Essay on Hamlet

A circa 1884 poster for William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, starring Thos. W. Keene. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Corruption, cruelty and uncertainty — three aspects of the human condition as perceived by Hamlet — are revealed in Hamlet’s employment of a rich variety of imagery, such as science, the military, law, racing disease, etc…

Hamlet’s way of employing imagery is to be identified as a unique artistic process. when he begins to speak, the images fairly stream to him with the slightest effort as immediate and spontaneous visions. They show us that whenever he thinks and speaks, he’s at the same time a seer, for whom the living things of the world about him embody and symbolize thought.

This visionary and prophetical power results in his applying the general to the particular through the employment of imagery. the following lines from his soliloquy are relevant:

” How weary, stale, and unprofitable

seem to me all the uses of this world …”

This world, in which he finds himself and towards which his attitude is defined, is expressed in terms of a most striking, central image of sickness, the “unweeded garden”, that will permeate the whole play. The “unweeded garden” evokes an atmosphere of corruption, decay and unfaithfulness in an indirect, general way. Hamlet, in fact, is capable of transforming this awareness into symbols and then interpreting those symbols.

The “unweeded garden”, already established as symbol of the corrupted world, Hamlet’s garden goes on to explain it: “things rank and gross in nature” until they “possess it merely.” Then there is a shift from the general to the particular: his family situation. This shift is revealed through a dramatic process in which we witness a succession of flashes produced by a comprehensive alert mind. There is a shift to the moral shock which has resulted from the sudden disclosure of Hamlet’s true nature. all his life he had believed in her. He had seen her not merely devoted to his father, but also hanging on him, “as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.” This cluster of imagery reveals the spontaneity and acuteness of Hamlet’s mind it has the power of observation, the capability of scanning reality, and of penetrating the veil of semblance to the very core of things.

Incest triggers Hamlet’s mind to compare his mother to a beast, “A beast … would have mourned longer …”, thus giving an entrance to cruelty, the second aspect of the human condition. Hamlet now longs for ” self-slaughter”, a violent act forbidden by the “everlasting”. Later on, savagery and ferocity are expounded throughout the play by a poisonous motif. The description which the ghost of Hamlet’s father gives of his poisoning by Claudius,

“And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilement”,

is characterized by vividness with which the process of poisoning and the malicious spreading of the disease is portrayed, “… and curd like eager dropping into milk.”The corruption of land and people throughout Denmark is evaluated by Hamlet as an irresistible process of poisoning. Finally, this motif reappears in the poisoning of all the major characters in the last act. Corruption, as represented through the poisonous motif, reveals Hamlet’s power of transforming reality into imagery by his full awareness of the human nature and of the world around him.

The first appearance of the ghost, creating a sense of confusion for both Marcellus and Bernardo, introduces the notion of uncertainty to the play — the third and vital aspect of the human condition,”Horatio says ’tis our fantasy”, until reality defeats uncertainty,”is not something more than fantasy”.

Uncertainty reappears later with Hamlet’s hesitation between contemplation and action–the tragic flaw that leads to his destruction. His hesitation is revealed stylistically through a succession of incomplete sentences,

” and yet, within a month-

Let me not think on’t Frailty, thy name is woman …”

This fragmentation reflects the fragmentation of his mental process. Here the style is reflecting the dilemma of his mind; it has been invaded by “frailty”, a disturbing element from the human condition. Such fragments evoke not only his mental state but also his psychological conditioning, characterized as they are with bitterness and agony: “… like Niobe, all tears-why she, even she …”

Hamlet’s mental debate is concluded with the following couplets:

“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!”

Hamlet doesn’t have the active will to take revenge, so his mission seems to spring more from without than from within. In other words he seems to be more persuaded by the ghost than by his own conscience. Realizing that “conscience does make cowards of us all”, Hamlet experiences deactivation of will. “… and lose the name of action”, seems to be the proper description of the will’s failure to assert itself.

The “gravedigger scene” The Gravedigger Scene: Hamlet 5.1.1–205. (Artist: Eugène Delacroix 1839) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Corruption, cruelty and uncertainty–three aspects of the human condition–are revealed genuinely through keen observations of reality embellished by various clusters of imagery, most prominent among which is poison imagery-animal and plant imagery being less effective in evoking the proper atmosphere of the human condition. Through their concreteness and preciseness, their simplicity and familiarity, Hamlet’s nature is introduced with all its aspects: corruption and integrity, cruelty and mercy, uncertainty and assertion. We see a man, who in other circumstances might have exercised all the moral and social virtues, placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.

