The Internal State of Hamlet
Abstract: This essay uses psychoanalytic, new historicism, and deconstructive methods of criticism to expore the scene in which Hamlet stands before Claudius and Gertrude after he has killed Polonius. The oblective is to provide a better understanding of how Shakespeare uses the events in the play as a means of shaping or changing Hamlet's actions or emotions
Hamlet is a character with emotions that are so complex and intriguing that we, as readers or viewers, are drawn into this story until Hamlet's situations, actions, and feelings become things we can understand, and relate to, as if his emotions were as human as our own. This genuineness Hamlet holds creates for this play an audience who wishes to examine the character of Hamlet in hopes of grasping a better understanding of how Shakespeare uses the events in the play as a means of shaping or changing Hamlet's actions or emotions. The scene in which Hamlet stands before Claudius and Gertrude after he has killed Polonius is a scene particularly worth examining in this respect, because it allows us to see one of the most interesting changes that Hamlet undergoes in the play and how his inner-emotions or thoughts affect his behavior. To explore this engaging scene I will employ the use of psychoanalytic, new historicism, and deconstructive methods of criticism.
By scene three of act 4 Hamlet has already confronted his mother about his father's murder, he has killed Polonius, and taken Polonius's body. This scene finds Hamlet standing before Claudius and Gertrude the next day. When asked where the body of Polonius is Hamlet answers in a calm, yet odd way, "At supper" (4.3.17). Hamlet explains this simple answer ...
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...ve otherwise overlooked. In such a scene as the one examined here we are able to think more intensely about the complexity of Hamlet and think about the way situations and events presented in this play may have shaped this character's actions. Hopefully this examination can make the reading or viewing of this play more enjoyable and profound.
Works Cited
Adelman, Janet. "'Man and Wife is One Flesh': Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body." Hamlet: William Shakespeare. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. New York: Bedford, 1994. 256-279.
Murfin, Ross C. "Deconstruction and Hamlet." Wofford. 283-293.
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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. T. J. B. Spencer. New York: Penguin, 1996.
The reader is first introduced to the idea of Douglass’s formation of identity outside the constraints of slavery before he or she even begins reading the narrative. By viewing the title page and reading the words “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself” the reader sees the advancement Douglass made from a dependent slave to an independent author (Stone 134). As a slave, he was forbidden a voice with which he might speak out against slavery. Furthermore, the traditional roles of slavery would have had him uneducated—unable to read and incapable of writing. However, by examining the full meaning of the title page, the reader is introduced to Douglass’s refusal to adhere to the slave role of uneducated and voiceless. Thus, even before reading the work, the reader knows that Douglass will show “how a slave was made a man” through “speaking out—the symbolic act of self-definition” (Stone 135).
Adelman, Janet. "Man and Wife is One Flesh": Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body.
Findlay, Alison. "Hamlet: A Document in Madness." New Essays on Hamlet. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. New York: AMS Press, 1994. 189-205.
Leverenz, David. 1980. 'The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View.' In Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Coppelia Kahn and Murray M. Schwarz. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 110-128.
...y afraid at first but finds out that there are many ex-slaves willing to take a stand and risk their lives to help their own. Douglass realizes that with the help from the ex-slaves he could also help his fellow slaves.
In The Narrative of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, an African American male describes his day as a slave and what he has become from the experience. Douglass writes this story to make readers understand that slavery is brutalizing and dehumanizing, that a slave is able to become a man, and that he still has intellectual ability even though he is a slave. In the story, these messages are shown frequently through the diction of Frederick Douglass.
Boklund, Gunnar. "Hamlet." Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is arguably one of the best plays known to English literature. It presents the protagonist, Hamlet, and his increasingly complex path through self discovery. His character is of an abnormally complex nature, the likes of which not often found in plays, and many different theses have been put forward about Hamlet's dynamic disposition. One such thesis is that Hamlet is a young man with an identity crisis living in a world of conflicting values.
