Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Death in literature symbolism
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Death in literature symbolism
Shakespeare saved the life of an inmate, both literally and figuratively. When Bates knocked on Larry's cell door, his life had been so desolate that he was literally at the point of suicide. Shakespeare's sonnets brought something positive in Larry's life and gave him a new direction. Shakespeare literally saved him from taking his own life. Figuratively, Shakespeare unlocked Larry's mind by giving him a new positive way of looking at life.
Shakespeare writes with purpose in this play, he is showing that our ideals are not always what they seem. That in the end the truth wins. As in the case of his main characters in the play they needed to think about their ideals and see what the truth would be before they moved forward with their plans. These characters needed guidance and should have allowed life to happen instead of forcing situations; maybe then they would have survived.
Although Cohen provides a lot on insight about death in King Lear, I liked how Lawrence specifically focused on the suicide attempts and how they relate to the play. In a day and age where many people seem sensitive to talking about suicide, it was nice to see Lawrence’s openness in talking about it. I found that through his critique, I was able to consider suicide as a theme in King Lear, which I had been unable to address previously. The idea Lawrence suggested that really brought my attention to the theme of suicide was that death comes from outside the self. Although many people believe we have control over suicide, King Lear makes it apparent that while we can do things to speed up our deaths, we do not have full control over how and when we die since there is a force beyond us that influences our deaths. This is seen through Gloucester’s repeated attempts to kill himself. No matter how hard he tries to escape life on Earth, it appears that some other force has other plans for him. On the other hand, Goneril is successful at her suicide attempt because she has no feelings towards others. Unlike Gloucester, Goneril does not seek attention or purpose in her life, but would rather keep a low profile after killing Regan. Lawrence provides us with yet another way that Shakespeare highlights the predicament that comes with human existence. Ultimately, we only
In my essay I will be looking at what Shakespeare has done to make us
William Shakespeare intended for Hamlet to be a tragic play of a hero: Hamlet. He does exactly that by allowing Hamlet to be exposed to suffering and being able to endure it without committing suicide. Although if one was to analyze the content of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy once would realize that Hamlet is not really all that suicidal. However, there are moments throughout the play that arise the suspicion of Hamlet to no longer be able to endure the suffering and pain in his life. Hamlet’s judgment can be distorted when he does not act using reason but rather emotional impulse. His ability to accept and embrace suffering and pain, allows him to realize how valuable his life truly is.
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.
No matter how different we think that we are, as a human race, the feelings that are brought out in Shakespeare's plays bring us together in spirit.
“Why do you feel the way you do? Have other people felt this way before? What have they done about it, and how has it turned out?” (Why Read Shakespeare?, lines 118-120) Mack uses these questions to help him further explain how reading Shakespeare is beneficial to fully integrating your head and heart. The questions make the reader contemplate their own life, make them think that by reading Shakespeare, his plays, stories, and sonnetts, they will live a better life. In lines 66-75, Mack reasons that “...great books were thought of as mirrors.” He uses an analogy that is universally understood, to help the reader better understand his point of view. “What is more, as we hold the volume of Shakespeare in front of us, we see that it reflects not only the world around us, but also ourselves.” (Why Read Shakespeare?, lines 70-72) Professor Mack goes on to further explain that by reading Shakespeare, we can find a character that we relate to, or even a storyline in some cases. Shakespeare makes art, and art is supposed to make the viewer feel
Shakespeare’s dramatic theatre performances have long endured the test of time. His tales of love and loss, and even some history, make a reader think about events in their own life and what they wish to accomplish in life. Though written for the stage, Shakespeare’s plays have life lessons that readers of the great works can take put into effect in their own lives. Some may say that his plays are out dated, and are something of the past; though they were written in the 1600’s, they have morals and themes that can apply to life. “You've got to contend with versification, poetic license, archaisms, words that we don't even use any more, and grammar and spelling that were in a state of flux when the works were written,” says Pressley in an attempt to explain how to read Shakespeare. Once read and understood, however, one can start to compare and contrast different plays. The ways in which Shakespeare’s two plays King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing are similar out numbers the instances they are different, even though one is a Shakespearian tragedy while the other is a comedy.
