Examples Of Misreading In Hamlet

Now that we have established what it means to we are now going to move to look at what it means to misread, and specifically what it means to misread inside the context of a family. If we change our definition of reading to be about misreading, it would be encountering something, assessing it incorrectly, and then misunderstanding it. The first story we will examine to see this idea is Hamlet, in Act 3 Scene 4, where Hamlet and his mother begin fighting about his father. But they are both talking about other people. As Hamlet is talking about his birth father who was murdered, and his mother the Queen, is talking about his uncle that she married after her husband was killed. In the scene, Hamlet says “Now, mother, what’s the matter?” and the Queen responds with “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended” (referring to his uncle-father, Claudius),

In Act II, Biff comes to visit Willy while he’s away on one of his sales trips, and discovers that there’s a naked woman in Will’s room, and is astounded that his father, who he has always thought was so devoted to his mother, would betray her by cheating on her. Biff’s begins to cry as Willy tries to explain away what Biff has just seen, but Biff reaches his breaking point and begins to cry, as Willy says, “She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.” To which Biff responds, “You- you gave her Mam’s stockings!” and then calls him a liar. To me, this text shows how misreading can occur is you encounter something that completely goes against what you had previously believed. Willy tried to get Biff to misread the situation to believe it was nothing, so that it wouldn’t go against what he had previously misread about his parent’s relationship. Biff then is forced to reassess what he believes about his father, to understand him as he realizes everything he thought about him is