By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Previously, we have offered a short introduction to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one of his most popular tragedies. But there is plenty to explore in this, one of Shakespeare’s longest plays, so in this post we’re going to focus on the interesting side of the key characters in Hamlet, offering a mini-analysis of the role of these major characters.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers a famous and much-misunderstood quotation from Shakespeare
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ These words are among the most-quoted in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and they’re up against a whole host of other now-ubiquitous phrases and snquotations, including ‘hoist with one’s own petard’, ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’, ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’, and countless others. And this is to say nothing of the short phrases the play has given to the English language, such as ‘something is rotten’, ‘cruel to be kind’, ‘to the manner born’, and so on.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of Hamlet’s famous quotation ‘A little more than kin …’
‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ is a famous quotation from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. But as ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’ is a famous and memorable line in a play that is packed with famous and memorable lines – as the old quip has it, there are too many quotations in it – it might be worth spending some time analysing the cleverness of this particular one, since this line comprises the very first words Hamlet speaks to his uncle, Claudius.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hamlet’s ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ speech to Ophelia is a memorable moment in a play full of memorable moments. Before we analyse his speech, here’s a reminder of the relevant section of the play, which is found in Act 3 Scene 1, not long after Hamlet’s famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I am thy father’s spirit’: so speaks the Ghost to Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play. We have analysed Hamlet as a whole in more detail here, but the ‘I am thy father’s spirit’ speech calls for further close analysis to tease out the meaning of the Ghost’s words.