The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet (/ ˈ h æ m l ɪ t /), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between and It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29, words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet The Hamlet play is actually around six hours long and very detailed, but you can still ace your Hamlet essay by just knowing the sequence of events, themes, and the symbolism used in the play. Read on until the end to learn more about the themes prevalent throughout the play The highlights of Hamlet, however, are not the action scenes, but the soliloquies, wherein Hamlet reveals his motives and thoughts to the audience. Also, unlike Shakespeare's other plays, there is no strong subplot; all plot forks are directly connected to the main vein of Hamlet struggling to gain revenge
Hamlet: Entire Play
From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, Hamlet has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud 's explanation of the Oedipus complex. As Foakes writes, "No other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in literature, have come to embody an attitude to life and been converted into a noun in this way.
Interpretations of Hamlet in Shakespeare's day were very concerned with the play's portrayal of madness. The play was also often portrayed more violently than in later times. The procession hamlet revenge essay mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama frequently appears indebted to Hamlet. Other aspects of the play were also hamlet revenge essay. Looking back on Renaissance drama inAbraham Wright lauds the humor of the gravediggers' scene, although he suggests that Shakespeare was outdone by Thomas Randolphwhose farcical comedy The Jealous Lovers features both a travesty of Ophelia and a graveyard scene.
Theatres were closed under the Puritan Commonwealthwhich ran from — When the monarchy was restored intheatres re-opened. Early interpretations of the play, from the late 17th to early 18th century, typically showed Prince Hamlet as a heroic figure. On the one hand, Shakespeare was seen as primitive and untutored, both in comparison to later English dramatists hamlet revenge essay as Fletcher and especially when measured against the neoclassical ideals of art brought back from France with the Restoration.
On the other, Shakespeare remained popular not just with mass audiences but hamlet revenge essay with the very critics made uncomfortable by his ignorance of Aristotle's unities and decorum, hamlet revenge essay. Thus, critics considered Hamlet in a milieu which abundantly demonstrated the play's dramatic viability. John Evelyn saw the play inand in his Diary he deplored the play's violation of the unities of time and place. In addition to Hamlet's worth as a tragic hero, Restoration critics focused on the qualities of Shakespeare's language and, above all, hamlet revenge essay, on the question of tragic decorum.
Critics disparaged the indecorous range of Shakespeare's language, with Polonius's fondness for puns and Hamlet's use of "mean" i. Even more important was the question of decorum, which in the case of Hamlet focused on the play's violation of tragic unity of time and place, and on the characters, hamlet revenge essay. Jeremy Collier attacked the play on both counts in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stagepublished in Comparing Ophelia to Electrahe condemns Shakespeare for allowing his heroine to become "immodest" in her insanity, particularly in the "Flower Scene".
Collier's attack occasioned a widespread, often vituperative controversy. Hamlet in general and Ophelia in particular were defended by Thomas D'urfey and George Drake almost immediately. Drake defends the play's justice on the grounds that the murderers are "caught in their own toils" that is, traps. In the next decade, Rowe and Dennis agreed with Collier that the play violated justice; Shaftesbury and others defended the play as ultimately moral.
Criticism of the play in the first decades of the 18th century continued to be dominated by the neoclassical conception of plot and character. Even the many critics who defended Hamlet took for granted the necessity of the classical canon in principle. Voltaire 's attack on the play is perhaps the most famous neoclassical treatment of the play; [13] it inspired numerous defenses in England, but these defenses did not at first weaken the neoclassical orthodoxy.
Thus Lewis Theobald explained the seeming absurdity of Hamlet's calling death an "undiscovered country" not long after he has encountered the Ghost by hypothesizing that the Ghost describes Purgatorynot death.
The ghost scenes, indeed, hamlet revenge essay, were particular favorites hamlet revenge essay an age on the verge of the Gothic revival. Early in the century, George Stubbes noted Shakespeare's use of Horatio's incredulity to make the Ghost credible. Hamlet revenge essayAaron Hill sounded an unusual but prescient note when he praised the seeming contradictions in Hamlet's temperament rather than condemning them as violations of decorum.
