Guys, I am watching the opera version of Hamlet on SkyArts2. It sucks.

Claudius!

Last lesson we focused on Claudius in Hamlet. We looked at his speech near the beginning of the play, and watch a couple of clips in various versions of Hamlet.
Personally, I do believe that Claudius is the villain in the story. I think his speech when he is addressing the court is supposed to be 'put on', rehearsed and fake. He could be portrayed as very evil, or just a baddie, but I do think he is evil. Look at the facts; he kills his own brother to become King of Denmark, and then marries his sister-in-law. He insults Hamlet for grieving over his dead father, then he orders two of Hamlets friends to spy on him and sends him away.
Although we agreed that villains in tragedies don't have a motive, I believe this case is different and that Claudius did have a motive for becoming King. I think that he must have been jealous of his brother, which is why he killed him and married his wife, I also think that he is jealous of Hamlet. Hamlet is clever, young and witty, and I don't think that Claudius likes that. Therefore, Claudius's motive to kill the King (his brother) was to gain the throne and have a control over Hamlet.

Tragic Flaws

In today's lesson, we did a free writing exercise to see how much we knew about Tragic flaws. Everyone got similar ideas, that it is something bad happening in a play.
We then started to look at Aristotle, and his ideas of a classic tragedy:

• The idea of a plot
• Character
• Speech
• Reasoning (Not just blind aggression)
• Spectacle (Something exciting happening onstage)
• Lyrical poetry (Beautiful words to hear

Then we looked at the idea of Catharsis and what it could mean. Aristotle said that is was a ''purging of emotions'' and you take the lessons learned from the play to benefit your own life. Whereas Brecht said that you use a tragedy to change the world for the better. We then decided that a good definition of Catharsis was ''to feel an emotion with the performance/narrative''.

Aristotle also had '3 Unities' that made up a play.

• Action (one main plot)
• Time (Time span of the play should relate to 'real' time)
• Place (The play stays in one place)

Shakespeare was know for breaking these rules. He made his plays span across days such as Romeo and Juliet, and he changed the places of the play such as in Othello when he begins in Verona but ends up in Cyprus. However, a new take on tragedy has come from Karen Numan, who said that a tragedy is something which goes against nature, eg Othello sees a black man marry a white woman, and Macbeth sees a man going against the king. I think this is an interesting view on tragedy, and also believe that it is very relevant. If you relate her idea of tragedy to the real world, she is right. Things that go against nature (eg War [men killing men]) end up as being terrible tragedies (Death, suffering of countries, people). Therefore her idea of tragedy I believe is probably the most accurate.

Tragedy!

Last lesson we looked at Tragedy, and what makes a tragedy.
We decided that a tragedy has 3 main elements:

• Death
• Suffering
• Chaos

It also has 3 main characters:

• Victim (Innocent, beautiful, weak)
• Villain (Evil, fatal flaw, manipulative)
• Hero (Perfect, hubris, harmartia)

We also looked at the tragic structure:

1. Introduction
2. A Complication
3. The Climax
4. A New Understanding
5. The Resolution

Really looking forward to Hamlet and assessing its tragic structure.