Religion’s Role in Hamlet
It is known that William Shakespeare did not follow or support any one religion. However, he evidently had a great deal of religious education. In his play, Hamlet, Shakespeare uses his knowledge of religion and culture to manipulate the reactions of the audience for which it was originally intended. This is seen by observing the way in which he exploits the Elizabethans' confusion concerning religion, his use of conflicting cultures to evoke responses in the audience, and the significance of Hamlet's Christian knowledge.
The time in which Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed was one of great religious confusion for the Elizabethans. They had only recently come under Protestant rule, but they were all familiar with Catholic beliefs. Shakespeare used this knowledge to his advantage. The Ghost in Hamlet is an example of this. According to the Catholic belief system, the spirit of Hamlet's father is in purgatory. This means that he is not harmful but merely doing penance ‘till the foul crimes done in [his] days of nature are burnt and purg’d away.’ (I. v. 12-13) This is necessary because he was ‘cut off even in the blossoms of [his]sin.’ (I. v. 76) This attitude was not unknown to the Elizabethans. However, according to Protestant beliefs, purgatory did not exist, and any ghost was evil. This is reflected in Horatio’s scholarly concern that the ghost ‘bodes some strange eruption to our state.’ (I. i. 69) Because of this confusion, not knowing whether Old Hamlet’s ghost was ‘a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,’ (I. iv. 40) the Elizabethan audience would have supported Hamlet in his choice to be sure before killing Claudius, his father’s murderer. This shows how Shakespeare uses the audience’s uncertainty to manipulate their response to the play.
Shakespeare also uses conflicting culture to control the audience’s reactions. Hamlet is set in Denmark, but written for an English audience. According to the Danish tradition of the blood feud, the King’s murder requires vengeance, and filial duty dictates that Hamlet ‘was born to set it right.’ (I. v. 189) However, to the Christian audience, murder for any reason violated the highest Christian ethic -- love. This includes love for one’s enemies. Therefore the blood feud conflicted with the audience’s Christian views. By juxtaposing Danish culture with Christian morals, Shakespeare again persuades the Elizabethan audience to have a certain reaction to the play.
Throughout the course of a novel, poem, or any literary piece, writers frequently hide symbols offering insight to the true meaning of their stories. Symbols appear as objects in nature, items in home, central ideas, or specific colors surrounding the main characters. The presence of symbolism in literature directly reflects the feelings or characteristics of the protagonist and any other major characters involved in the plot. When writers utilize color as a symbolic message, the colorful images ignite the reader’s inspiration to better understand the situation and state of mind of the character present in the scene. In the Indian novel Life of Pi, author Yann Martel portrays the ideas of hope, salvation, and life through the color orange. Although Pi’s situation looks grim as he spends 227 days aboard a lifeboat with a tiger, the color orange reenters the prospect of life and gives the reader hope that Pi will survive his strenuous endeavor at sea. In contrast, colors do not always bring positive emotions into a story; Charlotte Perkins Gilman taints her story a fading yellow hue in her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Her use of the color yellow attributes to the idea of the sickening and deteriorating mind of the protagonist in comparison the the fading and aging yellow wallpaper along the walls of her bedroom. Within the two pieces, each author applies symbolism through color and greatly affects the reader’s perception and feeling towards the stories.
...knowledge his shadow self. He was able to survive his plight on the lifeboat because of the characteristics of his shadow self, Richard Parker. Even at the loss of his shadow self, Pi remains connected and constantly misses this part of his persona. After his ordeal on the lifeboat, Pi becomes rational and humane; however his experiences has scarred him, and will forever remain with him. Readers can definitely learn from Pi’s experience with his shadow self. The more we refute our shadow, the more it weighs us down. However, if we are willing to come to terms with the reality of our shadow, learn how it works, “tame” it so that it does not control us, we would be more literate and enlightened.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is widely regarded as one of the greatest tragedies in English literature. Written near the turn of the 17th century, there were new branches of Christianity appearing and the traditional Roman Catholic hold on power was waning, throwing the whole of Europe was in religious chaos. Nonetheless, the existence of a supreme being known as God was recognized in any branches, and strict adherence to religion was necessary for all the people of that age. It is important to examine the historical setting to fully understand some of the play’s subtler connotations. The protagonist of the play, Hamlet, is one of the most famous tragic heroes in existence, but the character’s fatal flaw is that he does not believe in God sufficiently.
