(1795). Coming from such an eminent source, every consideration is due this opinion." Haven McClure. |
Hamlet's madness is an act of deception, concocted to draw attention away from his suspicious activities as he tries to gather evidence against Claudius. He reveals to Horatio his deceitful plan to feign insanity in 1.5: "To put an antic disposition on." |
Term Paper (Advanced seminar) , 2009 , 11 Pages , Grade: 1,7
Autor:in: Niklas Bastian (Author)
Is Hamlet even delaying his revenge or does it merely take him some time to plot and execute it? Critic G.B. Harrison stands by this assumption and says “In the play which Shakespeare wrote, there was no delay”. But there are other critics finding the answer to the delayed revenge in the main character himself. But for sure there is some sort of delay all through the play, a delay that somehow is based on the behavior of the main character, Prince Hamlet. If there was no delay, Hamlet would have acted in a whole different way. As soon as he was told that his father had been killed by his uncle, he would have taken out his sword and simply killed the new king of Denmark. There would not have been much delay and self-doubt then. Hamlet’s act of revenge is fulfilled a couple hundred pages and thousands of lines later. The question comes to mind: Why did Hamlet delay so long in taking his revenge for his father’s murder?
Introduction
Different phases of Hamlet’s actions
Does Delay equal Morality
Action and misdirection
Proving who’s guilty
Literature used
Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet — Analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a Revenge Play
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Hamlet is no doubt one of the greatest literary works ever written. William Shakespeare presents in it complexity of human nature and examination of human behavior. After reading this drama one of the main questions we have to ask is ` Why does Hamlet delay?’. Why does he wait so long before taking revenge on Claudius for killing his father? While answering the question about postponement we have to take under consideration few aspects.
First of all let us start with probably one of the most popular theory, which is mental weakness and lack of physical strength. Hamlet as a student of art has an artistic soul. That means, he is very sensitive and lost in emotions person, who does not know what to do:’ Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, unpregnant of my cause` (Act Two, Scene Two).
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The prince as a perfect example of philosopher takes everything under consideration. He is rather perfectionist; therefore he wants to plan everything in great detail. The prince also meditates often upon how cruel and unfair the world is. Hamlet regards himself as too sensitive, too good and too philosophically theoretical for this world.
Therefore, after the talk with the ghost, he wants to analyze everything before taking any action. Nevertheless, next to mental weakness, lies the trouble with physical condition. In the first soliloquy Hamlet says:’ My father’s brother: but no more like my father, than I to Hercules’ (Act One, Scene Two).
He is aware of the physical weakness, but in my opinion it is only an excuse for the further postponement. We can also add, that Hamlet does not have enough courage and he is afraid of remorse. But we have to remember, that although the young prince does not have strong psyche and is poetical and philosophical nature is not ready to hoist the weight, fallen on him after his father’s death.
The sadness after father’s death, marriage of his mother, lack of strong will, and other aspects which make up on the prince’s mental problems show how fragile human psyche can be, and how easy we can destroy the peace of human consciousness. Hamlet is a perfect example of duality of human nature. He wants to take revenge on the murderer of his loving father, but at the same time his morality and sensibility as well as his egoistic and selfish needs prevent him from doing it. He wants to perform an act, which is at variance with his nature.
Bibliography:
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Why does hamlet delay avenging his father’s death.
Why Hamlet is not carry out immediately, thinking why he posed. It is a great question. Firstly Hamlet need to make sure that the ghost is a good spirit or a dad spirit and his story is good and to carry that it is a good reason to pose and delay his action of revenge.
