Assignment
Optional Paper on Hamlet and Lyrical Ballads During the term you have to write only one paper , and this is the first of three options. You can choose any one of these topics below for your first paper. Make sure you have a clear and coherent thesis and a well developed introduction. Make a clear outline for the body of the paper. Give examples, including several quotations, from the books. At the end, list your works cited, especially if you are using different editions.
Length: 1,000-1,250 words, MLA Guidelines (use in-text citations and Works Cited at the end.) Deadline: 03/29/18, Thurs. Hard copies only. If you want help with a thesis etc., make a conference appointment.
You will be allowed to revise this paper one time if you save the original hard copy with my comments and staple that to the revision. Important: don't try to answer every part of a topic. Focus on the one or two ideas that you can really work with well. The ideas here are just meant to help you get started.
1. Imagining how male writers try to evoke sympathy with women, compare one of the important female characters in the tragedy byShakespeare with one of the important female figures in the poems of Wordsworth. Focus upon just one or two scenes with each character. For example, you could compare Ophelia with the female vagrant. You could focus upon Gertrude with the Mad Mother etc. Try to explore how the way male writers portray women tells us about the way women have had power, respect or value or lacked any or all of these.
2. Imagine how heroism has changed between the Elizabethan period when Shakespeare was writing and the late 1700s when Wordsworth was writing. Pick just one heroic figure from the tragedy and one specific scene, and then pick one heroic figure in Lyrical Ballads. For example, you could pick Prince Hamlet in the scene where he finally takes revenge on the usurper Claudius and kills him, and then compare him with the Ancyent Marinere in the scene where he explains he moral of his long story of committing a grave error and then being redeemed. How has the idea of masculine heroic action changed?
3. Imagine how our feelings about social justice have changed between the tragedy and the lyrical poems. Pick one example in each work where you can see a very clear example of an injustice and a response to that injustice. This could be a minor injustice or a major one, in either case. But look for very specific examples. For example, Polonius thinks it is okay to send a spy to France to basically find out everything that his son, Laertes, will be doing. Even the spy thinks the way the father is acting is questionable. In the lyrical poems, there is one very clear example of a wealthy landowner surprising a very poor old woman who needed some sticks to stay warm in the winter, which seems really unfair, given that the rich man has no need for the sticks, so the old woman curses the rich man. So then you should try to explore what people in various times pay attention to in terms of social justice.
Another example in the tragedy is the way that Polonius forces Ophelia to work for the king as a spy and forces her to reject Hamlet, the man she loves. She has no choice about any of this. So you could compare the way even a woman in a high ranking place in society still has almost no power or control over her own life. You could compare her with one of the women who is oppressed by social conditions in the poems. One theme to consider here is whether women in 1798 are in any better position than women in the early 1600s.