Hamlet Context (Jai)

Reformation - Luther

1517, 95 theses, door of Wittenburg

Print

William Caxton brings the printing press to England 1470

Reformation - Henry

Henry VIII chooses to break with Roman church, establish English monarch as head of the church, 1527

Return to Catholicism

Mary I, 1553

Return to Elizabethan rule

1558, Elizabeth I undoes rule of Mary I

James I, religious upbringing

Catholic baptism, Protestant upbringing; transitional state

Hysteria text

Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called The Suffocation of the Mother

mother is the woman's womb, which moves around in her body to cause "monstrous and terrible" symptoms

Hippocrates on Hysteria

virgin women are most prone to hysteria, as they "lack the benefit of marriage"

Melancholy as an illness in Elizabethan time

one of the four humours, which could be congested: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood

Bright's Treatise on Melancholie, affects "soule and spirite"

Materialist decay of the powerful to show the body politic

Panofsky comments double-decker tomb split between two bodies, late Middle Ages, "grisly transis"

Symbol of memento mori with inscriptions, coming from ars moriendi, art of dying

Edmund Plowden body politic

Plowden makes kingship a real physical manifestation, body politic that "cannot be seen or handled" is codified in law

Edmund Plowden, Treatise On The Succession 1567

Michel de Montaigne Renaissance Humanism post-reformation

"it is I myself I portray"

The futility of trying to know oneself

Christian Humanism - feature of the Renaissance

Emphasised the humanity of Jesus but argued you could hold secular beliefs whilst remaining Christian

Michel de Montaigne, 'Essais', 1580

André du Laurens on melancholia making men performative AND sad

"stirreth man up to play the philosophies"

"with an inseparable sadness"

Seneca

Senecan tragedies had influenced people like Thomas Kyd to write The Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe Jew of Malta

Soliloquys, violence, ghosts

The state's monopoly on revenge

Hamlet was written according to Dr John Lannard just before the state wanted to monopolise revenge so these were live issues for the Elizabethans

Hamnet

Shakespeare's son died 1596 aged 11

Shakespeare's Catholic father had also died

Yorick scene, skull, cultural impact

Thomas Middleton adopted this in the Revenge Tragedy shortly after

Spanish Tragedy

hugely influenced Hamlet, like long soliloquy of Hieronimo, and a play within a play within a play

Edward Alleyn, lead actor of The Admiral's Men, plays Hieronimo, described as "stalking"

Thomas Hoby

1561, The Book of the Courtier translated by Thomas Hoby to England

"not to be womanish in his sayinges or doinges"

"body and mind ... aide each other"

James I text

Basilikon Doron, late 16th century, argues king must use honest and plain language

Amleth

Saxo Grammaticus 1200, story in history of the Danes, Shakespeare would have read a French translation

Critics disagree on Urr-Hamlet

Dramaturgy nostalgia

Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville Gorboduc

Memento mori Christian context

Developed with the growth of Christianity's emphasis on heaven/hell

Jacobean cult of melancholia

Psychomachia

Medieval, early Tudor dramas

Personification of internal conflict on stage

Internalised by Shakespeare, through soliloquy

Kyd + Marlowe pioneer this

An Humour Day's Mirth

Chapman, 1597

"eat I this cream and cake"

Performative social melancholia