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Saturday, February 9, 2019

The Thought Process of Shakespeares Hamlet Essay -- William Shakespea

The Thought Process of Shakespeares HamletIf Hamlet from himself be taen away,And when hes not himself does scathe Laertes,Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.Who does it then? His madness. Ift be so,Hamlet is of the gang that is wrongdHis madness is poor Hamlets enemy.(V.ii.230-235) Hamlets self-description in his apology to Laertes, delivered in the appropriately distanced and split third-person, explicitly fingers the greatest antagonist of the playconsciousness. The obligatory cultural luggage that comes along with Hamlet heeds little attention to the incestuous Claudius while center entirely on the gloomy Danes legendary melancholia and his resulting revenge delays. As Laurence Olivier introduced his 1948 image version, This is the tragedy of a man who couldnt make up his head word. By introduce the leitmotif of eyeshot throughout the play, I will examine the conflicts that foresee Hamlet from unified decisions that lead to action. Shakespeare is not content , however, with the simple notion of thought as a mere signifier of the battle amongst the mind and the body. The real clash is a conflict of consciousness, of Hamlets oscillations between infinite abstraction and shackled solipsism, between recognition of the heroic ideal and of his limited means, between the methodical mishmash of sanity and the total chaos of insanity. I adopt between not only for anaphoric effect, but to suggest Shakespeares founding of thought that is, a set of perspectivally-splintered realities which can be resolutely conflated, for go bad or worse, only by the mediating hand of action. Any discussion of Hamlet, a work steeped in contradictions and doubles, necessitates inquiry into passages ... ...ble that someday the legendary cultural baggage that accompanies Hamlet will be lost, and future generations may wish to hear the play on its dramatic merits and not on its required-reading position. If that is the case, they may very well make the play bad through their different perspective, hotshot which we cannot yet appreciate, and Hamlet, already four centuries old, may disappear from our cultural consciousness. As the prince himself might say, perish the thought. Works CitedFredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late capitalism (Durham Duke University Press, 1991). Franco Moretti, Modern Epic (New York Verso, 1996). Marjorie Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (Illinois Northwestern University Press, 1950). William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (England Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982).

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