How Film Censorship Has Changed in the UK

Current technology makes it effectively impossible to censor the written word, theatre censorship was abolished in 1968, and there has never been any systematic regulation of other art forms - anyone seeking to clamp down on such events must mount a private prosecution, a lengthy and expensive process.

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• the British Board of Film Classification was originally founded in 1912 as the British Board of Film Censors
• BBFC guidelines are based on two main factors: legal requirements (for instance, unsimulated animal cruelty, indecent images of children) and the BBFC's own policies 
• Current context-based system where artistic merit is a key factor in assessing individual films
• This is controversial, due to the inevitable inconsistency. Some films are treated much more leniently than others with very similar content, as a result of largely subjective judgements by a handful of people
• But means a number of important films being passed either uncut or with a milder age restriction
• A side-effect of its stated commitment to greater openness is that it is now easy to find out if films have been cut in their British versions and current technology makes it equally simple to order uncut and unclassified videos and DVDs from elsewhere
• When video was introduced in the late 1970s, there was no specific legislation governing its content and major distributors were reluctant to get involved with a medium they considered vulnerable to piracy, meant small independent companies to flood the market with low-budget horror films and lurid advertising campaigns
• Most had little or no artistic merit, though there was an inclusion of work to be withdrawn by respected genre practitioners Dario Argento, Wes Craven, Lucio Fulci and Tobe Hooper, arthouse auteurs Andrzej Zulawski and Paul Morrissey, and the then unknown Abel Ferrara
• May 1982 article in the Sunday Times headed "How high street horror is invading the home". This theme was enthusiastically taken up by the tabloid press, creating what Martin Barker has called a 'moral panic'
• 194 Criminal Justice Act which added a clause covering potential harm "caused to potential viewers or, by their behaviour, to society" by material dealing with "criminal behaviour, illegal drugs, violent behaviour or incidents, horrific behaviour or incidents or human sexual activity"
• This was because of the result of the 1994 Newson Report, which alleged that violent videos were capable of causing psychological damage, especially to impressionable children
• This report wrongly suggested that a definitive link had been established, with Newson merely drawing inferences from individual case studies and her case studies were sourced from often highly speculative accounts in the press rather than independent first-hand research
• In the post-war years it was fears of social unrest that were near the top of the agenda.
• The history of British film censorship is as much social as cultural: the reasons films were banned in the 1920s (revolutionary politics) and 1950s (nudity) say as much about the society of the time as anything in the films

• In our era of far greater equality the BBFC is noticeably tougher on sexual violence today than it was thirty years ago, though correspondingly much more relaxed about most other issues

• As the nation relaxed into the 1960s, nudity becomes a prime concern. 
• The early 1970s saw film-makers keen to push at the limits of acceptability.
• Viewed from 2011, many of the board's decisions seem odd, quaint even, and we are able to see many of the scenes originally deemed unacceptable on DVD reissues.
• In the 1980s the board changed its name from British Board of Film Censors to that of Film Classification and it was levels of violence that capture the attention.

Read More:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/445733/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15107384

Learning Lessons from Paradise Lost

• God should be obeyed
• God doesn't make idle threats 
• Woman should be ruled over by man
• Wife dragging down husband 
• Female autonomy has terrible consequences
• Man giving into woman leading to bad things
• Reason can be tricked
• Passion can lead to danger
• Not to follow duty to anyone but God
• Ambition leading to greater fall
• Sin was 'freely' chosen
• Responsibility for own actions
• Man made same choice to fall as woman though for different reasons - in their sin they are equal
• Doubting God is wrong
• Idolatry is wrong
• Making self into own God is wrong
• Temptation is powerful
• Sin as corrupting and destructive force - breaks relationships and earth down
• Not to trust the unknown
• Importance of unwavering faith
• Not to love anything else more than you love God
• God is generous - giving humanity earth and free will
• Not calvinistic suggestion that God ordained that mankind would sin
• Danger of rebellion - becoming what you are rebelling against
• Animals not given speech - humanity elevated beyond
• The idyllic nature of pre-lapsarian life
• Marriage as supposed to be romantic, mutual, loving
• Power corrupting
• Meritocracy where God is rightfully at the top
• Selfishness leads to misery
• Sin leads to more sin - snowballing into evil
• Evil not natural state - even Satan has to consciously choose to be evil
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The importance of language in Hamlet and The Revenger's Tragedy

