The Subject of Death in Hamlet
Discuss About The Shakespeare As Dramatist Cambridge University.
The reason of the iconic “to be or not to be” speech which is presented in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has many interpretations. Some of these are historically or even textually based. Generally, the soliloquy actually highlights the positive factors of life over gloomy ideas like sadness or death in moral terms. Hamlet’s speech presents the subject of death and gives the audience the clear picture that he wants to live and have his revenge of Claudius (Nelson, 2014). Before the soliloquy, it is important to understand that Hamlet’s speech is shown as a question. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet curses God because he believes that suicide should not be an immoral option. This is vividly portrayed in his speech.
This is also clarified that Hamlet is deciding on the factors which includes the good and bad results for ending his life. Then he realizes that suicide is a punishable offence according to the Almighty and there could a possibility that his afterlife could be worse than his present. Hamlet is a character whose thoughts clearly revolves around the theme of life and death and acts as a foreshadowing for the soliloquy for the Act III (Marchitello, 2013). At the beginning of the play, the death of King Hamlet and the wedding of Getrude and Claudius are the two key factors that change the tide of the play. This in turn causes distress in Hamlet and gives the motive to plot the revenge (Zhatkin & Kruglova, 2015)
Gertude’s character inspires and compels Hamlet’s quest for vengeance. It can be said that she is the instrument in the actualization of that revenge. She is a passive character during the first part of the play. Though her character is seen as very passive, she often anticipates or rightfully identifies the vital moments or themes within the play drinks a poisoned wine, in which doing so labels Claudius as her murderer (Erne, 2013). This gives the central character of the play, Hamlet a clear purpose and the reason for vengeance, which has been soliloquized throughout the entire play. These two events are the cause of Hamlet’s distress and disgust in Act 1, and form the basis of the revenge plot.
When Hamlet utters the question, “To be, or not to be” there is little evidence that he is thinking of death. Although he attempts to portraythe question in a rational and logical way, he is still left without an answer of whether the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune can be borne out since afterlife is so uncertain.Hamlet wonders about the nature of his death and thinks for a moment of what it would be like. It may be like a deep sleep, which seems at first to be acceptable until he speculates on what will come in such a deep sleep. The dreams that he fears are the pains that the life after death might bring and since there is no way to be sure that there will be a relief from his earthly sufferings through death, he does not hesitate to question death yet again. (Rani, Muhamad & Zin, 2016)
Gertrude’s Role in Hamlet’s Revenge Plot
Compose a soliloquy using evidence from the play that expresses the point of view of one of the following characters: Gertrude. Into which act of the play would you insert this additional speech?
“To you, my child, I am visually impaired,
In any case, it is you, that neglect to see,
For I am not feeling frozen,
Though I feel icy through the loss of affection,
This soliloquy is by Gertrude in Act 3 Scene 4. Hamlet, after killing Polonius, accuses Gertrude of lust towards Claudius. She begs him to leave her alone. King Hamlet’s ghost appears to say that her son needs to be kinder to his own mother and to stop accusing her. Hamlet reassures Gertrude, who is convinced that her son is hallucination about his father, that he is completely fine. He begs his mother to confess her sins and pleads to not sleep with her. Hamlet finds out that Claudius is sending Hamlet to England. He says goodnight to his mother and leaves the room (Stern, 2013).
This customized soliloquy is introduced right after this scene. Gertrude is heartbroken because she knows that her own son hates her and accused her of something preposterous. She had only loved one person, King Hamlet, who was Hamlet’s father and after his death she had married Claudius, but felt no love anymore. This soliloquy is for her son. She talks about how she knows the pain he is going through and that she is not loved by anyone anymore and only Hamlet is left of her love. She loves Hamlet and no one else. Shakespeare might not have imagined a ruler with an unnatural affection towards his mother. It can be argued that Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius agitated Hamlet according to the Renaissance idea of family respect and the implied incestual connection between Gertrude and Claudius (Heath, 2014). But after Act III Scene 4, Shakespeare, even as the excellent scholar he is, could not rationalize Hamlet’s behavior that to assume a Freudian relationship with Gertrude. The most important question in the readers mind is surely that if Gertrude knew of the criminal nature of Claudius. This questions answer would say if Gertrude was a cunning schemer who conspired with Claudius to kill King Hamlet and get the rights to Prince Hamlet’s ascend to the throne or if she was simply as woman who knew only a life dependent on a man.