The main character, Hamlet, is a character that is not true to others, nor to himself. When the Ghost of his father tells him he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet doubts the truth. He does not trust the ghost of his father, so has to find a way to prove it. Deciding on how to prove or disprove the Ghost, Hamlet predicts: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2, 616-17). Because he distrusts the Ghost, Hamlet is not true to his father. However, when his plan proves to him that the Ghost’s words are true, Hamlet still does not act; he still cannot avenge his father’s murder. Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius, using the fact that he is praying as an excuse. Hamlet does not want Claudius’s soul to go to heaven, therefore he decides not to kill him, explaining: “A villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do the same villain send to heaven” (3.3, 76-78). However, after trying to pray, the King claims that his prayers were not heard: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (3.3, 97-8). Therefore, had Hamlet chosen to kill Claudius at that time, his soul would have gone to Hell. Hamlet uses God as an excuse for not acting. He is not true and is lying to himself, because he wants to kill Claudius, yet does not.
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the overruling drive of the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is his want to attest himself master of all, whether man or woman, his prime cravings, all-powerful destiny, or even something as broad as language. Through the novel the reader begins to see Humbert’s most extreme engagements and feelings, from his marriage to his imprisonment, not as a consequence of his sensual, raw desires but rather his mental want to triumph, to own, and to control. To Humbert, human interaction becomes, or is, very unassuming for him: his reality is that females are to be possessed, and men ought to contest for the ownership of them. They, the women, become the very definition of superiority and dominance. But it isn’t so barbaric of Humbert, for he designates his sexuality as of exceptionally polished taste, a penchant loftier than the typical man’s. His relationship with Valerie and Charlotte; his infatuation with Lolita; and his murdering of Quilty are all definite examples of his yearning for power. It is so that throughout the novel, and especially by its conclusion, the reader sees that Humbert’s desire for superiority subjugates the odd particularities of his wants and is the actual reason of his anguish.
Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is a complex and ambiguous public exploration of key human experiences surrounding the aspects of revenge, betrayal and corruption. The Elizabethan play is focused centrally on the ghost’s reoccurring appearance as a symbol of death and disruption to the chain of being in the state of Denmark. The imagery of death and uncertainty has a direct impact on Hamlet’s state of mind as he struggles to search for the truth on his quest for revenge as he switches between his two incompatible values of his Christian codes of honour and humanist beliefs which come into direct conflict. The deterioration of the diseased state is aligned with his detached relationship with all women as a result of Gertrude’s betrayal to King Hamlet which makes Hamlet question his very existence and the need to restore the natural order of kings. Hamlet has endured the test of time as it still identifies with a modern audience through the dramatized issues concerning every human’s critical self and is a representation of their own experience of the bewildering human condition, as Hamlet struggles to pursuit justice as a result of an unwise desire for revenge.
Throughout the course of the novel Lolita, readers have regarded Humbert Humbert’s heinous actions towards Lolita with condemnation and loathing disgust. However, even as he is notoriously known for his sickening crimes, at one point readers will unknowingly come to the realization they have started to empathize with Humbert’s actions. Lionel Trilling once asserted that, “We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents – we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.” As we accepted Humbert Humbert’s repulsive actions with leniency we have permitted his actions and we have taken his side which bounds us to condoning his immoral crimes.