In conclusion, "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain," by Emily Dickinson creates an illusion of a mind becoming unstable by expressing the speaker's pain, describing her irrationality, and the speaker tragically ending her existence. Throughout the poem, the speaker's feelings of grief and pain are evident. As a result of her pain and grief, it becomes obvious that the speaker must choose between a state of madness or a state of solitude. Due to her irrational state of mind, the speaker chooses to commit suicide as she feels that it is the only method for her to control her own destiny. The poem truly expresses a person's loss of connection with reality. The poem not only gives an intense examination of insanity, but it also reflects a person's soul as it moves towards its final breakdown.
As the play’s tragic hero, Hamlet exhibits a combination of good and bad traits. A complex character, he displays a variety of characteristics throughout the play’s development. When he is first introduced in Act I- Scene 2, one sees Hamlet as a sensitive young prince who is mourning the death of his father, the King. In addition, his mother’s immediate marriage to his uncle has left him in even greater despair. Mixed in with this immense sense of grief, are obvious feelings of anger and frustration. The combination of these emotions leaves one feeling sympathetic to Hamlet; he becomes a very “human” character. One sees from the very beginning that he is a very complex and conflicted man, and that his tragedy has already begun.
Old Hamlet is killed by his brother Claudius. Only two months after her husband’s death a vulnerable Gertrude marries her husband’s brother Claudius. Gertrude’s weakness opens the door for Claudius to take the throne as the king of Denmark. Hamlet is outraged by this, he loses respect for his mother as he feels that she has rejected him and has taken no time to mourn her own husband’s death. One night old Hamlets ghost appears to prince Hamlet and tells him how he was poisoned by his own brother. 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.
One of the most popular characters in Shakespearean literature, Hamlet endures difficult situations within the castle he lives in. The fatal death of his father, and urge for revenge leads Hamlet into making unreasonable decisions. In William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, Hamlet’s sanity diminishes as the story progresses, impacting the people around him as well as the timing and outcome of his revenge against Claudius.
Hamlet is one of the most often-performed and studied plays in the English language. The story might have been merely a melodramatic play about murder and revenge, butWilliam Shakespeare imbued his drama with a sensitivity and reflectivity that still fascinates audiences four hundred years after it was first performed. Hamlet is no ordinary young man, raging at the death of his father and the hasty marriage of his mother and his uncle. Hamlet is cursed with an introspective nature; he cannot decide whether to turn his anger outward or in on himself. The audience sees a young man who would be happiest back at his university, contemplating remote philosophical matters of life and death. Instead, Hamlet is forced to engage death on a visceral level, as an unwelcome and unfathomable figure in his life. He cannot ignore thoughts of death, nor can he grieve and get on with his life, as most people do. He is a melancholy man, and he can see only darkness in his future—if, indeed, he is to have a future at all. Throughout the play, and particularly in his two most famous soliloquies, Hamlet struggles with the competing compulsions to avenge his father’s death or to embrace his own. Hamlet is a man caught in a moral dilemma, and his inability to reach a resolution condemns himself and nearly everyone close to him.
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies. At first glance, it holds all of the common occurrences in a revenge tragedy which include plotting, ghosts, and madness, but its complexity as a story far transcends its functionality as a revenge tragedy. Revenge tragedies are often closely tied to the real or feigned madness in the play. Hamlet is such a complex revenge tragedy because there truly is a question about the sanity of the main character Prince Hamlet. Interestingly enough, this deepens the psychology of his character and affects the way that the revenge tragedy takes place. An evaluation of Hamlet’s actions and words over the course of the play can be determined to see that his ‘outsider’ outlook on society, coupled with his innate tendency to over-think his actions, leads to an unfocused mission of vengeance that brings about not only his own death, but also the unnecessary deaths of nearly all of the other main characters in the revenge tragedy.
...World of Hamlet.” Yale Review. vol. 41 (1952) p. 502-23. Rpt. in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism. Rev. ed. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. New York: Oxford University P., 1967.