Related Articles:

• The Development of Shakespeare’s Characters in Macbeth
• A Critical Analysis of Shakespeare’s Tragic Characters
• William Shakespeare: A Study of the Structure of Macbeth
• William Shakespeare: A Critical Analysis on the Distinguishing Characteristics of the Shakespearean Tragedy Othello

National Poetry Month: April 6th

The Saddest Poem by Pablo Neruda

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

                            .

Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”

          .

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

                                           .

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

.

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Guest Blog: Keats and Stoicism

Interesting Literature

By Laura Inman

John Keats lived for twenty-five years, from 1795 to 1821. He is considered one of the great Romantic poets, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. Unlike those other poets of his era, most notably in contrast with Byron and Shelly, Keats was a middle-class commoner, whose parents were inn keepers, a factor that affected his outlook and reception as a poet.  Keats and his two brothers attended a progressively-minded school and received an education that included Latin, but not Greek, a language taught at upper-class schools.

Keats’s life was marred by a succession of sad events, thus he wrote that he had hardly known any days of ‘unalloyed happiness’. His father died while Keats was a child, after which his mother fell into various forms of degradation and finally succumbed to tuberculosis. Keats nursed her through the final stages, as he would also do for his…

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The Romantic Age

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley imbibed his radical philosophy from William Godwin’s Political Justice. (Amelia Curran, 1819) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Romantic era poetry rejects neoclassicism and the Enlightenment. It is characterized by individualism and subjectivity, emotion, and the pastoral. There is a preoccupation with the poet as genius and the hero’s inner struggles and passions. Although definitions of the term vary, Romanticism continues to exert considerable influence over Western thought and art but should not be confused with contemporary notions of what is romantic. Nearly every country has produced Romantic poets.

A wide-sweeping artistic and philosophical movement that began in the late 18th century in Germany, Romanticism arrived in different countries at different times. The complexity and multiplicity of the movement is reflected in the varied definitions of the term, causing American scholar A.O. Lovejoy to remark that romantic means so many things that it means nothing at all by itself. Although love can be a subject of Romantic era poetry, Romanticism has little in common with what is popularly considered to be romantic.

Generally Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment and continues to exert influence over Western ideas and thoughts. Romantic era poetry exalts the individual; the poet becomes a prophet or moral leader who gives voice to the common man and nature. Rather than adhere to conventional forms, romantic era poetry created new modes of expression and a dynamic language to articulate how a personal experience becomes a representative one of all human experience.

Nature is a substantial presence in Romantic era poetry, functioning as a teacher and companion. The poets viewed their art as mediation between humanity and nature and would set their human dramas on her stage. The Romantic wanderer and vicariously the reader would learn his or her place in the universe by journeying through nature’s dark spaces and exotic dream lands. The mysterious, monstrous, and strange are all Romantic era poetic predilections.

Generally Romantic era poetry emphasized intuition and imagination over reason, everyday language over inscrutable poetic form, and the pastoral over the urban. Imagination is the gateway to transcendence, and the poet filters powerful emotions and emotive responses, translating them into an accessible poetic form. The arguably extreme idealism of Romantic era poetry characterized by a search for immortality, perfection, and pure love was often in conflict with the realities of everyday life.

Some of the most well-known Romantic era poets include William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are representative American Romantic poets. The movement also included accomplished female poets like Mary Shelley, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Turner Smith.

English: Cropped portrait of Mary Shelley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Romanticism as a movement lasted well into the 20th century, and its ideals and themes in poetry have yet to completely die out. Aspects of Romanticism can be found in many subsequent movements, including surrealism and French symbolism. Some literary theorists have begun to question the Romantic perception of the poet as a genius and individual creator. Instead, they argue that a poem is part of a web or archive or other texts and the poet is one of a collective of voices limited by the boundaries of language.

The Decline of the Male Figure in D.H.Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence, world famed author (1906) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

One of the features of the English novel is the transition period (1880- 1920) is the progressive decline of the hero.It is not the purpose of this research to investigate why this should have taken place, but several critics have put forward their own interpretations of this phenomenon. It may be the decreasing stature of the authoritarian father figure in the fiction of the transition period linked to the decline of the hero. The fact that England was ruled by a queen, who was openly referred to as the “Mother” of the country, is probably important.

 

What I have tried to do in the pages that follow is to show that the image of the great male figure  underwent considerable change in D.H. Lawrence’s autobiographical  novel Sons and Lovers.

