When I broke up with my first real boyfriend I was devastated. We had been together for eight months and he was the first person I trusted with my heart. After we broke up, I was immediately shocked and sad; I cried for days. When I was done crying and feeling sorry for myself, I tried to get back at him by playing mind games and acting as though I was completely over him. Next, I was furious at him. I had no clue why he broke up with me and I was angry as hell. Eventually, I learned that I needed to deal with the grief of losing a loved on in a more mature manner. I tried my best just to let it go; I gave myself what I deserved: freedom and happiness. Shakespeare portrays grief in all its ugliness through three sons whose grief leads to revenge. Fortinbras, Laertes, and Hamlet lose their father and spend most of the effort on taking revenge. Hamlet is indeed a tragedy of grif that focuses on the way individuals handle deaths and how they mourn after death; he represents this through ugly and murderous anger.
Tesik points out each of us is a unique combination of diverse past experiences.
We each have different personality, style, various ways of coping with stress situations, and our own attitudes that influence how we accept the circumstances around us. We are also affected by the role and relationship that each person in the family system had with the departed, by circumstances surrounding the death and by influences in the present (Tesik 1).
Shakespeare understood these philosophical ideas in the 1600s and they are just being studied today by philosophers such as Tesik.
The way Fortinbras grieves depends on his relationship with his father, his own personal history, his personality traits. Fortinbras’ father dies fight...
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...erves us well when our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will” (V.2.8-11). Hamlet realizes that because there have been witnesses to Claudius’ murders that he isn’t killing Claudius for revenge; Hamlet kills Claudius to execute justice!
Fortinbras, Laertes, Hamlet all grieve differently; the main difference is that Hamlet matures from being a child like Fortinbras, an adolescent like Laertes, and finally a mature adult. Samuel Coleridge explains “Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve.” Hamlet is indeed a tragedy of grief that mirrors our real life experiences. We all experience grief differently, but we all can relate in some way to the grief of characters in Hamlet.
Hamlet and Fortinbras both lost their fathers. But how the fathers died is different. Hamlet’s father was
All in all, the emotions one feels from the death of a loved one can either make or break one’s relationships. Through various characters, the author further demonstrates the possible ways a person can react to adversity, and how their decisions and character influence their relationships. The ability to maintain relationships through adverse situations reveals the internal strength and determination in the person’s character.
... accepts his feelings towards Ophelia when she passes away. Lastly, Hamlet accepts that he will not be able to carry out the roots of being a king as he is dying. He says to Horatio, “I do prophesy th’ election lights/on Fortinbras; he has my dying voice” (5.2.380-381). Just as a person has a will testimony before they pass away, so to does Hamlet, as he desires Fortinbras to become King. One can see that Hamlet fulfills the last stage of the grief cycle, acceptance.
Many sources on grief declare it to be something that must be faced or it will never go away. Ophelia never faces her grief, but it does go away when she drowns herself. She resorts to singing to solve her problems, while Laertes takes to violence. He believes he will feel relief once Hamlet is dead. Hamlet, on the otherhand, grieves for his father and does not take action for some time. He also has strong feelings on how his mother should take a longer time to grieve for her former husband. These three characters endure the same sort of grief at times, but choose toreact differently. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, but as many of the characters in Hamlet discover, grief can overtake one’s life and lead to downfall.
Any great king must be compassionate, and Hamlet is the embodiment of compassion. He shows this through his great sadness after his father’s death. Unlike many others in the play, Hamlet continues to mourn long after his father’s death. In fact, he never stops thinking of his father, even though his mother rushed into a marriage with Claudius a mere two months after her husband’s funeral. Also, Hamlet shows the reader his compassion through
Hamlet throughout the play lives in a world of mourning. This bereavement route he experiences can be related to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s theory on this process. The death of Hamlet’s spirit can be traced through depression, denial and isolation, bargaining, anger, and acceptance. The natural sorrow and anger of Hamlet’s multiple griefs include all human frailty in their protest and sympathy and touch upon the deepest synapses of grief in our own lives, not only for those who have died, but for those, like ourselves, who are still alive. Hamlet’s experience of grief, and his recovery from it, is one it which we ourselves respond most deeply.
