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Different kinds of betrayal in hamlet
Element of tragedy in hamlet
The element of tragedy in hamlet
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William Shakespeare’s masterpiece, "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" is a tragic drama which revolves around the themes of betrayal, vengeance and procrastination. Although these concepts are shown throughout the play, they are especially shown in Act V, Scene I. This scene is of great importance because it revolves around the three basic ideas of the play. It exemplifies how these three particular ideas lead to the downfall of almost all of the major characters.
The scene opens with two gravediggers preparing a site for Ophelia’s burial. As they dig, they discuss the questionable circumstances of her death. They ponder whether her drowning was intentional or accidental. Hamlet and Horatio, unaware of who is going to be buried at this site, enter and start a conversation with one of them. The First Gravedigger tells them of his job and how he has buried people from all walks of life. This leads Hamlet to ponder death. As the conversation continues that a skull the gravedigger was playing with belonged to an old court jester, he once knew. He starts discus how death makes even the most powerful men, like Caeser, nothing but dust, but his speech is interrupted by Ophelia‘s, funeral procession. Hamlet and Horatio hide to observe what is happening and determine whose death everyone is mourning. As they watch Claudius, Gertrude and Laertes lament for the unknown person, it is learned that Ophelia is only entitled to limited rites due to the questionable circumstances behind her death. The identity of the deceased is revealed to Hamlet when the grief-stricken Laertes speaks of his sorrow over the passing of his dear sister. Overcome by emotion, Hamlet reveals himself to everyone. He exclaims the he loved Ophelia more than anyone else, including Laertes, ever could. This enrages Laertes and he attacks the prince. After a brief fight between the two, Hamlet leaves. The scene ends as King Claudius attempts to calm Laertes down with the idea that revenge against Hamlet is coming.
The events of this scene all could have been prevented if it wasn’t for the three wrong acts the main characters in this play contain. The first is betrayal. Which is an indirect cause of not only Ophelia’s death, but also every other tragedy in this drama. The murder of King Hamlet is the first example of this. Claudius’ despicable act of poisoning his brother and marrying his wife is the most prominent act of betrayal in the play.
Something was definitely rotten in the state of Denmark. The king was dead of a murder most foul, a betrayal from his own brother, young Hamlet was thrown out of the frying pan, which was his father's passing, and into the fire of revenge. On would think that an act of revenge such as this, retribution from an enraged son over the unjust murder of his father, would come so quickly, wildly, and brutally, driven by anger and rage. This simply was not the case in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As the young prince Hamlet carefully thought out his plans for revenge over a rather large amount of time due to his own apparent weakness, inaction. "The smallest deed is greater than the grandest intention"(Stokes 90). Hamlet was full of grand ideas and intentions on how to kill the King, but he failed to act and to carry out the deed that was his revenge, the destruction of Claudius. Why did Hamlet choose and it was his choice, not to take revenge on Claudius quickly and decisively? Hamlet had his own reasons for inaction; the strategy that he felt best suited his revenge.
Ophelia’s obedience towards her untrusting father is indescribable ( I; iii; 101-103. "Affection? Pooh! You speak like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance. Do you believe his tenders, as you call them"?). Why a grown woman would listen to her father and not help the man of her dreams in his time of need is disheartening. A man’s girlfriend should be there for him when a family member passes away, no matter what. If she had been with him on the plan to kill Claudius and knew about his fathers ghost who told Hamlet that Claudius was the one that murdered him, than neither one of them would have went crazy.
In The Tragedy of Hamlet, Shakespeare developed the story of prince Hamlet, and the murder of his father by the king's brother, Claudius. Hamlet reacted to this event with an internal battle that harmed everyone around him. Ophelia was the character most greatly impacted by Hamlet's feigned and real madness - she first lost her father, her sanity, and then her life. Ophelia, obedient, weak-willed, and no feminist role model, deserves the most pity of any character in the play.
...hat elevates the tension between Laertes and Hamlet to its peak. This passage encases all of the themes in the play: revenge, death, and doomed innocence. Hamlet discusses suicide throughout the play, but it is Ophelia who, at last, takes action against her own despair. Her final deed forces the other characters to act toward a resolution, pushing them to turn words and threats into events. Ophelia lives her life striving to make her own decisions and trying to find purpose in a world dominated by men. She is used as a pawn in a game of revenge and hatred, and only in her act of suicide does she finally make an impact on the people who control her life. The lines describing Ophelia's death are imperative to the play, obviously marking the point where schemes and thoughts become reality, but also showing the lack of women's power during the time of Shakespeare.
Ecclesiastes 7: 17 said “Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time?” Suicide is an important part in the bible. It is one of the things that is considered a sin in Christianity. The bible has lessons and commandments for Christians to follow and those lessons are represented in books. In the early 1600’s religion was an important part of people’s lives and writers incorporated it into their writings. William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in the early 1600’s and he wrote about religion while he was writing about a prince’s revenge on his uncle. His uncle killed his father and he was prepared to take revenge. Hamlet and Christianity are both about the good, the bad and the afterlife which makes Hamlet a Christian play.