• Polonius: ‘What do you read my lord?’ Hamlet: ‘Words, words, words.’
• many word duels in Hamlet, Only the clown can match his wit.
• Hamlet mirrors people’s languages – for example he matches the ghost’s language after he meets him, but ghost also mirrors his use of the word 'foul'
• Hamlet’s language becomes more erratic as he tries to make himself the archetypal revenger – “keep his wounds green”
• “I am mad but north-north-west.” Lots of hidden meanings, riddling – playing the part of the fool?
• Ophelia also alter plays the part of the fool when she turns “mad”.
• Soliloquies to illuminate what they are thinking however, Vindice uses them not to ponder, but to plan revenge
• Ophelia loved Hamlet's 'words of such sweet breath composed'
• Duplicity of language important in revealing the conflict between inner and outer
• Titles given to people important such as 'uncle-father and aunt-mother'
• Hendiadys and doubling
• Hamlet constantly addressed as 'my lord'
• Language of excess – emphasise sin
• Letters used to sentence the character to death – never seen in physical form, are they trustworthy?
• Hamlet's letters to Ophelia bought into open, pored over, intrusion into privacy
• Polonius demands to know what Laertes and Ophelia were talking of
• Language used to give subjective account of what has happened offstage - preparations for war, Ophelia's death, Hamlet's adventures with pirates
• The power of the 'tongue' in Revenger's Tragedy
• Vindice was able to trick his mother into prostituting his sister
• In the Revenger’s Tragedy, most characters use asides to undermine the other characters – also give the audience information – the audience is submerged within the play
• Junior Brother unable to resist from insert his own comments whilst reading the letter from his brothers – product of society, excessiveness, no subtlety. He does not even trust the letter – no truth to words

Revenge Tragedy

Revenge Tragedy

Explores relationship between tragedy and justice – revenge becomes a vehicle for moral debate and at the centre of this is the conflict between duty and conscience.

The play’s persistent questioning and Hamlet’s position as a philosopher is a signal that the play invites debate.

Revenge – A divide in attitudes.

Old Testament – eye for an eye, but repeatedly we are told that ‘vengeance is mine, I shall repay saith the Lord.’ Revenge is at odds with Christian teaching.

1584 Bond of Association – swear before God that they would take revenge on those that tried to challenge Elizabeth.

Francis Bacon.

Analysis

Development of Revenge Plays

Senecan Revenge

Senecan tragedy is a body of ten 1st century AD dramas of which eight were written by the Roman Seneca. Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca's themes of bloodthirsty revenge more congenial to English taste than they did his form. Senecan influence is also evident in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet: both share a revenge theme, a corpse-strewn climax, and ghosts among the cast, which can all be traced back to the Senecan model.

Differences – deaths occurred off-stage with gruesome deaths reported to audience usually by a messenger. In Renaissance, these deaths are shown on-stage and audience witness violent events.

This succeeds in implicating the audience with the action – complicit.

Also an analogy between the theatre and the ‘Theatre of Execution.’ – The two are suspiciously similar.

Revenge plots border on farce – it will eventually exhaust itself as there is no one left to kill and the stage is left littered with murdered corpses.

Revenge plots popular – great fashion for staging revenge tragedies.

Kyd’s – ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ 1590

Character ‘Revenge’ actually appears and the action is solicited by Revenge’s mood – he both structures and frames the play.

‘Titus Andronicus’ – 1590

Blood-fest.

Hamlet – 1601

Much more psychologically developed and rounded character. The audience shares in Hamlet’s torments and questions what it is to be human knowing that the only certainty is death, and what of that death.

‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’ – 1607

More violent – grotesque, almost comic.

