Scarica Analysis of Shakespeare's Plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity!
TRAME
1. ROMEO & JULIET (1594/96)
>The Plot: The play, which is set in Verona, is a story about a long feud between the Montague and Capulet families. It is divided into 5 acts: First Act: the first act covers a whole day and it is composed of a series of dialogues about courtly concept of love (a medieval ideal that emphasized nobility and chivalry). It ends with the meeting of Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet at the party: they fall in love at the first sight. Second Act: the second act goes on with the relationship between the lovers. There is a dialogue that points out the theme of love in a way that departs from courtly convention. It ends with the secret wedding of the two lovers in the chapel of the priest, Friar Laurence. Third Act: the third act can be divided into two parts: that of public events and that of private events. The first part is full of twists: Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, kills Mercutio, Romeo’s Friend during a street fight. Accordingly, Romeo kills him and he is hunted from Verona. He moves to Mantua. The acts ends with Romeo and Juliet's wedding night at the Capulet’s house. Fourth Act: In the fourth act, Juliet, in order to avoid the marriage organised by her father, takes a drug given to her by the friar. This poison makes her seem dead. The priest tries to warn Romeo, but in vain. Fifth Act: it is divided into three scenes: in the first scene, Romeo come back to Verona; in the last scene, Romeo, believing that Juliet is dead, takes the poison. When Juliet wakes up and sees Romeo dead, she stabs herself with his dagger. >The themes: This tragedy is about love , hate and the inevitability of Fate. The main themes are two: The lack of knowledge; which derives from bad communication: Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of not knowing and unawareness; The language of Juliet departs from the contest of the courtly love and shows a tendency of realism. She does not use metaphors like Romeo. She is a real woman, because she is original and independent.
2. HAMLET (1599/1602)
>The plot: The story is set in the middle Ages in the royal castle in Elsinore, in Denmark. Like England it was a protestant country, in fact, Hamlet studied in Germany, where Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation. Shakespeare chose Denmark probably for the war against Norway, to add tension in the scenes and sets the mood of the play. First Act: After the death of the King of Denmark (Hamlet’s father), the Queen Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) marries her brother-in-law, Claudius, who comes to the throne. The king's ghost (armed for a possible attack from Fortinbras, Prince of Norway) appears to his son and to his son’s friend Horatio and tells them the truth about his death: Claudius killed him by pouring poison into his ear while he was sleeping in his orchard. He asks Hamlet to avenge him, but to leave his mother’s punishment to heaven. Second Act: The Prince pretends to be mad so that Claudius thinks Hamlet does not represent a menace for him. Polonius, king’s counsellor, thinks Hamlet’s madness is caused by his love for Ophelia. Hamlet refuses Ophelia, even if he loves her, and represents a play whose plot is like his father's murder “The Murdered of Gonzago”, to test Claudius' reaction. Third Act: King Claudius rushes away and Hamlet, during a conversation with his mother in her bathroom, kills Polonius who was hiding to eavesdrop their talk. The king decides to send Hamlet to England in order to kill him.
Fourth Act: Ophelia goes mad and her brother Laertes (They are Polonius’ sons) wants revenge his father; the king, after hearing that Hamlet has escaped, plots his death in a duel with Laertes. Fifth Act: To make sure Hamlet dies, he puts on the tip of Laertes’s sword a poisoned drink. Hamlet refused to drink it and he offer it to her mother, who dies. Laertes wounds Hamlet, then the swords are exchanged and Hamlets wounds Laertes. Hamlet then stabs Claudius through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his revenge. Before he died, Hamlet asked to Horatio to tell his story, recommending that Fortinbras be elected King of Denmark. >The themes: the main theme is the vengeance. Around this theme, other themes are central to humanity, like love and familiar relationship, madness, corruption, youth and God. Hamlet is a play of life and death, melancholy and doubts. First of all, the relation between ‘appearance and reality’ and the concept of man’s complex. Another theme is honour: it makes it clear that any action to correct a wrong should be reasoned, not emotional. >Hamlet: Hamlet is the most talkative of all Shakespeare’s characters. His language is full of rhetorical figures and his words have a hidden meaning. Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical; he is often indecisive and hesitant, but at other times prone to rash and impulsive acts. Hamlet is perhaps the closet of Shakespeare’s tragedies to modern sensibilities; its hero’s doubts and indecisions are familiar to modern man equally tormented by a lack of certainties and the inability to communicate. >Structure: In the third act, there is a play-within-the-play, which is the only true thing in the play. There is a audience within the audience (The Murdered of Gonzago).