Arguably the greatest playwright of his time, perhaps in all of history, William Shakespeare's literary works have had a tremendous impact (see Appendix 2). Reaching into the pop culture of the modern world through movies and quotes used in everyday conversation, Shakespeare's influence is astounding (see Appendix 1). One rarely stops to think, however, about events that had an impact on Shakespeare's life, particularly his writing. The outbreak of the plague, social disparity, political unrest, just a few of the historical happenings that impacted Shakespeare's plays, including Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Henry IV
The life William Shakespeare lead was not an easy one. Shakespeare had been middle-classed and his circumstance had been no easier than of most people today. He had to apprentice at his father’s shop, and then, after marriage, travel away from his family to start his career. When Shakespeare started, no one would have thought of how successful he would be, and he was even criticized for his work. Through his determination and individuality Shakespeare gained fame and fortune. Shakespeare life story then came to be preserved in Samuel Schoenbaum’s biography of Shakespeare and many other biography of him. If there was a lesson to be taught in Shakespeare’s life, then it would be this: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” (Hamlet, 4.5).
It makes sense to me to see in this Shakespeare's sense of his own art--both what it can achieve and what it cannot. The theatre--that magical world of poetry, song, illusion, pleasing and threatening apparitions--can, like Prospero's magic, educate us into a better sense of ourselves, into a final acceptance of the world, a state in which we forgive and forget in the interests of the greater human community. The theatre, that is, can reconcile us to the joys of the human community so that we do not destroy our families in a search for righting past evils in a spirit of personal revenge or as crude assertions of our own egos. It can, in a very real sense, help us fully to understand the central Christian commitment to charity, to loving our neighbour as ourselves. The magic here brings about a total reconciliation of all levels of society from sophisticated rulers to semi-human brutes, momentarily holding off Machiavellian deceit, drunken foolishness, and animalistic rebellion--each person, no matter how he has lived, has a place in the magic circle at the end. And no one is asking any awkward questions.
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.
From this play we learn of the difficulty associated with taking a life as Hamlet agonises as to how and when he should kill Claudius and furthermore whether he should take his own life. Hamlet being a logical thinker undergoes major moral dilemma as he struggles to make accurate choices. From the internal conflict that the playwright expresses to us it is evident that it can kill someone, firstly mentally then physically. The idea of tragedy is explored in great detail through conflict where the playwright’s main message is brought across to the audience; Shakespeare stresses to his audience the point that conflict be it internal or external it can bring upon the downfall of great people and in turn have them suffer a tragic fate. It is Shakespeare’s aim to show us the complexity of man and that moral decisions are not easily made.
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.
Never to go unnoticed, the name William Shakespeare describes an experienced actor, an exceptional playwright, and a notable philosopher. As one of the most influential men of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Shakespeare impacted many artists with his riveting masterpieces. Shakespeare captured the attention of the people through his exquisite work in blank verse, and he inspired them with universal truths of the human condition. His sonnet sequence, consisting of 154 poems, is arguably the finest collection of love poems in the English language. Shakespeare continuously impressed his audience with his explorations of life’s complexities. Such an intricate man; however, he never wrote about himself. He would not discuss his composition methods and only through careful analysis could one understand the underlying truths to his work. Shakespeare was often known to use plots from other sources and enrich them to masterpieces with his genuine knowledge of literature. Although he completed many poems in his lifetime, each one of them was rich in quality and very complex in structure. The play, Macbeth, reveals the uniform structure of a typical Elizabethan tragedy with five acts that carefully reflect the pyramid organization of an exposition, a rising action, a climax, a falling action, and a denouement.