Here we get a different type of protagonist and the division between hero and villain is blurred. Note the difference between Vindice and Hamlet.

The Revenger

Need to avenge a terrible deed that occurred in the past – there is a constant act of remembrance. Vindice with Gloriana’s skull and Hamlet is implored to ‘remember’ his father by his ghost.

Revengers are usually patient.

They keep their wounds green. – often consumed by bitterness.

Isolated from their surroundings.

Sensitive and intelligent.

The law / state has let them down – the villain is protected by the law.

Feign madness – dissemble to gain proof of crime or to get close to their enemy.

Hamlet struggles in this role

He is stuck in a play started by others.

whereas

Vindice relishes this role

Vindice is a supremely inventive revenger who revels in and is proud of his inventiveness. He speaks like Iago and acts like Edmund.

Women are often treated badly in these plays.

‘Frailty thy name is woman.’

Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy

One of the great influences on the early modern revenge play genre was the translation of the works of the Roman playwright Seneca into English in the last half of the sixteenth century. Seneca’s tragedies concerned the heroic figures of classical legend, and borrowed from such playwrights as Aeschylus, Euripedes and Sophocles. The tragedies were filled with horrifying events such as cannibalism, incest, rape, and violent death. Revenge is also a theme in many of Seneca’s plays: in Hippolytus, Theseus takes revenge on his son for the supposed rape of Phaedra, while in Agamemnon, the ghost of Thyestes urges Aegisthus towards revenge. Revenge and violence are associated with ghosts in several other Senecan plays. [1]

Another strong influence came from Italian literature, reinforced by a stereotype that was held in contemporary England of Italians as vengeful, cunning and bloodthirsty. [2] Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote The Prince, a treatise on power, in the early years of the sixteenth century. The perceived amorality of the work led ‘Machiavel’ to be synonymous with villainy in the contemporary imagination. Innocent Gentillet wrote that in Machiavelli’s country, ‘vengeances, and enmities are perpetuall and irreconcilable’, and revenge gave ‘delectation, pleasure and contentment’; revengers will torment a victim, and may even ‘force him with hope of his life to give himselfe to the diuell; and so they seeke in slaying the bodie to damne the soule, if they could’. [3] This detail recalls Hamlet’s refusal to murder Claudius during prayer, lest the King’s soul go to heaven, [4] and to his emphasis on Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s deaths being carried out immediately, with no ‘shriving time’. [5] Other Italian works, like The historie of Guicciardin containing the warres of Italie, translated by Geoffrey Fenton (1579), and novels such as those translated by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques (1559-70) and into English by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure (1567-8) contained gruesome tales of revenge and violence. [6]

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587-9) is one of the earliest plays built around blood-revenge to be performed on the English stage. [7] It not only contains a ghost, but also a personified spirit of Revenge, giving the play a framework that involves supernatural forces and the workings of fate. [8] This is set against the protagonists’ struggles to achieve justice through their own actions. Hieronimo’s desire for vengeance ‘is in a very real sense a passion for justice’. [9] The existence of evil and undeserved misfortune in the world drives him to exclaim ‘O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs,/ Confus’d and fill’d with murder and misdeeds’. [10] Here we find echoes of ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ in Hamlet, (1.4.90) and Lear’s mad ravings about the evils of society in King Lear. In The Spanish Tragedy, as in Hamlet, an attempt is made to procure justice by means of a play-within-a-play, but in The Spanish Tragedy the revenger takes part in the play and stabs the villain in the middle of the performance.

Revenge plays in the style of Kyd include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, perhaps the most grotesque and least likeable of Shakespeare’s plays, and Hamlet. Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599) includes elements found in Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy: the ghost, the play-within-a-play, delayed revenge, rape or threats to female honour, and a bloody denouement, as well as the pretended foolishness of Antonio, which matches Hamlet’s feigned madness. The Revenger’s Tragedy (attributed to Tourneur, c. 1606-7), is another play in this genre. [11] A central element is the skull of a woman who has been poisoned. Carried about by the revenger, the skull prompts meditations on the transience of life and the inevitability of death and corruption, which recall both medieval morality drama and the philosophical musings of Hamlet. The revenger, Vindice, goes about disguised, which ‘enables him to act as a detached, satirical and didactic commentator in the folly and evil of the other characters’, [12] again recalling Hamlet’s similar ironic commentary under the disguise of madness.