3. MACBETH (1606)
>The Plot : five acts First Act: The play begins with the appearance of a trio of witches and then moves to a military camp, where the Scottish King Duncan hears the news that his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated two separate invading armies: one from Ireland and one from Norway. After the battle, Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches while they are returning to the Castle. The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be made thane (a rank of Scottish nobility) of Cawdor and eventually King of Scotland. They also prophesy that Banquo will beget a line of Scottish kings, although Banquo will never be king himself. The Witches vanish and they meet the king’s messenger who tells them that the king wants to reward Macbeth with the title of Thane of Cawdor. He invites the king to his castle and writes a letter to his wife to inform her. She carries out a plan to kill Duncan and sweeps away Macbeth's doubts with her determination. Second Act: Duncan is murdered and the blame is put on the king’s servants, who were outside the room. Macbeth ascend the throne and Macduff and Banquo suspect him. Third Act: Macbeth does not feel sure because of the prophecy about Banquo; So he decides to kill his friend and his friend’s son Fleance but the young escapes and Banquo’s ghost makes after him. Fourth Act: the witches warn Macbeth not to trust Macduff; this will be followed by the murder of Macduff's wife and children. The witches also predict that Macbeth will be safe as long as Birnam Wood does not move towards him and that 'none of woman born shall harm' him. Fifth Act: Lady Macbeth is washing away Duncan’s blood. Meantime, Malcom (Duncan’s son) is marching into Scotland with an army. Now Macbeth is alone because everyone has allied with Malcom. Macduff, to whom the phrase ‘none of woman born’ refers, kills Macbeth. The play ends with Macduff carrying Macbeth’s head and proclaiming Malcom king of Scotland.
3. TO BE OR NOT TO BE
This is the Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy on life and death. In his soliloquy, Hamlet is concerned with a doubt: whether life is better than death. He is alone but he speaks in the first person plural because he is giving voice to the biggest of man’s dilemmas. He wonders which is the right attitude towards life: whether it is better to live and suffer or have an active opposition to it. He says Death is the only way to escape the sorrow and pain of the injustices and miseries inflicted on humanity. Hamlet points out that man fears what may happen after death and he says “conscience” makes us cowards since it is linked to consciousness, which produces cowardice preventing us from committing suicide. Hamlet seems to resent his own incapacity to act and to put an end to his life because of his “conscience”. In fact, Death would be preferable to Life’s suffering if man was not scared by the thought of what there may be beyond it. This makes cowards of men and take s away the will to act. Hamlet uses many infinitive forms, which give his speech a reflective mood. Hamlet views death I as something to be welcomed because of its freeing power and considers it in a medieval perspective, that is, as a liberation of the soul from the “mortal coil”. We can find a metaphor, which stands for the after death or the “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”. In fact, no one has ever come to life again to tell what really happens after death. At the end of his soliloquy, the effect of the whole passage taken from Hamlet is to make the audience consider what the meaning of “cowardice” is. Hamlet reverses the traditional idea about suicide seen as an act of weakness, of cowardice, a form of defeat. A person who commits suicide is unable to face problems, and decides to escape from troubles through death. To Hamlet, instead, suicide requires courage because it means facing the unknown reality of the after-death. The majority of people prefer to continue to live without conviction or participation, rather than face “the undiscovered country”. However, the discussion on suicide also poses religious implications: man has no right to take his own life. God has given man life, and God alone can take it. This interpretation of suicide and death was already present in stoicism: if the philosophers did not accept what life reserved for them, they decided to take their own lives, rather than live unhappy.