After midcentury, such psychological readings had begun to gain more currency, hamlet revenge essay. Tobias Smollett criticized what he saw as the illogic of the "to be or hamlet revenge essay to be" soliloquy, which hamlet revenge essay belied, he said, by Hamlet's actions. More commonly, the play's disparate elements were defended as part of a grander design.
Horace Walpolefor instance, hamlet revenge essay, defends the mixture of comedy and tragedy as ultimately more realistic and effective than rigid separation would be. Samuel Johnson echoed Popple in defending the character of Polonius; Johnson also doubted the necessity of Hamlet's vicious treatment of Ophelia, and he also viewed skeptically the necessity and probability of the climax.
Hamlet's character was also attacked by other critics near hamlet revenge essay end of the century, among them George Steevens. Not until the late 18th century did critics and performers begin to view the play as confusing or inconsistent, with Hamlet falling from such high status. Goethe had one of his characters say, in his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship"Shakespeare meant to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it A lovely, pure, hamlet revenge essay, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away.
Already before the Romantic period proper, critics had begun to stress the elements hamlet revenge essay the play that would cause Hamlet to be seen, in the next century, as the epitome of the tragedy of character.
InWilliam Richardson sounded the key notes of this analysis: Hamlet was a sensitive and accomplished prince with an unusually refined moral sense; he is nearly incapacitated by the horror of the truth about his mother and uncle, and he struggles against that horror to fulfill his task.
Richardson, who hamlet revenge essay the play should have ended shortly after the closet scene, thus saw the play as dramatizing the conflict between a sensitive individual and a calloused, seamy world.
Henry Mackenzie notes the tradition of seeing Hamlet as the most varied of Shakespeare's creations: "With the strongest purposes of revenge he is irresolute and inactive; amidst the gloom of the deepest melancholy he is gay and jocular; and while he is described as a passionate lover he seems indifferent about the object of his affections. To this analysis Thomas Robertson adds in particular the devastating impact of the death of Hamlet's father.
By the end of the 18th century, psychological and textual criticism had outrun strictly rhetorical criticism; one still sees occasional critiques of metaphors viewed as inappropriate or barbarous, but by and large the neoclassical critique of Shakespeare's language had become moribund.
The most extended critique of the play's language from the end of the century is perhaps that of Hugh Blair. Another change occurred right around the Romantic literary period 19th centuryknown for its emphasis on the individual and internal motive.
The Romantic period viewed Hamlet as more of a hamlet revenge essay against hamlet revenge essay, and as an intellectual, rather than an overly-sensitive, being. This is also the period when the question of Hamlet's delay is brought up, as previously it could be seen as plot device, while romantics focused largely on character.
Samuel Coleridgefor example, delivered lectures on Hamlet during this period that evaluated his tragic state of mind in an interpretation that proved influential for over a century. For Hamlet revenge essay, Shakespeare depicted Hamlet's light of indecisiveness as resulting from an imbalance between the human attention to external objects, and inward thoughts, and thus suffered a paralysis of action because his faculty of vivid imagination overpowered his will and induced an aversion to actually enacting any measure [25] For Coleridge, Shakespeare aimed to convey the basic message that man must act, and not be trammeled by hamlet revenge essay thinking that only leads to delay.
Later criticism has come to consider this view as much a reflection of Coleridge's own problematical nature as an insight into the Shakespearean character, hamlet revenge essay. Coleridge and other writers praised the play for its philosophical questions, which guided the audience to ponder and grow intellectually. At around the turn of the 20th century, two writers, A. Bradley and Sigmund Freudhamlet revenge essay, developed ideas which built on the past and greatly affected the future of Hamlet criticism.
Bradley held the view that Hamlet should be studied as one would study a real person: piecing together his consciousness from the clues given in the play. His explanation of Hamlet's delay was one of a deep "melancholy" which grew from a growing disappointment in his mother. Freud also viewed Hamlet as a real person: one whose psyche could be analyzed through the text. He took the view that Hamlet's madness merely disguised the truth in the same way dreams disguise unconscious realities.
He also famously saw Hamlet's struggles as a representation of the Oedipus complex, hamlet revenge essay. In Freud's view, Hamlet is torn largely because he has repressed sexual desire for his mother, which is being acted out by and challenged by Claudius. Later critics of the century, such as T. Eliot in his noted essay " Hamlet and His Problems ", downplayed such psychological emphasis of the play, and instead used other methods to read characters in the play, focusing hamlet revenge essay minor characters such as Gertrudeand seeing what they reveal about Hamlet's decisions.