In these plays, the revenger is a kind of hero, avenging cruel and undeserved death, yet is a killer in his turn. The extent to which contemporary audiences would have sympathised with the avenger is debated by literary critics. [13] In some plays, the revenger is not heroic at all, but utterly villainous: in The Duchess of Malfi,  Ferdinand comes to believe he has turned into a wolf, symbolising his savagery. Yet revenge could be a way to settle a ‘legitimate grievance’. [14] Francis Bacon wrote that ‘revenge triumphs over death’, [15] a sentiment expressed by Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy when he proclaims ‘When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good’, [16] suggesting that the justice of revenge outweighs the horror of tragedy. However, Bacon also wrote that ‘in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon’. [17] In revenge plays, the option of forgiveness is not taken, and even if justice is done and the revenger dies to expiate his deeds, revenge plays close with a sense of futility, waste and loss.

Karen Kay

1. Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1959). Return to text

2. Bowers, pp. 48-52. Return to text
3. Bowers, p. 52, citing Innocent Gentillet, Discours sur les moyens de bien governer [...] contre Nicolas Machiavel (1576), translated as A Discourse Upon the Meanes of Well Governing [...] by Simon Patericke (1577), Part III, max. 6. Return to text
4. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 3.3.73-98, pp. 331-3. Return to text
5. Hamlet, 5.2.46-7, p. 436. Return to text
6. Bowers, pp. 53-61. Return to text
7. A Hamlet play written before Shakespeare’s version, possibly by Kyd, now lost, would have been another early example of the genre. Return to text
8. Cf. Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallet, The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 8. Return to text
9. Hallet and Hallet, p. 145. Return to text
10. Hallet and Hallet, p. 147, citing Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 3.3.3-4. Return to text
11. On plays in the style of Kyd, cf. Bowers, pp. 101-53. Return to text
12. Tourneur, Cyril, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. by Brian Gibbons, New Mermaids (London: Benn, 1967; Black, 1988), p. xv. Return to text
13. Cf. Bowers, pp. 3-40.Return to text
14. Cf. Hallett and Hallett, p. 6. Return to text
15.From ‘Of Death,’ Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. by Charles W. Eliot, The Harvard Classics (New York: Collier, 1901-14), III, Part 1, online at http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/2.html Return to text
16. The Revenger’s Tragedy, 3.5.198, p. 64. Return to text
17. From ‘Of Revenge,’ Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. by Charles W. Eliot, The Harvard Classics (New York: Collier, 1901-14), III, Part 1, online at http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/2.html Return to text

Literary Terms

Assonance- repetition of the same vowel sound 

Metrical rhythm- metrical poetry imposes artificial rhythms on sentences by enclosing them within a pattern of stresses. A metre is a basis for the reading of the poem- it is up to the reader to decide where the metre should be strictly kept to and where the rhythm of speech should be allowed to override the metre.

Feet- units of stress within a line of a poem: Iamb- dee dum (demand, expect) Trochee- dum dee (soldier, weather) Anapaest- dee dee dum (intercept) Dactyl- dum dee dee (extrovert, internet)

Metre- the number of feet within a line of poetry: 2 feet- dimeter; 3 feet- trimeter; 4 feet- tetrameter; 5 feet- pentameter; 6 feet- hexameter; 7 feet- heptameter

Caesura- the half way point in a line of verse, which may correspond to a natural break

Simile- the direct comparison of two things (The sky is like a polished mirror)

Synecdoche- something is defined by one part or aspect (farm hands=people who help on farm, a new motor= a new car).

Oxymoron- a combination of incongruous and apparently contradictory ideas (O loving hate!)