In 1969, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross developed a psychological model for the process of grief. In this model, she outlines five stages, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. While these stages vary from person to person, they represent a universal reaction to loss, like the loss of a father experienced by Hamlet and so many other people. At the start of the play, Hamlet is in the stage of Depression after his father’s death. He himself claims, “‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother” (Hamlet 1.2.76-77). As the model suggests, Hamlet withdraws from his personal relationships, like that with his mother, and feels a lack of hope or control. “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all
Each man deals with grief in extremely distinct manners, when looking at Laertes in comparison to Hamlet you can swiftly see their great contrast to one another. Hamlet would rather create reason before madness; he is the type to use his brain before his fist. Whereas Laertes is always caught up in his anger that he sees no means to absolve the actions of others.
Hamlet's father, Old King Hamlet who he looked up to was recently killed, and his mother married his uncle within a month. He receives a visit from the ghost of his father which urges him to "revenge [Claudius'] foul and most unnatural murder" (I, v, 32) of Old Hamlet. It is only logical that under these circumstances, Hamlet would be under great duress, and it would not be abnormal for him to express grief. Fortnibra and Laertes also have to deal with the avenging their fathers' death.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a tragic play about murder, betrayal, revenge, madness, and moral corruption. It touches upon philosophical ideas such as existentialism and relativism. Prince Hamlet frequently questions the meaning of life and the degrading of morals as he agonizes over his father’s murder, his mother’s incestuous infidelity, and what he should or shouldn’t do about it. At first, he is just depressed; still mourning the loss of his father as his mother marries his uncle. After he learns about the treachery of his uncle and the adultery of his mother, his already negative countenance declines further. He struggles with the task of killing Claudius, feeling burdened about having been asked to find a solution to a situation that was forced upon him.Death is something he struggles with as an abstract idea and as relative to himself. He is able to reconcile with the idea of death and reality eventually.
Shakespeare put Hamlet through a number of never ending hurdles, causing him to become more and more depressed. For example hamlet Says “ Frailty, thy name is women” (Act 1, Scene 2). Hamlet believes that the “Women” is tenuous, therefore it is why she is unable to grief. Hamlet faces
With his thinking mind Hamlet does not become a typical vengeful character. Unlike most erratic behavior of individuals seeking revenge out of rage, Hamlet considers the consequences of his actions. What would the people think of their prince if he were to murder the king? What kind of effect would it have on his beloved mother? Hamlet considers questions of this type which in effect hasten his descision. After all, once his mother is dead and her feelings out of the picture , Hamlet is quick and aggressive in forcing poison into Claudius' mouth. Once Hamlet is certain that Claudius is the killer it is only after he himself is and and his empire falling that he can finally act.
... be overstepping the boundaries of morality. Not only does Hamlet want to kill Claudius, but he also wants to damn his soul. This contrasts greatly with Claudius’ act of murder, which is carried out with no preference for the victim’s afterlife. As a result of Hamlet’s tendency to over-think situations, his mission of vengeance is once again delayed.
Imagine growing up without a father. Imagine a little girl who can’t run to him for protection when things go wrong, no one to comfort her when a boy breaks her heart, or to be there for every monumental occasion in her life. Experiencing the death of a parent will leave a hole in the child’s heart that can never be filled. I lost my father at the young of five, and every moment since then has impacted me deeply. A child has to grasp the few and precious recollections that they have experienced with the parent, and never forget them, because that’s all they will ever have. Families will never be as whole, nor will they forget the anguish that has been inflicted upon them. Therefore, the sudden death of a parent has lasting effects on those
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.