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The influence of hamlet
The tragedy in shakespeare hamlet
The influence of hamlet
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William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a tragic story that captures the audience’s emotions. The story wraps around the protagonist, Hamlet, whom finds out his father has been murdered by his uncle. Filled with hostility, Hamlet tries to organize a plan to seek his revenge. His hunger for vengeance only grows stronger as Hamlet experiences treachery, despair, sorrow, and animosity. The famous play by William Shakespeare portrays absolute and fabricated madness—from the overbearing grief to complete mania—and delves into the themes of sarcasm, suicide, and procrastination.
Throughout the play, William Shakespeare uses sarcasm to add humor into his works. With the use of sarcasm, the audiences are able to interpret the character's true feelings and thoughts. In Act I, King Hamlet has died, and his brother Claudius, has married the widowed queen of the king. The son (also named Hamlet) has been depressed, lately, about the death of his father and is aggravated at his mother for marrying Claudius (his uncle) less than two months since his father’s death. Many characters in the book (especially Hamlet) use sarcasm, which gives insight to what they truly think about the other characters of the book. In line 179-180, Hamlet states, "Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (I.ii.179-180). Hamlet uses sarcasm to suggest that his mother has gotten married so quickly after the death of his father and how much he disapproves of this matter. Moreover, in line 65, Hamlet comments "A little more than kin and less than kind" (I.i.65) when Claudius talks about the family ties between them. The sarcastic response to Claudius shows Hamlet's true feelings toward his uncle by giving him attitude. Hamle...
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...certain people and situations presented in the play. Furthermore, Hamlet’s procrastination plays a huge role in the play. Because of Hamlet’s procrastination he causes many unnecessary deaths throughout the play. The examples of madness, sarcasm, suicide, and procrastination mentioned earlier shows what kind of person Hamlet is. However, Hamlet’s procrastination/indecision was a fatal flaw. Since Hamlet took ages to take his revenge, he gave Claudius to make plans of his own—Claudius’s own plan to have Hamlet killed. Hamlet is an interesting character throughout the play with his contemplative and philosophical personality, however his rash and impulsive behavior causes a great deal of dilemmas during the play.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William, Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. New York: Washington Square, 2002. Print.
The Tragedy of Hamlet is a play written by William Shakespeare about a young prince trying to avenge his father’s death. In the beginning of the play, young Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father, who tells Hamlet that his uncle, Claudius, killed him. Meanwhile Hamlets mother, Gertrude, has gotten married to said uncle. Now it is Hamlet’s job to kill his Uncle-father to avenge his dead father, a task that may prove to daunting for Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s, The Tragedy of Hamlet, the author uses diction and syntax to make Hamlet portray himself as mentally insane when in reality, he is sane thorough the duration of the play, tricking the other characters into giving up their darkest secrets.
Hamlet by William Shakespeare is one of the world’s most revered literature. The main character, Hamlet, is arguably one of the most intriguing characters the playwright ever developed. Hamlet is daring, philosophical, mentally unstable at times, and clever. Throughout the play though, these characteristics change and/or diminish as Hamlet is put through a plethora of unfortunate events. His father is murdered by Claudius, his mother soon after marries Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betray him, and his girlfriend most likely commits suicide. While Hamlet is incredibly philosophical, indecisive, and full of resentment in the beginning of the play, he becomes violent, instinctive, caring and sympathetic towards the end of the play.
Throughout William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, Hamlet undergoes a transformation from sane to insane while fighting madness to avenge his father’s death. The material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge. Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain.
Shakespeare’s plays, among other classic works of literature, tend to be forged with the tension of human emotion. The archetypical parallel of love and hatred polarizes characters and emphasizes the stark details of the plot. More specifically, the compelling force of revenge is behind most of the motives of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. The play opens with the return of Hamlet’s father, a surprising encounter, which ended in his son learning that his father’s death was the result of foul play. By emphasizing this scene as the beginning of the story to be told, Shakespeare clearly implies that the plot itself will be based around the theme of revenge. Through three different instances of behavior fueled entirely by vengeance, Shakespeare creates an image in the reader’s mind, which foreshadows the future of the story and provides insight into the plot line. Even so, despite the theme of revenge being the overarching concern of the plot, the parallels drawn between characters truly strengthen the thematic depth of the piece overall, making the play easily one of Shakespeare’s most infamous and historically valuable works.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2002. Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012. Print.
Shakespeare, William. The New Cambridge Shakespeare: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Philip Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1985.
Shakespeare, William, Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Washington Square Press new Folger ed. New York: Washington Square, 2002. Print.
Shakespeare, William. “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts. 9th Ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. Print
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most famous work of tragedy. Throughout the play the title character, Hamlet, tends to seek revenge for his father’s death. Shakespeare achieved his work in Hamlet through his brilliant depiction of the hero’s struggle with two opposing forces that hunt Hamlet throughout the play: moral integrity and the need to avenge his father’s murder. When Hamlet sets his mind to revenge his fathers’ death, he is faced with many challenges that delay him from committing murder to his uncle Claudius, who killed Hamlets’ father, the former king. During this delay, he harms others with his actions by acting irrationally, threatening Gertrude, his mother, and by killing Polonius which led into the madness and death of Ophelia. Hamlet ends up deceiving everyone around him, and also himself, by putting on a mask of insanity. In spite of the fact that Hamlet attempts to act morally in order to kill his uncle, he delays his revenge of his fathers’ death, harming others by his irritating actions. Despite Hamlets’ decisive character, he comes to a point where he realizes his tragic limits.
Hamlet’s mourning about the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother drives him to madness. This is the main characters inner tragedy that Shakespeare expresses in the play. First he considers suicide but the ghost of King Hamlet sends him on a different path, directing him to revenge his death. Shakespeare uses Hamlet to articulate his thoughts about life, death and revenge. Being a moral character he must decide if revenge is the right thing to do. Shakespeare relays many scenarios of reasoning to the audience about mankind His hero sets the wrongs on mankind right again.
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.
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.
Although Hamlet’s reasoning has some legitimacy, it serves as an excuse for Hamlet to put off the murder until later. Linguistics research scholar Shivani Kaul offers her explanation for why Hamlet chooses to procrastinate throughout the play:
Hamlet is the best known tragedy in literature today. Here, Shakespeare exposes Hamlet’s flaws as a heroic character. The tragedy in this play is the result of the main character’s unrealistic ideals and his inability to overcome his weakness of indecisiveness. This fatal attribute led to the death of several people which included his mother and the King of Denmark. Although he is described as being a brave and intelligent person, his tendency to procrastinate prevented him from acting on his father’s murder, his mother’s marriage, and his uncle’s ascension to the throne.