Antithesis- opposition of nearby words or phrases (Your grace attended to their sugared words/But looked not on the poison of their hearts)

Tautology- redundant words or ideas (I myself personally…)

Anaphora- the repetition of the beginning of phrases (Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!)

Chiasmus- two phrases which are syntactically parallel, but reversed (The years to come seemed a waste of breath/ a waste of breath the years behind)

Classical Rhetoric:

Circumlocution or periphrasis-talking around your subject obliquely or evasively (It’s when you meet your maker, fall asleep for the final time, draw your last breath)

Expolitio- explaining an idea several times in different ways (attending school, going to your place of study, entering a learning environment…)

Sententiae- moral generalisation (Love is blind; virtue is always rewarded)

Diversio- digression (There was a lady in the room called Anne. She reminded me of someone I knew once before called Amy. Have I ever told you what happened with Amy?)

Rhetorical questions- questions which invite reflection but are not meant to be answered (Is this what the world has come to?)

Anthony Giddens and Identity

Modernity and Self identity:

• everyday questions about clothing, appearance and leisure
• high-impact decisions about relationships, beliefs and occupations
• earlier societies with a social order based firmly in tradition
• post-traditional societies we have to work out our roles for ourselves
• 'What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity - and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour.'
• connections between the most 'micro' aspects of society - individuals' internal sense of self and identity - and the big 'macro' picture of the state, multinational capitalist corporations, and globalisation
• Social change such as in relationships bought about my decline in religion and rise of rationality - changes in how individuals view life
• Institutions typically thought to want people to have stable monogamous family life
• mix of macro elements like law change and micro elements of how people live lives - change stemming from mesh of both
• media also influencing views of things like relationships
• need for 'good stories' would always support an emphasis on change in relationships
• inevitably receive a message that monogamous heterosexual stability is, at best, a rare 'ideal', which few can expect to achieve
• encouraged to reflect on our relationships in magazines and self-help books (explicitly), and in movies, comedy and drama (implicitly)
• Information and research is then 'reappropriated' by ordinary people, often lending support to non-traditional models of living
• Information and ideas from the media do not merely reflect the social world, then, but contribute to its shape, and are central to modern reflexivity

Read more:
http://www.theory.org.uk/giddens4.htm
Gauntlett, David (2002), Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York

The Pastoral

• Can be traced back to 3rd century BC
• conventionalized picture of rural life
• natural and innocence vs corruption and artificiality of city and court
• real vs ideal
• Yearning for golden age of innocence
• about shepherds but not written by them
• use shepherd world to present simple image of complex society
• social political religious criticism
• nostalgic
• written by those in cities
• innocence don't have in a corrupt world
• mythologised world
• Theocritus, Virgil
• Leisure which the townsmen attributes to countryman
• Corrupted by outsiders
• community harmony, value of peace
• shepherd piping and dancing
• The garden of Eden
• tradition from bible and virgil merged
• image of responsibility as shepherd
• garden of eden lost suddenly by sin whereas golden age fades gradually by time
• Wakefeild cycle - second shepherd play (medieval mystery plays)
• using pastoral for satire
• The Fairie Queen
• Milkmaid the english equivalent of french shepherdess
• As You Like It - exploring seriousness of pastoral, constant debate between pastoral and anti-pastoral
• The Winter's Tale - only marry shepherdesses if they are secretly daughters of the aristocracy
• Shepherd able to speak for common man
• The Sad Shepherd - Ben Jonson
• Happy Endings
• Milton  in comus and Paradise Lost

Censorship Case Study: The Wild One

Problems:

• Disrespect to figures of authority
• Contempt
• Brando was seen as imitable
• Thought it reflected Teddy Boys at the time

BBFC's Response:

• Called a 'spectacle of unbridled hooliganism'
• Didn't issue a certificate
• Columbia desperate for it to be shown
• Related to subject as whole - thought it would be difficult to cut
• Ban stuck until 1967

Then 'Rebel Without A Cause' passed as 'X' which then limited not just the audience (over 16) but also the cinemas that were prepared to show it - BBFC did't want children to witness 'ridiculous and ineffectual parents'