Retaliation? Essay, Research PaperAn geographic expedition of why Hamlet delays the act of revengeHamlet is a human being, and he is an emotional homo being. He feels guilt, compunction and has duties, yet at the same clip he feels pride and a sense of responsibility. He is speedy, in Act one, scene five to take
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the chief character continually delays moving out his responsibility of revenging his male parent's slaying. This essay will discourse how Hamlet's nature and ethical motives ( which are intensified by hard events ) prevent him from transporting out the undertaking. In the gap scenes of the drama, the Ghost of Hamlet's tardily male
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William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is widely considered one of the greatest dramas ever written, in part, because so much of the play is open to multiple interpretations. One such ambiguous aspect is the indecisive nature of Hamlet’s revenge. Since the play’s conception over four hundred years ago, intellectuals have put forth numerous theories attempting to identify
Revenge causes Hamlet to act blindly through anger and emotion, rather than through reason As the play begins, Hamlet is in a grieving period over the death of his father, To make matters worse, his mother marries his uncle, the deceased King's brother. Hamlet does not approve of this relationship and distances himself from hert
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Hamlet to avenge the murder. Hamlet's initial response is to act on the Ghost's exhortation quickly. Hamlet says; "Haste me to Knott that with wings as swift... May sweep to my revenge, (Roberts, peg. 1370). " Yet by the end of the same scene, his reluctance to murder King Claudia is evident. Hamlet says; "This
"Why? ... What is my fault? ... Until this day I have pursued virtue with rigor. I have labored long hours to relieve my fellow men. I have worked and worked the talent you allowed me. And now I do hear it - and it says only one name: MOZART!". Throughout the play "Amadeus" by Peter
Revenge, which causes one to act blindly through anger rather than through reason. is based on the principle an eye for an eye. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, the struggle between justice and vengeance consumes Hamlet and eventually demonstrates that the pursuit of revenge ultimately leads to tragedy. Throughout this play, Hamlet contemplates whether it is
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Oedipus complex, good vs. evil, consequences of procrastination, works cited.
It is of diminutive doubt that Hamlet is one of the most controversial characters ever created by William Shakespeare. Due to his complexity in persona, critics have over the years ever since the play’s premier varied in opinion over the true essence of Hamlet. More importantly, procrastination, which was Hamlet’s most conspicuous flaw, has had its predisposition debated over since it was first observed.
The reasons for the procrastination vary within different schools of thought with some arguing that it is due to “Oedipal Complex”, a theory conceptualized by Sigmund Freud who considered Hamlet to be in love with his mother. A supportive argument is based on the fact that Hamlet is provided with numerous opportunities to slay Claudius but always passes them on even when ordered to do so bearing in mind he deeply loathes Claudius.
Thus it is highly likely that Hamlet advertently keeps Claudius alive so as to buffer Hamlet’s predilection towards his mother. Others critics argue that he is never availed with the opportune moment to revenge of his father’s murder since he is usually preoccupied whenever such a scenario presents itself. Either way, Hamlet’s procrastination to a variable extent identifies his unstable mental condition which leads to a detrimental finale not only for Hamlet but those surrounding him as well.
Claudius is guilty of killing Hamlet’s father king Hamlet, who is also his own brother in order to gain access to the throne by marrying Gertrude, mother to Prince Hamlet.
Claudius is successful in his ambition and Hamlet is left with the decision on whether or not to kill his uncle so as to avenge his father’s death (Burnett 49). Hamlet finds himself in a dilemma that ultimately leads to his procrastination because he is aware of the fact that if he kills Claudius, his companions will avenge Claudius death by killing him.
Claudius is also a member of his family and so the monarch remains in possession of the throne and the crown and killing him would amount to treason, a serious crime. On the other hand, Hamlet is influenced by the urge to avenge his father’s death which further aggravated by the appearance of his father’s ghost that asks him to kill Claudius (Johnson 265).
Hamlet however doubts the actuality of the ghost and is confused on whether it was the spirit of his late father or just an evil spirit. “Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape” (Johnson 262).
Hamlet is left with a tough decision to make that ultimately puts him at a crossroads between upholding morality or standing up for his father’s legacy (Neal 1). Such a decision becomes difficult for Hamlet to make and ponders over it for a long time leading to several incidents of procrastination with reference to the murder of Claudius (Burnett 53).
Hamlet is attracted to his mother Gertrude but the presence of Claudius condenses the possibility of intimacy with his mother. Even though Hamlet believes in the vengeance of his father’s death by executing Claudius, he is afraid that the void that would be left would inevitably lead to a mutual closeness between him and his mother.
The fear of such an occurrence leads Hamlet to procrastinate the death of Claudius through self deception. He begins by investigating whether or not Claudius was responsible for killing King Hamlet not so much to find the answer since he already knew, rather to pass off time. Once he is satisfied that Claudius was indeed his father’s murderer, he embarks on a pious duty to kill him but even when presented with an opportunity, he finds a reason not to kill Claudius (Burnett 52).
During his first attempt he finds Claudius in prayer and avoids killing him alleging it is not devout to kill one in prayer. The only occasion when Hamlet does not waver to kill is when he is in the bedroom with Gertrude and stabs the man behind the curtain. Unfortunately it turns out that Polonius is the man behind the bedroom curtain (Neal 1).
It is likely that Hamlet stabs Polonius impulsively because he is in the presence of his mother and is still possessive over her. Hamlet is able to postpone killing Claudius in all other instances due to the fact that he lacks an emotional driving force at that moment akin to his mother.