Eliot famously called Hamlet "an artistic failure", and criticized the play as analogous to the Mona Lisahamlet revenge essay, in that both were overly enigmatic. Eliot targeted Hamlet's disgust with his mother as lacking an "objective correlative"; viz. Questions about Gertrude and other minor characters were later taken underwing by the feminist criticism movement, as criticism focused more and more on questions of gender and political import.
Current, New Historicist theories now attempt to remove the romanticism surrounding the play and show its context in the world of Elizabethan England. The scholar Margreta de Grazia, finding that much of Hamlet scholarship focused on the psychological, dedicated her work Hamlet without Hamlet to understand the political in the play. In creating HamletShakespeare broke several rules, one of the largest being the rule of action over character.
In his day, hamlet revenge essay, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poeticswhich declared that hamlet revenge essay drama should not focus on character so much as action.
The highlights of Hamlethowever, are not the action scenes, hamlet revenge essay, but the soliloquies, wherein Hamlet reveals his motives and thoughts to the audience. Also, unlike Shakespeare's other plays, there is no strong subplot; all plot forks are directly connected to the main vein of Hamlet struggling to gain revenge. The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of action.
At one point, Hamlet is resolved to kill Claudius: in the next scene, he is suddenly tame. Scholars still debate whether these odd plot turns are mistakes or intentional additions to add to the play's theme of confusion and duality. Much of the play's language embodies the elaborate, witty vocabulary expected of a royal court. This is in line with Baldassare Castiglione 's work, The Courtier published inwhich outlines several courtly rules, specifically advising servants of royals to amuse their rulers with their inventive diction.
Osric and Polonius seem to especially respect this suggestion. Claudius' speech is full of rhetorical figures, as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's, while Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers use simpler methods of speech, hamlet revenge essay. Claudius demonstrates an authoritative control over the language of a King, referring to himself in the first person plural, and using anaphora mixed with metaphor that hearkens back to Greek political speeches. His language is very self-conscious, and relies heavily on puns.
Especially when pretending to be mad, Hamlet uses puns to reveal his true thoughts, while at the same time hiding them. Psychologists have since associated a heavy use of puns with schizophrenia.
Hendiadys is one rhetorical type found in several places in the play, as in Ophelia's speech after the nunnery scene "Th'expectancy and rose of the fair state" and "I, of all ladies, most deject and wretched" are two examples, hamlet revenge essay. Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the play.
Hamlet was written later in his life, when he was better at matching rhetorical figures with the characters and the plot than early in his career. Wright, however, has proposed that hendiadys is used to heighten the sense of duality in the play. Hamlet's soliloquies have captured the attention of scholars as well. Early critics viewed such speeches as To be, or not to be as Shakespeare's expressions of his own personal beliefs.
Later scholars, such as Charney, hamlet revenge essay, have rejected this theory saying the soliloquies are expressions of Hamlet's thought process. During his speeches, Hamlet interrupts himself, expressing disgust in agreement with himself, and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly, and instead skirts around the basic idea of his thought, hamlet revenge essay.
Not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, is Hamlet really able to be hamlet revenge essay and sure in his speech. The play makes several references to both Catholicism and Protestantismthe two most powerful theological forces of the time in Europe. The Ghost describes himself as being in purgatoryand as having died without receiving his last rites. This, along with Ophelia's burial ceremony, which is uniquely Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections.
Ghosts, Murder, and More Murder - Hamlet Part 1: Crash Course Literature 203
, time: 12:24Summary of Hamlet: Characters, Themes, and Symbolism | EssayPro
HAMLET I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. ROSENCRANTZ My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing--GUILDENSTERN A thing, my lord! HAMLET Of nothing: bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after. Exeunt. SCENE Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the dawn. Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness The Hamlet play is actually around six hours long and very detailed, but you can still ace your Hamlet essay by just knowing the sequence of events, themes, and the symbolism used in the play. Read on until the end to learn more about the themes prevalent throughout the play
No comments:
Post a Comment