4. DUNCAN’S MURDER
Lady Macbeth is alone on stage. She tells us that she drugged the King's guards and would've even killed Duncan herself. Macbeth enters with bloody hands and a weird story: two separate people staying in the castle woke up while he was in the act. One cried, "Murder!" but they both went back to sleep after saying their prayers. There is also a little problem where he heard voices saying things like "Macbeth does murder sleep!". Lady Macbeth tries to get her husband to focus on the matter at hand, which is framing the King's attendants. He won't do it himself, so she takes the daggers from him, smears the attendants with Duncan's blood, and plants the weapons. Come on. That would never fool CSI: Cawdor. As Macbeth philosophizes about his guilty hands, Lady Macbeth comes back, having done her part. She hears a knock at the door, and hurries Macbeth to bed so that (1) they don't look suspicious, and (2) they can do a little washing up before all the "Oh no! The king is dead" morning hullabaloo. Macbeth regrets killing Duncan —he says he wishes that all the knocking at the door would "wake Duncan" from his eternal sleep. Sorry, dude. No take- backsides with murder. The main themes are ambition, power, time and the prophesy. Ambition is a negative part of the story because Macbeth became a villain, after the talk with the 3 witches about the future. The crime is not mention explicitly because killing the king; he committed an act against nature and to give it a further dimension of horror and sense of guilt. The sleep give an idea of relief, rest and peace; Blood symbolized the guilt of murder, which sticks to Macbeth hands and cannot be washed; Water symbolized the possibility of redemption.
Macbeth is a tragic hero. Lady is a strong practical woman who dominates her husband, who seems disoriented.
5. MACBETH’S LAST MONOLOGUE
Macbeth (still at Dunsinane) insists that banners be hung outside the castle. Many of his former forces are now fighting against him on the English side, making it difficult for him to meet the army in a glorious blaze. He's still feeling pretty good, since Dunsinane is so fortified that he imagines the enemy army will die of hunger and sickness before he ever even needs to leave the castle. In the meantime, a shrieking of women tells Macbeth that his wife is dead—it's suicide. Macbeth here launches into one of Shakespeare's (and literature's) best known and oft-quoted speeches, beginning "She should have died hereafter," meaning one of two things: she would've died eventually so she might as well have died today or, she should have died later because I'm super busy defending the castle right now. He also gets to say the super famous line, "Life's but a walking shadow […] a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury," which is not only an early, maybe the earliest occurrence of Existentialist thought in literature—it's also the basis of William Faulkner's famous work, The Sound and the Fury. Macbeth is quickly distracted by the news that a "grove" of trees seem to be moving towards Dunsinane, which is all around bad news, since said "grove" is likely Birnam Wood. Macbeth finally realizes that the prophecy was as twisted as the prophets, but he's going to face the army anyway. If you have to go down, you might as well go down fighting. This is one of the most famous soliloquies in history. Shakespeare’s murderous king, Macbeth, has just learned of his wife’s death, and acknowledged his own imminent demise. His entire reign consisted of murderous plots, and he glorified his violent ascent to the throne. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow… day to day,” suggests Macbeth’s newfound understanding that he is not, as he believed, exempt from Death’s grip. “And all our yesterdays… walking shadow,” is a very in depth snippet I found a lot of underlying meaning in. Macbeth glorified his violent past, or basked in its ‘light’, if you will. The ‘light’ of those yesterdays shined on Macbeth, casting a dark, sorrowful shadow on the other side (his future). The ‘light’ also paved Macbeth’s (the fool in this case) life path to a dusty, or forgotten, grave. Forgotten because, when Macbeth dies, he has no son to continue his bloodline. “Out, out brief candle,” is a way for Macbeth to admit guilt and regret for his past, by extinguishing the source of the ‘light’. Also, it refers to the brief duration of life. This also applies to the hour upon the stage. “It is a tale… signifying nothing,” is the darkest excerpt of all. Macbeth is basically saying that the tale we tell (our life story) while on the stage (the world, Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage) is believed important only by an idiot. He ends by saying that, despite immense passion and voice, our tale is always nullified by Death.
