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.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Literature. 5th ed. Ed. Robert Di Yanni. New York. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2002. 1395-1496.
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
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
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.
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.
William Shakespeare's Hamlet Perhaps the greatest uncertainty in William Shakespeare's Hamlet is the character of Queen Gertrude. Undoubtedly a major player with regard to number of lines and contribution to the action of the play. her personality is nonetheless basically undeveloped. It is also notable that Gertrude is perhaps the only character besides Hamlet. with enough power over all of the characters to stop the play's tragic.
“For while few of us have murdered fathers to avenge, and not so many adulterous
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.
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.
He was great man and prince, with great potential and virtue. Another person whose virtue parallels that of Hamlet was Laertes, the son one of the Courtiers in Claudious’s court. Both of these men also share the trait of impulsiveness, achieving spontaneous reactions when angered. In Laertes this revealed in his return to Ellisenore after his father’s death. He returns with fire in his veins and revenge seething from his breath ready to kill the king. “To Hell, Allegiance! Vows, to blackest devil!”. In Hamlet this is seen in his rash reaction in stabbing Polonious with his rapier. In thinking it was the king behind the aras, he lashes out and kills Polonious. In both cases the men have been willing to commit regicide in order to attain revenge for the loss of a father.
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.
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies. At first glance, it holds all of the common occurrences in a revenge tragedy which include plotting, ghosts, and madness, but its complexity as a story far transcends its functionality as a revenge tragedy. Revenge tragedies are often closely tied to the real or feigned madness in the play. Hamlet is such a complex revenge tragedy because there truly is a question about the sanity of the main character Prince Hamlet. Interestingly enough, this deepens the psychology of his character and affects the way that the revenge tragedy takes place. An evaluation of Hamlet’s actions and words over the course of the play can be determined to see that his ‘outsider’ outlook on society, coupled with his innate tendency to over-think his actions, leads to an unfocused mission of vengeance that brings about not only his own death, but also the unnecessary deaths of nearly all of the other main characters in the revenge tragedy.
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.
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.