The Roots of His Lingering Indecision Essay Example for Free

The Roots of His Lingering Indecision Essay If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. (V. 2. 289-292) The tragedy of Hamlet does not only reveal Shakespeare’s remarkable skill as a playwright but it serves as a commentary of how he proclaims the complexity of the human mind. And even in the subject of death, he succeeds in conveying death as not just an element of tragedy, but as a showcase of complex emotions of the bereaved. In Hamlet, the â€Å"outward form† that consists of the thesis of ghostly malevolence and the use of irony in the dramatic integrity of which could not be sacrificed to preconceived Hamlet’s personality patterns and motifs (Wilson-Knight, 1963). Hamlet’s unpredictable character and ambivalent behavior compel its readers to contemplate much about the heros sanity. His personality, during the course of the play, leads us to believe that Hamlet only feigned his madness. Hamlet is a man disgusted with the repulsiveness of life around him and is obligated to set things straight. Under the guise of madness he attempts to fulfill revenge, yet the discussion does not stop there. Did Hamlet really succeed in being a good actor that he fooled everyone into believing in his madness or was he truly mad? Why did he wait so long to carry out his revenge? Did Hamlet pondered too much and this drove him to an insanity that was indeed real? In Act 2 Scene 2, we could read Hamlet speaking to himself. He wishes that he were able to act like the actor who performed the speech for him. Indecision has subdued Hamlet in forgoing the revenge the murder of his father on Claudius or keeping silent due to uncertainty about whether Claudius really killed his father. This is why he decides to try and make the players enact the murder scene as it was described to him by the ghost of his father. Hamlet is hoping that Claudius, when he sees the scene, will reveal himself as the true murderer of King Hamlet: I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / Been struck so to the soul that presently / The have proclaimed their malefactions (II. 2. 566-569). By watching Claudius when the actors perform this scene, Hamlet expects to discover whether the ghost told him the truth. Shakespeare creates such a vague situation which makes this character more intriguing. As a result of the ambiguity given throughout this play, many might argue for or against the idea that Hamlets antic disposition put on as a facade to mislead the royal family. This pales in contrast with the disposition of Hamlets lunatic mind. In other words, Hamlet might in fact really suffered insanity. Proof could be derived from Hamlets erratic mood changes, careless slaughter of those not directly involved in the murder of his father and his dealings with the ghost of his father. Many critics believe that Hamlet faked his insanity to conceal his real feelings and to divert attention from his task of revenge. Other critics assert that Hamlet hopes that Claudius, thinking him mad, will lower his guard and reveal his guilt in Hamlets presence. With his troubled life, Hamlet embraces the fools, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia and the ghost, and the mirror in which they all are reflected in Hamlet’s consciousness. The play exhibited the â€Å"fine intensification and enlargement of the theme of death; and in end the images which make dramatization possible are significant (Wilson-Knight, 1963). Due to his turbulent emotions which result from his indecision on how to respond to his fathers murder, he then thrived in isolation from society. Ill wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. (I. 5. 99-104) A tragic hero, Hamlet largely determines his own fate, similar to Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s own King Lear. An extraordinarily complex young man—intuitive, accomplished, sensitive, noble, philosophic and reckless, Hamlet is a larger-than-life character. Thus, his tragedy rooted from these ill-defined â€Å"excesses† of personality. Hamlet’s emotional side is obviously evident from the beginning: At the plays opening he is portrayed to be consumed by anguish and shock even before he sees the ghost. In his first soliloquy, he even expressed the wish that suicide was acceptable. Also, Wilson-Knight (1963) averred that by establishing a dominant motif of disease and corruption and skillfully developing it through a series of carefully chosen interlaces, always present in moments of dramatic and moral tension, he enhances the genre and provides a structure suggesting macrocosmic and microcosmic horror. How the ghost contributes to irony implicit in that analogy must be investigating by first dialectically proving malevolence. A deeper understanding of the conflicts that hound the character of Hamlet and his turbulent emotions exemplifies the complex reactions of humans towards the issue of death. The approach taken by Shakespeare in Hamlet has generated countless different interpretations of death, but it is through Hamlets struggle to confront his internal dilemma that he himself dies at the end, fulfilling his duty as a son and his duty to society, by purging the corrupt from the monarchy and avenging his father’s death. However, we all know that death is never the end, it is only the beginning. Works Cited Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. In Kirszner Mandell (ed. ), Portable Literature Reading, Reacting, Writing, 5th ed. , Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth Publishers, 2003, p. 722-827. Wilson Knight, G. The Wheel of Fire. New York: Meridian Books, 1963.