Philosophy applicable to Paradise Lost

Augustine of Hippo - 'What made Adam capable of obeying God's command also made him able to sin', evil is a lack of or deficiency


Boethus - God foresees our thoughts and actions, God knows the future as if it were the present, 'everything is known, not according to itself, but according to the capacity of the knower'


Calvin - 'no wind ever rises or blows but by the special command of God'

Ingmar Bergman's Production of Hamlet

• Stabs Polonius repeatedly, slashing at his body
• Hamlet's role as the play's moral centre
• The Lyttleton curtain went up, to reveal red plush curtains behind them
• ''To be or not to be'' is delivered to the Player King, almost as if Hamlet were a Method director confiding psychological motivation
• life as theatre, theatre as life
• certain actors to double up in different roles eg Claudius and gravedigger
• Claudius had mounted Gertrude from behind before the entire Danish court, and had performed the confession scene while alternately manhandling and fondling the Player Queen
• polite applause of the court
• highly emotional, modern-dress
• Fortinbras, strides in, accompanied by a black-garbed army of street warriors and has Horatio killed (offstage) and then unceremoniously disposes of Hamlet and the other dead, his stance and attitude fascistic rather than heroic
• nature of theatrical illusion
• Fortinbras' leather-clad soldiers, armed with machine guns, burst in and mowed down everyone in their way to the accompaniment of thunderous Danish rock music
• After Fortinbras television cameras and microphones of the obligatory press conference scene
• Wearing a black leather coat and sulking behind sunglasses, Hamlet sits silently as his uncle and mother display an open sexual voraciousness 
• Hamlet drags a black chair, which he slams down at dead centre before proceeding to turn his back on the debauched, ruby-clothed King and Queen
• Hamlet's disgust registers in the seemingly casual way he ignores them
• Ophelia's closeness to Laertes verges on the incestuous 
• Hamlet alternately embraces Ophelia and shoves her out of his grasp
• Player Prince, finding his milieu among the actors, even to performing a small victory dance when he captures the conscience of the king
• Ophelia carries not flowers but nails, as if to impale her antagonists
• Ophelia went barefoot and wore a blue slip
• Gertrude carefully prepared Ophelia with some lipstick, and a pair of red high-heeled shoes,
• Acting as our surrogate, Ophelia is often amazed at the events
• dream-like atmosphere of the production, in which the borders between the internal and external were erased
• 'Blood is the theme of this interpretation,'
• emphasises violence and Hamlet's powerlessness, both personal and political
• Claudius edged away from Hamlet, the Ghost entered, came up behind him, and pinioned his arms so that Hamlet could run him through more easily

Michael Bogdanov Peter Sellars and Mark Lamos

Case Study: Copycat Project X Party

Where: Houston, Texas

Media Copied: Project X, a film about Californian High Schoolers who try to throw the biggest party

What copied:

• Broken Windows
• Broken walls
• alcohol bottles
• Not their home

11 charged with criminal trespassing, caused 100,000 worth of damages

Conforming to media effects theory?

• glamourising partying

But the film also shows the consequences of this, with even the trailer using police siren sound effects and conversations with the protagonist's parents to indicate this. This fits more with David Gauntlett theory of how media effects research usually lifts parts of a film without considering how the narrative treats elements like sex, drugs and vandalism.

However the film does not end censoring the film's material, with an number of the characters escaping charges and the protagonist's father's applauding him. This was not the case with those involved in the Houston party.