 

Lawrence’s  outlook on life is not much different from that of his contemporaries. He, too, is interested in the study of man and the record of the human experience. He believed in the individuality of man and his right to establish world according to his own world according to his line of thought.

 

In Sons and Lovers (1913) D.H. Lawrence attacked not only the Victorian society, but also the Victorian family. Perhaps his personal experience as a son of a  collier motivated him to write about the miners and their painful life. Because of his parents unhappy marriage, D.H. Lawrence denied all social bonds. He believed in the freedom of the individual: “Each (man or woman) must be true to himself, herself, his own manhood, her own womanhood, and let the relationship work out of itself.”

 

Continue Reading: Bloomy eBooks: The Decline of the Male Figure in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons & Lovers

 

Edmund Spencer Sonnet 75

Sonnet 75 – Edmund Spenser

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay

A mortal thing so to immortalize,

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eek my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name.

Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue,

Out love shall live, and later life renew.

STANZA BY STANZA ANALYSIS

STANZA 1: The first quatrain describes the poet writing his lover’s name on the sand. Yet, the very next moment, the waves swallow them up and the letters vanish away. In the verse “Again I wrote it with a second hand”(line 4), we can see how the poet strives once more to leave his writing upon the beach, only to see it quickly disappear. We can understand the poet’s endless, but futile effort to immortalize something that is mortal. At the same time the writing of the lady’s name, which is the central image of the poem, is transferred from earth to heaven. Here we learn that time is the destroyer of all things but even so, the poet perseveres with determination to engrave his love on the walls of time itself.

STANZA 2: In this quatrain, the poem states that the poet’s lover did not have the confidence in his efforts of trying to immortalize his love towards her. She argued it is a mere waste of time and effort as love is a mortal thing as the phrase “A mortal thing so to immortalize”. She will be “washed away” just like her name was washed away by the tide. Continue Reading: Renaissance Era: Sonnet 75 – Edmund Spenser

Shakespeare Wrote Commercial Fiction–The Battle Between Literary & Commercial Fiction

Kristen Lamb's Blog

In the last post, we had a little bit of a debate about literary fiction versus commercial fiction in the comments, thus I wanted to take a moment to point out something very important. Just because fiction is commercial, doesn’t mean it’s the equivalent of Transformers Part 5. Commercial fiction runs the gambit from fluff that is just there for fun entertainment to multi-dimensional, powerful writing.

I want to point out that Shakespeare’s works were all commercial fiction. His plays were written to entertain regular, illiterate working people. BUT, why his works were so brilliant was that they were multi-layered, threaded with nuance, symbolism, and powerful themes. His work could be understood and enjoyed by “common” people, but there were references that captivated, challenged, and even upset the highly educated.

We still study Shakespeare to this day. Just because our work is “commercial” doesn’t mean it’s plebeian. Conversely…

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Essay on books

books (Photo credit: brody4)

 Books are of different types. Some of them are useful and delightful while others are not. The exact value of books is greatly related to their content and purpose.

Francis Bacon, a famous English essayist, classifies books into three categories in his formal essay ” Of studies”: ” Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.” In other words, some books should be read in parts; others hastily, without much concentration and attention; and some few thoroughly and steadily.

In essence, books are used as a source of knowledge and information; they are also used as a source of pleasure and amusement. As a source of knowledge, books are considered valuable stores and treasures of information, wisdom and moral advice, for they widen the horizon of the reader’s thoughts, deepen the meaning of his life and enrich his experience. By reading a useful book in the field of history or science, for instance, one can learn a lot about past generations and live with the most honest people of past centuries. In fact, a valuable book is to the mind as nourishing food is to the body. As a source of delight, there is no companion like a good book, specially when one feels lonely and sad. One can drive evil thoughts, anxiety and boredom out of one’s mind by reading an entertaining book. This certainly relates to the positive side of books.

As regards the negative side, there are books that are very dangerous to read, for they poison the reader’s thoughts and spoil his character. Examples of such books are those on crimes, violence and immoral or indecent behavior. Books of this category are a waste of time, specially to our children; they may  instill evil thoughts in  their minds and, subsequently, affect their behavior adversely. Consequently, parents should be very careful and cautious  when selecting books for their children.

In conclusion, books, if well selected, can be regarded not only as faithful friends but also as unfathomable wells of knowledge. Although they can not control the length of our lives, they, undoubtedly, can control their width and depth, thus rendering them more  meaningful and enjoyable.