Dichotomy In Hamlet

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“Revenge is sweet but you got to stay alive to taste it” composed by David and Leigh Eddings is a beautiful way revenge can be illustrated. By definition, revenge is a legitimate response to political, family, personal or legal transgression. This act of supposed justice is epically epitomized in “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”, arguably the greatest drama of all time. Being a revenge tragedy, William Shakespeare draws on interiority, external and internal conflict as well as moral justification to illustrate a mosaic of images and in doing so, demonstrates the dichotomy of whether or not revenge is as simple as it seems to be.

The concept of a revenge tragedy is evoked when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his …show more content…

The ghost seen in act one is can be seen as a catalyst in speeding up revenge process. Hamlet, after his father’s death is full of melancholy and wishes to suicide however refrains from doing so only because it is a sin. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy we see no drive for him to take revenge but rather a clutter of ‘explicitly salty’ thoughts which are disorganised. He, in all fury curses the current state of politics and family dynamics as an “incestuous” and manipulative man rules the state, and his mother in all “frailty” naively agrees to marry him. This soliloquy is full of thought rather than action however the ghost gives Hamlet a motive and application for his …show more content…

In this scene Hamlet acts strictly out of spontaneity. His rage is far from ‘sugar coated’ as he outpours the grief burdening his heart in most shocking and vile fashion. His outburst of now exteriorised interiority is heavily centred on the “incestuous pleasures” of his mother and uncle. This follows close suit to the Oedipus complex – a Freudian view of psychology that all toddlers are in love or lust with the opposite parent sex. Freud himself saw Claudius “the man who shows [Hamlet] the repressed wishes of his own childhood realised”. This means to say that the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude revoked the passions of his youthful subconscious and because he cannot define them or know what they are, he sees the need to take revenge on Claudius upon a superficial yet tangible enough

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