Hamlet is a noble and sophisticated prince who allows his deceptive attitude corrupt his mentality. Being a man of thought rather than action, Hamlet focuses his thoughts on evil leading him to become suspicious of everybody around him, and doubt every decision he makes (Johnson 262).
Deep within him Hamlet is of high moral standards and entirely despises evil but the death of his father exposes him to the need to become evil. He attempts in numerous occasions to suppress his decency and the constant conflict between his mind and conscious precipitates the procrastination evident in his demeanor.
The resultant outcome of Hamlets procrastination is diverse in its reach and effect thus many individuals surrounding Hamlet are negatively affected by his inaction (Johnson 264). Hamlet at the outset is able to conceal his true affection for Ophelia hence postponing the appropriate moment to declare his true affection for her. Hamlet tries hard to identify with a mad and careless character overlooking the affection and adoration Ophelia has for him (Burnett 55).
To stay in character, Hamlet rejects her and this breaks her heart which consequently leads to Ophelia’s insanity and eventual suicide. He rejects those he claims to love including his mother whom he shouts at. Hamlet’s mad man charade arouses the curiosity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who keep on enquiring about the logic behind the play as they endeavor to find out hermit’s long term ideology (Neal 1).
Hermit is however not pleased with the questions and he becomes highly suspicious of them, which culminates into intense rage when he discovers their true motives. He holds this against them for a long time and finally has them killed in England as a result of his built up rage and malevolence.
Hamlets deferment to kill Claudius puts Polonius in harms way when Hamlet stabs him in Gertrude’s bedroom on suspicion that he is Claudius.
Hamlet’s procrastination could have been attributed to either his obsession with his mother, his way of thinking, his father’s death or all of the above. However, the fact is that the habitual deferment of his duties eventually led to the death of most of the people who closely associated with him. His attempt to be an evil person predisposed him to a different kind of reasoning that transformed him to be more comfortable with evil which eventually culminated in his demise.
Burnett, MarkThornton. Ophelia’s False Steward’ Contextualized: The Review of English Studies. New York: Oxford publishers, 1995. pp. 48-56.
Johnson, Bruce. Hamlet: voice, music, sound. Popular Music. London: Cambridge University Press, 2005. pp 257-267.
Neal Thakkar: Why Procrastinate: An Investigation of the Root Causes behind Procrastination . Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal. Vol.4 (2009): 33-35. Print.
Urquhart, Alan. Hamlet and a revenge tragedy: A reappraisal. 2004. Web.
IvyPanda. (2018, June 28). A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. https://ivypanda.com/essays/a-critical-analysis-of-hamlets-constant-procrastination-in-shakespeares-hamlet/
"A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." IvyPanda , 28 June 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/a-critical-analysis-of-hamlets-constant-procrastination-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.
IvyPanda . (2018) 'A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet'. 28 June.
IvyPanda . 2018. "A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." June 28, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/a-critical-analysis-of-hamlets-constant-procrastination-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.
1. IvyPanda . "A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." June 28, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/a-critical-analysis-of-hamlets-constant-procrastination-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.
Bibliography
IvyPanda . "A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." June 28, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/a-critical-analysis-of-hamlets-constant-procrastination-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.
Essays on hamlet.
Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.
Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.
At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.
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is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One | ? | : Divine Providence and Social Determinism | |
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Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?
These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.
These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.
Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.
The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).
Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.
That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.
In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.
Chapter One How Hamlet Works
Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).
Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics
King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.
Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy
This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.
Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College
What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.
Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius
Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.
Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.
Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism
This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.
Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students
Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.
Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet
Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?
Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One
Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.
Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido
Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.
Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet
According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.
Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy
This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.
Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet
As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?
Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias
Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.
Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing
Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.
Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost
Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .
Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet
The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.
Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet
This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?
Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet
Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”
Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism
In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .
Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet
There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.
Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet
Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.
Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.
Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet
In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .
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The general design of the play must be worked out and a specific conclusion drawn as to Hamlet's impelling motive in delaying his revenge. This is deductive reasoning. Assuming that Hamlet is abnormal in some phase of his being is manifestly unfair, as we have seen, because all evidence when assembled is overwhelmingly against such supposition.
After the play within a play, Hamlet has proof and still cannot act. Not until everybody is dying, including himself, does he realizes that he should not have waited so long. He understands the consequences of his delay, all of his pent-up rage explodes, and he murders the King; getting the revenge he was after from the beginning.
Hamlet's revenge is delayed in three significant ways. First, he must establish Claudius' guilt, which he does in Act 3, Scene 2 by presenting the murder of his father in a play. When Claudius storms out during the performance, Hamlet becomes convinced of his guilt. Hamlet then considers his revenge at length, in contrast to the rash ...