Ophelia is a perfect example of how the poison of revenge of the kingdom of Elsinore does not only affect the person committing these acts, and as the victim, but the innocent bystanders as well. Originally Ophelia had nothing to do with King Hamlet’s unjust death, but her relationship and involvement with Hamlet, her father, and Claudius and Gertrude is enough to make her a lunatic and at last her deplorable death. Shakespeare shows Ophelia’s heartbreaking downfall in her speeches after her father’s passing “There’s/ rue for you, and here’s some for me.../Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.—There’s a daisy. I would/ give you some violets, but they withered all when/ my father died. They say he made a good end”
Many people question the psychological condition of the character Hamlet in the sixteenth century play Hamlet written by William Shakespeare. One of the reasons that the mental health of hamlet is in question by many people is the result of hamlet's actions as well as his reactions to events that occur during the play. Some people argue that the character Hamlet is insane, while others may argue that his insanity can be justified by several means such as his need for justice of his father's murder. However, Hamlet's need for justice or revenge does not necessarily justify Hamlet's behavior in the play. In addition, Hamlet's behavior falls into several categories of insanity such as shizophrenia. Therefore, there are many ways in which it can be proven that hamlet may truly be insane.
Hamlet Compare and contrast between Hamlet and Laertes William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is known as the best tragedy play of all times. Each one of the characters has their own unique personality, but some of them are very alike. Hamlet, the main character, and Laertes, one of the other leading roles, are very much alike but at the same time slightly different. Their experiences collide and they both make some decisions, which change their lives forever. Hamlet and Laertes both display impulsive reactions when angered.
William Shakespeare is seen to many as one of the great writers in history. More specifically, the characters in his plays are reviewed and criticized and have been so for nearly four centuries. The character that many have revered Shakespeare for is perhaps the greatest such character ever in literature, Hamlet from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The commentary and response to this legend of literature is of wide array and opinion, though most, such as Pennington, believe him to be a truly magnificent character: "Hamlet is perhaps the cleverest hero ever written, the subject of the first European tragedy, a form of genius. A type Shakespeare despaired of writing thereafter, having perceived that the heroes of tragedies must be sublime idiots" (185). However, despite his clear gifts and aura, Hamlet was a doomed character from the beginning: Hamlet is dominated by an emotion that is inexpressible. It is thus a feeling he cannot understand, he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains open to poison life and to obstruct action" (Eliot 25). Thus, Hamlet, while possessing the traits of no other men of his time, a true Renaissance man, was doomed from the beginning of the play partly by forces he could not control, and also partly by his own character. It leads to a slow but definite ending to one of literature's great characters, one that he could not control. In the end, Hamlet was out of place in his environment, he was simply not meant to be.
Why do people crave power, fortune, and lust when all it leads to is corruption, greed, and/or death? In the play of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, one character's greed for power and fortune leads to tragedy. First, Claudius murders King Hamlet and attempts to kill prince Hamlet inorder to keep the crown to rule Denmark. Secondly, Claudius sets up a plan that involves putting a poisonous pearl in the winner's victory cup that eventually Gertrude drinks. He also puts poision on the tip of the sword that eventually kills Laertes in the duel. Lastly, Claudius sends Rosencranz & Guildenstern to escort Hamlet to England to secretly be killed so that he can keep the crown. One may object that Polonius' death was not the fault of Claudius' greed because Hamlet killed Polonius. However, Hamlet was obsessed with killing Claudius because he wanted to seek revenge for his father. Claudius' Greed for power is to blame for all the tragedies in the play Hamlet.
Hamlet – one of William Shakespeare's longest and finest pieces of literary work. Hamlets play hones in on characteristics such as, sadness, madness, insanity, morbidity, and mortality. While many scenes depict many of these characteristic’s, if not more than one, Act 5 Scene 1 is renownedly known for exhibiting all five of these characteristics in just a few paragraphs. With Shakespeare’s writing technique, imagery, repetition, and metaphors expressed throughout this scene, it allows for the reader to receive a clear image of what is going through Hamlets mind. In Act 5 Scene 1, Shakespeare uses imagery to express what Hamlet is thinking at that moment.
In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the main character, Hamlet, is often perceived by the other characters in the play as being mentally unbalanced because he acts in ways that drive them to think he is mad. Hamlet may very well be psychotic; however, there are times when he “feigns insanity” in order to unearth the truth surrounding his father's death. This plan seems to be going well until Hamlet's mental state slowly begins to deteriorate. What began as an act of insanity or antic disposition transitions from an act to a tragic reality. After studying Hamlet's actions, one will notice that as the play progresses, his feigned insanity becomes less and less intentional and devolves into true mental illness.
Poor Ophelia lost everything. She lost her lover and the social position and security that would have come when she became Hamlet's wife. She lost her father and an honorable burial and her trust and respect for her Queen and King. Finally, she lost her life. The innocent destroyed with the deceitful. Perhaps Shakespeare used Ophelia's innocence to provide an even greater contrast to the deceit of the characters that engulfed her.
To capture our sympathy, Ophelia goes through a transformation unlike any other character in Hamlet. She is abandoned by everyone she holds dear; her father Polonius, her brother Laertes, and Hamlet, her lover. And yet Ophelia becomes tangled in a web of madness when her loyalty is torn between Polonius and Hamlet. Most horrible of all is Ophelia's suicide-death. The emotion is evokes, coupled with the above points shows that Shakespeare's intentions was to make Ophelia, a minor character in terms of the number of lines assigned to her, into a memorable character evoking the most sympathy.
Up until this point the kingdom of Denmark believed that old Hamlet had died of natural causes. As it was custom, prince Hamlet sought to avenge his father’s death. This leads Hamlet, the main character into a state of internal conflict as he agonises over what action and when to take it as to avenge his father’s death. Shakespeare’s play presents the reader with various forms of conflict which plague his characters. He explores these conflicts through the use of soliloquies, recurring motifs, structure and mirror plotting.