Hamlet's Mirror Unlimited: The Mind's Prison

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Shakespeare’s a problem of “artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.”(Eliot) Hamlet continues as he wonders how so many soldiers, numbers of “twenty thousand men...[in his minds eye rush to their] immanent death… for a fantasy and trick of fame…[ and without question] Go to their graves like beds,[to] fight for a plot… [never knowing why they are fighting, and such a great number that there] is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain?”(Shakespeare Act IV) Using this as an example he then tries to cajole himself and get rilled up to do the deed by saying "O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”(Shakespeare Act IV) This is an example of how an artist or poet tries to express what cannot be said and what cannot be shown— in a way it “is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art.”(Eliot) Anyone can say things because speaking words are usually easy, but making ideas into reality proves to be more challenging as we see in Hamlet that he makes endless "resolutions which he so often embraces and always leaves unexecuted."(Schlegel) He wants to be brave but his self doubt "implies that there is no greater dissimilarity than between himself and Hercules."(Schlegel) Thus we see Hamlet is “both a hero and a dreamer, hard and soft, cruel and gentle, brutal and angelic, like a lion and like a dove…" because he truly wants to be better and "[individually] these judgments are all wrong [but when stated altogether] they are .... right”(Goddard)

IIII Reaction vs Action
Hamlet’s is foiled by his own intell...

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