Hamlet 2 Essay, Research Paper

Hamlet

Hamlet dares us, along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to “pluck out the heart of my mystery.” This mystery marks the essence of Hamlet’s character as, in spite of our popular psychologies, it ultimately does for all human personalities. Granting this, we can attempt to chart its origin and outward manifestations. Ophelia tells us that before the events of the play Hamlet was a model courtier, soldier and scholar, “The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / the’ observed of all observers.” With the death of his father and the hasty, incestuous remarriage of his mother to his uncle, however, Hamlet is thrown into a suicidal frame of mind in which “the uses of this world” seem to him “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” Though his faith in the value of life has been destroyed by this double confrontation with death and human infidelity, he feels impotent to effect any change in this new reality: “It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” All he can do in this frustrated state is to lash out with bitter satire at the evils he sees and then relapse into suicidal melancholy.

It is in this state that he meets the equally mysterious figure of his father’s ghost with its supernatural revelations of murder and adultery and its injunction upon Hamlet to revenge his father’s murder. While this command gives purpose and direction to Hamlet’s hitherto frustrated impulse towards scourging reform, it also serves to further unsettle his already disturbed reason. When two months later he forces his way into Ophelia’s room, he looks “As if he had been loosed out of hell / to speak of horrors.” Whether or not the ghost was actually a devil, its effect upon Hamlet has been diabolic.

In the two months after his meeting with the ghost, he puzzles the court with his assumed madness but does nothing concrete to effect or further his revenge. His inability to either accept the goodness of life or act to destroy its evils now begins to trouble him as much as his outward hysteria and depression does the court. He first condemns his apparent lack of concentration on his revenge as the sign of a base, cowardly nature. The advent of a company of players, however, gives him an idea for testing the truth of the ghost and the guilt of Claudius. Rationalizing his inactivity as an effect of his doubt about the ghost’s nature, he plans to have the players perform a play, which reproduces Claudius crime, and observe Claudius’ reaction to it, thereby dispelling his own doubts as to the proper course of his action. Having momentarily silenced his shame at his inaction, however, he immediately relapses into his former state; he meditates upon suicide and then lashes out with satiric cruelty at Ophelia.

The performance of the play is successful in revealing Claudius’ guilt to Hamlet, and Hamlet reacts to this proof with wild glee. His old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who had returned that day to Elsinore to help further Claudius’ investigation into Hamlet’s disorder and had thereby alienated Hamlet’s affections, enter with a message from Hamlet’s mother that she wishes to see him immediately. Hamlet treats them contemptuously before returning his answer that he will go to his mother. His coming visit with his mother inspires him with a murderous rage appropriate to the hellish time of night. Once more in the power of hell, he accidentally comes upon the praying figure of Claudius but does not take this opportunity for revenge because of the devilish rationalization that such revenge would not damn Claudius’ soul. But the truth seems to be that Hamlet’s murderous rage is misdirected at his mother rather than at Claudius, even though Hamlet is now fully convinced of his guilt. Coming to his mother’s room with the intent to punish her with verbal daggers for her unfaithfulness, her unwillingness to listen to him releases his murderous impulse against her. In a moment of temporary insanity he manages to exercise enough control to deflect the blow designed for her to the direction of an unexpected sound, killing the hidden figure of Polonius. In the ensuing scene he all but forgets the body of Polonius in his urgency to arouse his mother’s guilt for her treatment of his father and injury to his own trust.

This fact, together with his obsessed preoccupation with his mother’s sexual life, may provide a clue to the “mystery” of Hamlet. Hamlet, himself, had admitted to Ophelia that women’s sensual falseness “hath made me mad.” Elaborating on this clue, Ernest Jones has provided a well – reasoned Freudian explanation of Hamlet’s behavior, namely the reactivation of his repressed Oedipus complex. But whatever the truth of the matter, Hamlet’s intuition does not extend this far. All he knows is that his mother’s behavior has contributed to wrenching the time “out of joint” for him, and that he has been fated “to set it right.”

Once he is reconciled to his mother, the whole of reality appears to him in a different light. Where before his will was “most incorrect to heaven,” the “Everlasting” seeming to be the creator of sterile farces and imposer of harsh laws, he now can accept heaven’s purposes and ally himself with them as heaven’s “scourge and minister.” If Hamlet’s nausea with life as well as sex seems to the modern intelligence to have a hidden psychological basis, Hamlet raises the discussion of his nature to the ultimately more profound level of religious existential confrontation. Seeing the hand of heaven in his accidental slaying of Polonius as well as in the exile to England, which will result from it, he is able to accept this turn of events with new confidence in his ultimate success.