The Woman In Hamlet

by David Leverenz

• The different figures of male authority see Hamlet's identity very differently - dutiful son, lovesick heir, mad lovesick
• Mixed and contradictory expectations from different father figures
• 'part puritan' in his disgust at contamination
• destruction of good mothering
• 'diseased doubleness in everyone who has accomodated to his or her social role'
• At least players are obviously acting
• There are many voices in Ophelia's madness speaking through her (could mirror way Hamlet projects different personas for different people'
• 'Ophelia becomes the mirror for a madness-inducing world. Hamlet resists these pressures at the cost of terrifying isolation'
• cites his "whorish" doubts as the cause of his inability to take manly filial action
• Hamlet's idealizations of his father and Horatio's friendship show a hunger for male closeness
• 'Poisoning in the ear may unconsciously evoke anal discourse'
• tensions between head and heart, noble reason and diseased emotion
• 'Not a mouse stirring' later play is 'The Mousetrap'
• Horatio's first word is 'friends'
• loyalty as an identity
• 'one brow of woe' presenting his kingdom as single person
• war terms like Polonius' 'parley' and Laertes's 'shot' used in describing courtship
• first soliloquy filled with different parts of the body
• Ghost's speech designed to show his strength and Hamlet's weakness
• Ghost's speeches contradictory and mixed signals
• Ghost not interested in feeling 
• Old hamlet used to sleep on the job
• Ghost and Claudius alike in their arrogance
• Old Priam and Yorick even more father figures
• 'Olphelia mirrors in her madness the tensions that Hamlet perceives
• Ophelia driven mad by having inner feelings misrepresented, repressed etc
• continually commanded - implies distrust
• her advice to Laertes shows her awareness of his possible double self
• punning on 'recks' and 'reckless' she displays an independent wit
• 'Polonius is delibrately unconcerned what his daughter feels
• 'Polonius is preoccupied only with how he looks'
• Hamlet's 'oscillating acts of needs and repression'
• Ophelia's refusal of his letters etc echo Gertrude's inconsistency
• does what Hamlet does by going mad and her suicide reflects Hamlet's soliloquys
• She follows Polonius's saying that love leads to madness
• she is a 'player trying to respond to several imperious directors at once. Everyone has used her'
• Robin was Elizabethan colloquial term for penis and Ophelia sings 'For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy'
• Ophelia's song 'mirror every level of the play, even Polonius' flowery speech yet they do not express what Ophelia feels'
• 'the graveyard scene shows the last perversion of reason'
• 'Like ophelia, Hamlet can mirror how others talk, though with a savage irony'
• 'Even Ophelia only loved him for his words'

Laing 'in [Ophelia's] madness there is no one there... incomprehensible statements are said by nothing. She has already dies. There is now only a vcuum where there was once a person.'

her madness as a natural response to the unacknowledged interpersonal falsities of the group

Eliot Gertrudes' 'negative and insignificant'character 'arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing'

Coming of Age Dramas as a Genre

Matthew P Schmidt - Coming of Age in American Cinema: Modern Youth films as a genre

• Contain characteristics of the novelistic Bildungsroman and its modern literary variants, the childhood initiation tale and the coming-of-age or the rites-of-passage story
• includes not only teen entertainments but also social problem films and more personal, quasi-autobiographical works
• dramatize situations and events that bear upon the child's initiation into new domains of psychosocial experience and the adolescent's and postadolescent's encounters with the pleasures and perils of modern life

Robert McKee - Story
Part of Maturation plot

Norman Friedman

Plots of Character — in which the narrative’s protagonist undergoes a change of moral character.

• The Maturing Plot — The classic coming-of-age tale in which the protagonist passes into adulthood, either literally or on some figurative level. Examples include Sixteen Candles, Stand by Me, and Almost Famous.

Kate Erbland

• high school hijinks
• making own family/accepting your family
• falling in love for first time
• social outliers
• popular people having hidden depths

http://freeteawithpurchase.com/

• popular vs unpopular
• apprehension of future
• change from school to university
• world weariness

Aaron Weiss

• looking for acceptance
• rite of passage

Dusty McGowan

• Underdog
• Dreamgirl
• Older mentor
• quirky characters
• unexpected moments

Philosophy applicable to Hamlet

Is Hamlet truly wise because he does not seem to know self?
Laozi 'Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom'


Daois achieved through wu wei (non action)


'Reason is immortal, all else mortal' Pythagoras


Buddhist belief that suffering can be ended by detaching onself from craving and attachment - Nirodha, self centredness causing suffering
'Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.'