Hamlet is delayed by others and delayed by himself, as he grapples with his own conscience in his quest to avenge his fathers' 'foul and most unnatural murder.'. Hamlet is clearly grieving for his father. In his 'inky cloak,' he chastises his mother for suggesting that he looks on Denmark (Claudius) as a 'friend,' and goes on to ...
Why Hamlet Delays His Revenge. Date: August 2, 2020 Author: Orphic 1 Comment. Written by: Gacee Ezekiel. Perhaps one of the most debated questions in modern-day literature is why Hamlet took so much time to avenge his father. As he struggles with his suicidal despair, Hamlet cannot make up his mind, a situation that portrays him as the ultimate ...
Summary: Hamlet's delay in seeking revenge stems from his deep moral and philosophical contemplation. He grapples with the ethical implications of murder, doubts the ghost's authenticity, and ...
Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare's treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions.Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a ...
Some readers have long censured Hamlet for his supposed "delay" in taking revenge, and indeed many essays and books have been written trying to explain the reasons for that delay. On the other ...
It is fascinating to survey the major historical criticism on the subject of Hamlet's revenge and on such ancillary matters as the reasons for Hamlet's delay, the nature of the ghost, and the significance of the play's conclusion. The fray on the critical battlefield has its peculiar interest, as we observe interpretations advanced and disputed ...
The word "excessive" is more significant than the word "pride" from the perspective of a theory of tragic excess. In this theory, hamartia is not simply an "error," "mistake," or "flaw.". It is an act or habit of excessively displaying a trait that, if employed moderately, would be perfectly fine.
An Excuse for Doing Nothing: Hamlet's Delay. Hamlet's father's ghost sent him on a difficult errand, and he always tried to go, resolving, re-resolving, and ending the same. It was not that he was unfaithful, and did not want to go, but that he had never finished thinking the matter out. The moment he was about to do the work, up came a new ...
to the effects (not necessarily to the author's intentions) of an attentive reading. aa fine poem, novel, or play. The "good hour" between patient and. analysis, then, is "good" for many of the same reasons that hold true when. mind meets poet's mind, when poet's mind meets reader's mind in a text.
The play within a play is one of many tactics Hamlet employs over the course of the play to delay the revenge and therefore avoid his own death. In his essay Shakespeare's Hamlet, Chikako Kumamoto defends Hamlet's waffling as the impasse that results when a moral man becomes charged with an immoral act, in this case, murder. Kumamoto points ...
If there was no delay, Hamlet would have acted in a whole different way. As soon as he was told that his father had been killed by his uncle, he would have taken out his sword and simply killed the new king of Denmark. There would not have been much delay and self-doubt then. Hamlet's act of revenge is fulfilled a couple hundred pages and ...
Claudius appears guilty of killing his own brother, young Hamlet's father. After Hamlet gets the reaction he was seeking from Claudius, he delays in killing Claudius. While Claudius is praying ...
Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, but it is unique to the genre. The obstacles in place of Hamlet carrying out his revenge are of his own making. And, the reason that he places those obstacles there is because Hamlet, unlike most revenge play protagonists, has a conscience. Works Cited. Ardolino, Frank. Apocalypse & Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.
In my opinion, Hamlet delay his revenge is because his inner cowardice. Although all Hamlet's actions show us that he is trying to avenging his father's death. In act 1, the ghost told Hamlet the truth of his father's death. But the first thing that Hamlet want to do is find out whether the ghost tell him the truth of his father's death ...
In this case Hamlet considers not only killing a man, but a man from his own family. This makes him even more confused and uncertain of his deeds. Fear of society's reaction and reaction of his own mother has also influence on prince's actions. Next dilemma is a consequence of royal position.
Hamlet is a perfect example of duality of human nature. He wants to take revenge on the murderer of his loving father, but at the same time his morality and sensibility as well as his egoistic and selfish needs prevent him from doing it. He wants to perform an act, which is at variance with his nature. Bibliography:
Hamlet's delay. Summary: Hamlet's delay in action is attributed to his moral conscience and rational thinking. In the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet reflects on how "conscience makes ...
Hamlet is attracted to his mother Gertrude but the presence of Claudius condenses the possibility of intimacy with his mother. Even though Hamlet believes in the vengeance of his father's death by executing Claudius, he is afraid that the void that would be left would inevitably lead to a mutual closeness between him and his mother.
Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there's a method in their madness, and become suicidal.