The Performative Utterance in Hamlet

- Hamlet is often seen as indecisive; he knows his duty but struggles to make it reality

- He is very powerful but struggles to act

- Performative language acts

- Locutionary force: the ability of language to deliver a message; illocutionary force: what is done in being said; perlocutionary force: achieved by being said

- Writers use performative utterances to show that language influences a person to do something

- Characters that come from Shakespeare's plays develop through self-hearing; they over hear themselves thinking and in doing so gain self-knowledge

- Hamlet demonstrates a disconnect between what he says and what he does 

- Shakespeare was a dramatist; his characters have to present themselves through speeches, soliloquies, etc.

- Locutionary is that Hamlet wants revenge; Illocutionary is that he promises his fathers ghost he will kill the king; Prelocutionary is whether he does it or not and what results from that

- Common motifs are drama and play acting which brings the reader to the conflict of finding what is sincere and what is not

- Performatives that fail are called infelicities

- Hamlet is in hollow performative act and has powerful emotional forces and can spur action that had great consequence

- Hamlet is strongly influenced by the words of the first player and uses the first players emotions to decide what he shall do 

- Hamlet's intentions are misrepresented due to his play acting that requires more attention 

- The central mimetic act is a play at madness designed to hide Hamlet's murderous intent, to cover his investigation of his uncles crime and to inoculate him from punishment for his various small sins, in short he acts as if he is crazy in order to distract the others from what he plans to do

- Hamlet has made successful utterances because Polonius believes his madness

- Hamlet does not say he is mad but uses language to pretend that he is through illocutionary forces

- Hamlet realizes that royalty and power is fraudulent and he must break those barriers because he cannot trust those of royalty

- Hamlet looks at how others see him and question if that's who he really is

- Everyday, everyone creates an identity of themselves that is constantly evolving

- Claudius has unhappy performative utterances when praying because he feels guilty yet still has power and does nothing but pray (he hasn't performed happy utterances)

- Hamlet chooses not to kill Claudius while he is praying because he doesn't want him to go to heaven

- Hamlet uses performative utterances to self realize who he wants to be

- Hamlet has changed entirely over the course of the play