Hamlet themes, evidence and critics

Theme: Isolation

Isolation is portrayed in hamlet as a extended metaphor for hamlets inner feeling, especially about the loss of his father an the remarriage of his mother.

examples

• Right after his meeting with the Ghost…"I hold it fit that we shake hands and part" and asked them never "to note that you know aught of me."

• Rosencrantz later said, that "the cease of majesty dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw what's near it with it.”- indirect , to claudius about hamlet

• closet scene, Hamlet was mute. He was "loosed out of hell to speak of horrors", but he would not speak them to Ophelia. As Hamlet later said, "hell itself breathes out contagion to this world,"

• KING CLAUDIUS (4,7,54-55) 'Tis Hamlets character. 'naked! And in a postscript here, he says 'alone.’

• Last scene hamlet dies last although one of the first to be poisoned. Shows isolation as wants to be on his own.

Critical thinking

• Mark Thornton-Burnett “abundantly evident is hamlets refusal to fit into neat categorizations. His resistance to generic classification”- by refusing to comply to social normative, hamlet is in fact isolating himself, rather than being isolated by other characters.

• However, characters such as Ophelia and Gertrude who had betrayed him, left him with no other option but to distance himself from those who he loved.

Death

• Death is a central theme within the play; it begins with fascination but later ends up with him pursuing death.

evidence

•        The play starts with death, it shows hamlet questioning the demise of his father. This is projected onto the guards who have recently witnessed the ghost and are protecting themselves from the apparition and the afterlife.

•        Ghost is in purgurtry and hamlets key concern is his fathers soul. Protastants did not believe in purgatory however catholics did.

•        Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell / Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements

• To be or not to be- still concerned about afterlife and implications of suicide. The soliloquy considers suicide but it is a hypothetical argument. Due to uncertainty of afterlife most would have ended their lives.

• Act 4 scene 4 : ‘Even for an egg-shell’ . The land is not even big enough to bury them all, it is about honour. Use of simile

• Yurik’s skull is the only symbolism of death – memento mori used skulls as a reminder of death and inescapable morality.

• Death restores order in elsinore act 3.1 ‘undiscovered county that no traveller returns from’

critic

• 'It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us...the sense of the soul's infinity...‘ – ac bradley

Apperance and reality

• Shakespere presents deception as a critical theme in hamlet. The dramatical technique reveals the deception of self and others.

Evidence.

• Talks about ‘customary suits of solemn black’ , also ‘my inky cloak’, physically wears his melancholy

• Feigning madness “puts an antic disposition on” Act 3, Scene 1 “puts on this confusion” as a revenge strategy,

• Gertrude’s lie about Hamlet’s madness in order to excuse him of the murder of Polonius – “Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend/Which is mightier”

• Ophelia as a foil character, her real madness juxtaposes against hamlet’s deceptive madness

• Madness is a revenge tragedy, Shakespeare’s first tragedy Titus Andronicus, Titus pretends to be mad so that others would let their guard down

• In Elizabethan society, madness was feared.