On its surface, Martel’s Life of Pi proceeds as a far-fetched yet not completely unbelievable tale about a young Indian boy named Pi who survives after two hundred twenty-seven days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It is an uplifting and entertaining story, with a few themes about companionship and survival sprinkled throughout. The ending, however, reveals a second story – a more realistic and dark account replacing the animals from the beginning with crude human counterparts. Suddenly, Life of Pi becomes more than an inspiring tale and transforms into a point to be made about rationality, faith, and how storytelling correlates the two. The point of the book is not for the reader to decide which story he or she thinks is true, but rather what story he or she thinks is the better story. In real life, this applies in a very similar way to common belief systems and religion. Whether or not God is real or a religion is true is not exactly the point, but rather whether someone chooses to believe so because it adds meaning and fulfillment to his or her life. Life of Pi is relevant to life in its demonstration of storytelling as a means of experiencing life through “the better story.”
Life of Pi is so compelling to read and yet it is such difficult concept to truly understand. Yann Martel's novel, Life of Pi, is the about of Piscine Patel, who prefers it as Pi. At his age of sixteen, he survived for 227 days on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a hungry tiger to worry about. There were other inhabitants on the boat as well, a zebra, a hyena and an orangutan. Yann Martel is such a great author that he has masked one story over the other story though the work of Pi. Pi hides his second, true story by trying to give the people on the boat different appearances, in his devout triad of religions, and disembodying himself from his own thoughts. Pi hides his second story, in the first story, by trying to disembody himself from his own thoughts. To do so he had used physical look of Pi’s emotions, religion, and though circus acts.
Pi Patel in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a young Indian boy who is put through a tremendous traumatic experience; he gets lost at sea! Not only does he lose all his family, but he is forced to survive 227 days at sea with very limited resources. This ordeal causes great psychological pressure on Pi and causes his mind to find ways to cope with all the stress. When asked to describe what happened, Pi tells two stories: one with him surviving with animals including an adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, and a parallel story with humans in which Pi is forced to bend morality. Pi’s story of his survival with Richard Parker is a fiction that he creates to cope with a reality that is too difficult to face.
...ith moral problems of deep import; recognition of this fact is essential to an understanding of the tragedy.” (Sister Joseph 125) Most every character in the play, whether good or evil, has Christian thought. Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius until he knows he will be destined to live in hell, is the main turning point of the play. His fulfillment of his father’s ghost command is the condemnation. Hamlet is a Christian prince whose sense of Christian morals drives his motives in this timeless play by William Shakespeare.
The Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel, is the story of a young man, Piscine, or Pi for short, who experiences unbelievable and unrealistic events, which are so unrealistic ambiguity is aroused amongst the reader. Duality reoccurs over the course of the novel through every aspect of Pi’s world view and is particularly seen in the two contradictory stories, which displays the brutal nature of the world. Martel wonderfully crafts and image of duality and skepticism though each story incorporated in this novel.
Through Pi’s starvation, Martel first shows that depriving a person of a basic need like food can drive people to beast-like ways in order to satisfy their urges. After being on the lifeboat with barely any food for more days than he could count, Pi decides to eat some of
According to the Oxford dictionary the word supernaturalism is defined as “(a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature” 1. But for some writers it is the element that sets their stories successfully in motion.
A common motif in Shakespeare’s many plays is the supernatural element, to which Hamlet , with the presence of a ghost, is no exception. The story of Hamlet, the young prince of Denmark, is one of tragedy, revenge, deception, and ghosts. Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural element helps give a definition to the play by being the catalyst of the tragedy that brings upon Hamlet’s untimely demise. The ghost that appears at the beginning of the play could possibly be a satanic figure that causes Hamlet to engage in the terrible acts and endanger his soul. The supernatural element incorporated into the play is used as an instigator, a mentor, as well as mediation for the actions of the protagonist that ultimately end in tragedy, with the loss of multiple lives, as well as suscept Hamlet’s soul to hell. Shakespeare’s portrayal of the ghostly apparition causes a reader to question whether the ghost is a demonic force on the basis of its diction, conduct towards others as well as Hamlet, and it’s motive to kill.