quandary is mirrored in abundant questions and minimal answers – a rhetorical phenomenon that recurs throughout the play, even in the soliloquies of Hamlet; in other words an instance of dialectic. The sense of cosmic implication in the special situation of Denmark emerges strongly in the exchange between Hamlet and his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Much earlier, before his encounter with the ghost, Hamlet expressed his, extreme pessimism at man’s having to endure earthly existence with in nature’s unwholesome realm.

                                         ‘‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross 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 a seeming paradox in the nature of existence; the fair, in nature and humanity, inevitably submits to the dominion of the foul. His obsession with the paradox focuses his attention on Denmark as the model nature and human frailty. Thus 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 of repeated words and phrases, looking forward to larger thematic assertion and backward to earlier adumbration.

   The play constitutes a vast poem in which speculation about nature, human nature, the health of the state, and human destiny intensifies into a passionate dialectic. Mystery, riddle, enigma, and metaphysical question complicate the dialogue. Particularly in his Hamlet confronts questions that have obsessed protagonists from Sophocles’ Oedipus to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What begins with the relatively simple questions of the soldiers of the watch in act – 1 is magnified and complicated as the play moves on. Increasingly tenuous and rarefied probes of the maddening gulf between reality and appearance proliferate. Moreover, the contrast between what the simple man cheerfully accepts at face value and what the thoughtful man is driven to question calls into doubt every surface of utterance, act, or thing. In the world of Hamlet the cosmic implications of myriad distinctions between ‘‘seem’’ and ‘‘be’’ confront us at every hand.

3.    ‘‘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 player king points out to his queen that there is a 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 weaving's 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 ‘‘yet unknowing world.’’ The contest between human aspiration and natural order in which Hamlet finds himself is all too unequal: idealism turns out to be a poor match for the prison wall of either Denmark or the grave.