Customized Soliloquies from Gertrude and an Imaginative Scenario
If Gertrude has overheard Claudius plotting, she would know all. If she is in Claudius’ confidence, she would be complicit with all his conspiracies (Nalisnick & Baird, 2013). Though Claudius professes love and admiration for Gertrude, he never confides to anyone the extent of their relationship. Gertrude describes her love for Hamlet when she asks him not to return to Wittenberg. When she shares with Ophelia her hope that the young woman would have married her Hamlet, she divulges her wish for his happiness. However, she never declares any kind of emotion for Claudius, either positive or negative (Graf, 2013).
The possibility that Gertrude overheard Claudius’s schemes, and is in his confidence would mean she is in league with his conspiracies from the very beginning. Claudius never speaks about how deep his relationship with Gertrude is, even though he professes to love and admit for her. Gertrude describes the nature of her love to Hamlet as she asks him not to return to Wittenberg. She confides in Ophelia her wish for Hamlet’s happiness by expressing her wish for Ophelia to marry Hamlet. We do not see any revelation of emotion from her, neither positive nor negative, towards Claudius (Günenç,2015)
Write a soliloquy for yourself, expressing the central narrative of your own life in dramatic form. Think of yourself as a character explaining yourself to an audience that does not include those who play the most important roles in your life.
“Why is the hand so slow?
It is not like the clock is still,
Maybe because me starting at it has made it slower,
I wish I could work but I fear that the time is near”.
The above custom soliloquy is taken from an imaginative scenario. In this soliloquy I am very hesitant about something which I am looking forward to. It can either be the reason for excitement or even fear, as mentioned. It is clear that I am waiting. I feel so skeptical about this matter; I am looking straight at the time. My concentration is so focused; it has made the clock really slow. I am unable to focus on other things. It is evident that I cannot wait for the result of whatever is yet to happen. I feel that looking at the clock would actually make the time go faster.
The matter could be of anything, an examination, news, event, but it is certain that whatever it is of great importance. We all feel tensed right before the final moments of a crucial matter. The stage is shared by me alone, addressing to the audience about the approaching matter. (Clarke, Adams & Barker, 2017)
This is known as “stopped-clock illusion”. It needs work with your mind’s expectant capacity. As indicated by Amelia Hunt, taking a gander at the clock makes a distinction between what the eye is expecting and what is happening in all actuality. The brain makes a guide which is long ways ahead, and when somebody glances back at the clock. This is also called chronostatis, which is a type of temporal illusion that makes the work which appears to extend it in time. This occurs as a result of disconnection in the communication in between the eye sensation and perception. Sensation is collected from our eyes and is interpreted to create the perception. We all know that time is not relative for two people. It has been proved that if two people are in the room together, and one of them is focused on a particular work, it would feel like that time is going slow for him. The other person would feel that the time flow is normal because his mind is not engaged with any work (Merchant & Yarrow, 2016). Therefore in the above soliloquy, the audience feels adjusted to the time however me on the other hand, do not feel the same. As the speaker, my thoughts are engaged to the matter while the audience can just relate to the subject. This soliloquy points out the stopped-clock illusion factor of the speaker which is being addressed towards the audience.
References
Clarke, M., Adams, F., & Barker, J. A. (2017). Methods Matter: Beating the Backward Clock. Logos & Episteme, 8(1), 99-112
Erne, L. (2013).Shakespeare as literary dramatist. Cambridge University Press.Graf, E. (2013). Gertrude’s Role in Hamlet.
Günenç, M. (2015). Ophelia And Gertrude: Victimized Women In Hamlet. Journal of International Social Research, 8(41).
Heath, I. (2014). Role of fear in overdiagnosis and overtreatment-an essay by Iona Heath. BMJ: British Medical Journal (Online), 349.
Marchitello, H. (2013). 20. Descending Shakespeare. Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, 180.
Merchant, H., & Yarrow, K. (2016). How the motor system both encodes and influences our sense of time. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 8, 22-27.
Nalisnick, E. T., & Baird, H. S. (2013).Character-to-character sentiment analysis in Shakespeare’s plays. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (Vol. 2, pp. 479-483).
Nelson, M. (2014). An Onomastic Approach to’The Story of Edgar Sawtelle’: David Wroblewski’s Transformation of Shakespeare’s’ Hamlet’. Journal of Literary Onomastics, 3(1), 3.
Rani, Z. A., Muhamad, S. H., &Zin, S. M. M. (2016).Discovering Feminism Through Gertrude And Ophelia In Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Stern, T. (2013). Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a “Noted” Text. Shakespeare Survey, 66(1), 1.
Zhatkin, D. N., &Kruglova, T. S. (2015). Shakespeare in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Eyes. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6(5 S4), 509.
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