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Name: Joshi Tejasvi A
Paper:-1The Renaissance Literature
Unit:-1 Hamlet
Assignment Topic:
Cultural Studies Approach in Hamlet
Roll no: 24
Sem: 01
Submitted to:-Maharaja Krishnakumarsignji University,
Bhavnagar.
Department of English
Hamlet has remained Shakespeare’s best
known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a
critical role in Sigmund Freud’s explanation of the Oedipus complex and thus
influenced modern psychology.
Introduction
Cultural Studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and
can sometimes be seen as ant disciplinary. As cultural studies scholar to by
Miller has written, “Cultural Studies is a tendency across disciplines, rather
than a discipline itself.” The field of Cultural Studies encompasses a range of
theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices.
Cultural Studies approach
There are various approaches in
Hamlet like Textual, Genre Study, Historical and Biographical, Moral and
Philosophical, Psychological, Mythological and Archetypal, Feminism and Gender,
Cultural Studies in practice and Formalist Approach etc. Let us discuss
cultural studies Approach. Cultural
studies are quite a new approach to read new literature. It is always find
mistake of culture. What we do in our everyday life is a culture. We can notice
in Hamlet there are two marginalization characters in the cultural and new
historical emphases of the power and relationship of the cultural study in
practice. For example are noticed in critics assume “oppositional” role in term
of power structures. We know that true reality to Hamlet in his life his friend
also his favour but in power position has King Claudius so Claudius is taking
privately with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s fellow students from
students from Writtenberg. In response to Claudius’s plan to send Hamlet to
England so now see to this context in two characters Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern in cultural context and practice to Hamlet and also that if read
out to context is both an excellent set of metaphors and a adding up the
Elizabethan concept of the role and power of kingship:
The singular and peculiar life is bound with all the strength and armor
of the mind to keep itself from noyance, but
much more that spirit upon whose weal depends and rests the lives of
many....Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin.
Never alone did the King sigh but with a general groan. In this lines he
explain that taken alone, the passage is a thoughtful and imagistic ally
successful passage, worthy of a wise and accomplished statesman. It wants us to
have a lance at ones Marginalized characters we are not given enough important
and those who should have been given reorganisations in their life. But how
many readers and viewers of the play would rank this passage among the best
known lines of the play with Hamlet’s soliloquies “To be or not to be that is
the question...” or with the king’s effort to pray, or even with the aphorisms
addressed by Polonius to his son Laertes? We venture to say that the passage,
intrinsically good if one looks at it alone, is simply not well known.
Attention to the
contact and to the speaker gives the answer. Guildenstern had just agreed that
he and Rosencrantz would do the king’s bidding. The agreement is only a
reaffirmation of what they had told the king when he first received them at
court. Both speeches are wholly in character, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are among the jellyfish of Shakespeare’s characters. Easy it is to forget which
of the two speaks which lines indeed easy it is to forget most of their lines
altogether. The two are distinctly plot-driven empty of personality,
sycophantic in a snivelling way, eager to curry favour with power even if it
means spying on their erstwhile friend. Weakly they admit, without Mack skill
at denial, that they “were sent for.” Even less successfully they try to plan
on Hamlet’s metaphorical “pipe”, to know his “stops”, when they are forced to
admit that they could not even handle the literal musical instrument that
Hamlet shows instrument that Hamlet shows them. Still later these nonentities
meet their destined “non-beingness,” as it were, when Hamlet, who can play the
pipe so much more efficiently, substitutes their names in the death warrant
intended for him.
If ever
we wished to study two characters that are if marginalized, and then let us
look upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The
meanings of their names hardly match what seems to be the essence of their
characters. Murray j. Levith, for example, has written that “Guildenstern and
Rosencrantz are from the Datch-German: literally “garland of roses” and “golden
star”. Although of religious origin, both names together sound singsong and odd
to English ears. Their jangling gives them lightness, and blurs the
individuality of the characters they label”.
Lightness to be sure Harley Granville-
Barker once wrote in an offhand way of the reaction these two roles call up for
actors commenting on solanio and salarino from The Merchant of Venice, he noted
that their roles are “Cursed by actors as the two worse bores in the whole Shakespearean
canon; not excepting, even those other twin brethren in nonentity, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern.
Harold
Jenkins reports as historical person bearing these names: “These splendidly
resounding names, by contrast with the unlocalized classical ones, are
evidently chosen as particularly Danish both were common among the most
influential Danish familiar, and they are often found together”.
The
personalities and general vacuity of Shakespeare’s two incompetents
approaches. So let us look elsewhere for
what these two characters tell us. Let us review what they do, and what is done
to them. Simply, they have been students at Wittenberg.
They return to Denmark, apparently at the
direct request of Claudius. They try to pray from hamlet some of his inner
thoughts, especially of ambition and frustration about the crown. Hamlet foils
them. They crumble before them own questioning. As toned above, Claudius later
sends them on an embassy with Hamlet, carrying a letter to the king of England
that would have Hamlet summarily executed. Though, they may not have known the
contents of that grand commission. Hamlet’s suspicion of them is enough for him
to contemplate their future and to “trust them is enough for him to contemplate
their future and to “trust them as adders fanged”
Clearly
Hamlet makes reference in the lines just noted to the “mighty opposites”
represented by himself and Claudius clearly too the ones of “baser nature” who
“made love to this employment” do not matter much in this struggle between powerful
antagonists. They are pawns for Claudius first, for Hamlet second. It is almost
as if Hamlet had tried before the sea voyage to warn them of their
insignificant state, he calls Rosencrantz a sponge, provoking.
So they are pawns, or sponge, or monkey food: the massage of power keeps
coming through. Thus, they do not merit a pang of conscience. True there may be
some room for believing that at first they intended only good for their
erstwhile school fellow. But their fate, however, is to displease mightily the
prince, who will undermine them and “hoist with own petard.”
Claudius was aware of power, clearly, when he observed of Hamlet’s
apparent madness that “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’ with equal
truth Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have observed that power in great ones
also must not unwatched go. With equal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have
observed that power in great ones also must not unwatched go.
To
say, then, that the mighty struggle between powerful antagonists is the stuff
of this play is hardly original. But our emphasis in the present reading is
that one can gain a further insight into the play, and indeed into
Shakespeare’s culture, by thinking not about kings and princes but about the
lesser persons caught up in the massive oppositions.
Whether they “are” at all may be the ultimate
question of this modern play. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern both are died,
Stoppard has given the contemporary audience a play that examines existential
question in the context of a whole world that may have no meaning at all.
Although is it not our intention to examine that play in great detail, suffice
it to note that the essence of marginalization is here in this view,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are archetypal human beings, caught up on a ship-
spaceship earth for the twentieth or the twenty first century that leads now
here, except to death, a death for persons who are a heady dead. If these two
characters were marginalized in Hamlet, they are even more so in stop-part’s
handing.
And if the philosophical view of stopped goes
too far for some consider a much more mundane phenomenon of the later twentieth
century-and times to come, we expect. We allude to the Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, the little people, who have been caught up in the corporate
downsizing and mergers in recent decades-the effects on these workers when
multinational companies move factories and offices around the world like pawns on
a chessboard.
Whether
in Shakespeare’s version or stopper’s, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no more
than what Rosencrantz called a “small annexment”, a “petty consequences”, mere
nothings for the “ massy wheel” of kings.
Conclusion
Thus, cultural studies seeks to understand how
meaning is generated, contested, and produced
from the social, political and economic spheres within a particular social
formation or conjuncture.
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