Though Hamlet does not appear outwardly changed, as witnessed by his contemptuous treatment of Polonius’ body, continued obsession with the horror of death and with the obligations of honor, the change in attitude begun in his mother’s room continues to develop while on shipboard and is responsible for his actions there. Inspired by his restlessness, he rashly discovers the letter ordering his death, forges a new commission which substitutes for his death the deaths of Claudius’ accomplices, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, returns the commission unknown, and, in a sea fight with pirates, manages to free himself from the Danish ship. In all of this he sees “heaven ordinate” and this teaches him that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough – hew them how we will.” Recognizing by this that humanly conceived plots are doomed to fail, he places himself completely in the hands of Providence.

Nonetheless, his first actions upon his return do not seem to indicate any real change in his nature from our last view of him in Denmark. He is still overly sensitive to the decomposition of the body after death and, in his treatment of Laertes at the funeral he so rudely disrupts, he still shows a cruel insensitivity to the feelings of anyone he believes to have wronged him. This insensitivity also extends to his lack of any qualms about his murders of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as was also true of his earlier murder of Polonius. If Hamlet had once been a model human being disillusioned in life by the double blows of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage, his over sensitivity to these evils of existence has warped his nature into an equally extreme insensitivity to all those whom he suspects of impurity. He cruelly torments his mother and Ophelia, bitterly mocks Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and then wantonly kills them without a qualm and with the attempt, in the last two cases, of ensuring their eternal damnation, and he refrains from killing Claudius for this same evil reason. In terms of vindictive cruelty and wanton slaughter, he stands far more condemned for evil than Claudius and in danger of his own eternal damnation.

This warping of a sensitive nature into one capable of inhuman evil is perhaps the clearest proof of the evils of existence, though Hamlet must now be numbered among the evils to be punished by cosmic justice. But if Hamlet’s actions condemn him to death, his growing perception of reality finally redeems his soul in our eyes. Though Claudius has planned Hamlet’s destruction and Hamlet has proof of this, he has returned to Denmark without any plan for his revenge, even warning Claudius rudely of his approach. In “perfect conscience” now about the sin of regicide, he is confident that, in the “interim” before the arrival of the English ambassadors, heaven will so dispose events that he will be able to execute Claudius without any prior planning.

And his belief in the providential control of all events is justified by the outcome. Laertes establishes Claudius responsibility for Hamlet s death and the death of his mother before the court and he is able to execute Claudius for these crimes alone. Hamlet has transcended his earlier damnable intention of premeditated revenge in a spontaneous act of just repayment for the loss of his own life. Recognizing that “the readiness is all,” Hamlet has finally achieved this readiness to endure both life and death. His final actions are his most life affirming, his restraining of Horatio from committing suicide and his concern for the continuing welfare of Denmark. The tragedy of his death is that it comes at the moment when “he was likely, had he been put on, / to have proved most royal.” Destroyed and redeemed by the same brilliance of perception, Hamlet’s spirit has undergone a tragic development from the self – destructive negation of life and of heaven’s purposes to a new affirmation of the providential sanctity of life, and it is this final “readiness” which redeems him.

Yes he is mad:

- He says “it hath made me mad”, could be realizing that he really is insane

- He continues to yell at his mother, even when she admits she’s in the wrong, and asks him to stop

- Hamlet says that there is “a king of fighting that would not let mesleep” in his heart

- Even his own mother believes at first that he’s crazy

- Ophelia believes that he’s crazy

- He has a lot of stress, has to deal with his mother’s adultery, his father’s murder

- In Act III sc. I, Hamlet meets with Ophelia and begins acting mad, he insults her and makes sexual comments

- At first he trusted the ghost, but then he starts to become paranoid and thinks that the ghost is not really his father

- In Act II sc. I, Hamlet approaches Ophelia in a mad way- a sane man would not enter a woman’s private closet with no hat on and his garment unfastened

No, he isn’t mad:

- Tells his mother that he is not crazy, asks her to keep it a secret

- Says that he is just putting on an “antic disposition”

- Hamlet always thinks things through; a madman would just act on impulse

- He is very intuitive throughout the play, thinks logically

- Plays Polonius for a fool

- Killed Polonius because he logically believed that only Claudius would be in Gertrude’s closet

- He is behaving normally when he first meets with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II sc. ii, but as soon as he realizes that they were sent for, he puts on his antic disposition so he won’t give himself away

- He insults Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and Claudius in a clever way

- Thinking things through clearly when he doesn t’ kill Claudius when he’s praying

Perception

(I want to prove that) Characters, in literature, are often perceived by their peers. In most cases, the perceptions made are not accurate. Sometimes people base their opinion of others on a first impression. They fail to realize that becoming acquainted with a person is necessary to make a more accurate judgment. Furthermore, a person s true character is portrayed through their behavior and their attitude. This is evident in the play, hamlet by William Shakespeare.