It is "monstrous" that the player "in a dream of passion" could put so much emotion into the piece that he even cried "all for nothing". Hamlet is amazed but also suffers from a feeling of pitiful inadequacy because he sees that this player, acting out a speech about a fictional woman who is no more than a character on paper, has put much more emotion and passion into his speech than Hamlet has into avenging his own father's death. Hamlet loved his father and still continues to mourn for him long after anyone else, and while he should be putting as much emotion as the player into killing his father's murderer he is not. He is putting less emotion into his cause than the player into a fictional situation. "Not for a king/ upon whose property and most dear life/ A damned defeat was made" does Hamlet act.
After King Hamlet's death, Laertes, along with Prince Hamlet return to Denmark for the funeral services. This is the first sign that Laertes will become a foil to Hamlet in the play. Hamlet is devastated but he only mopes around whereas when Laertes father Polonius is murdered he vows for revenge “to the blackest Devil!”(4.5.215) He thinks through his emotions, not with his brain like Hamlet. When Hamlet is trying to solve if Claudius killed his father he uses Gertrude asking, “I know not: is it the King?”(3.4.123) Spying through someone else is typical Hamlet not only keeping his feeling hush but also avoiding a confrontation with the king before he knows for sure if he killed his father. When Ophelia dies Laertes is Distraught and isn’t afraid to show this whereas Hamlet loved her but his lack emotion left him without a connection to her at the end of the play.
He compares himself to the actor, that just recited the speech on Pyrrhus filled with so much passion and grief by just acting this revenge story, and how he (Hamlet) cannot show his grief at all even though he is experiencing in real life the role the actor is portraying. Hamlet even begins to wonder if he is going to do anything about his father’s wishes. “Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak like a john-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause” (542-544). Here Hamlet tells himself that all he has done is mope around feeling sorry for himself and he hasn’t even bothered to come up with plans for revenge. He begins to show thoughts of how the task he was given is seen as overwhelming to him.
But he comes back as Sweeney Todd wanting to seek vengeance on the man who sent him away from his family. In Hamlet, Hamlet struggles with his fathers death. He is the only one able to talk to the ghost of his father. Everyone around notices his absent mind, and believes he is crazy, even his own mother, “Alas, he is mad.” (III.iv.106). But later on, we discover Hamlet is not mad, and that it was all just an act.
Gertrude is a hard to read character, but the guilt of her actions with Claudius and her deceased husband comes out when she cry’s, “O Hamlet, speak no more./ thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul,/ and there I see such black and grained spots/as will not leave their tinct.”(III, IV, 89-91). Hamlet berated her to the point where she shows all the bottled shames she’s been concealing, showing her true superego. Hamlet main personality is his superego, which he doesn’t acknowledge, yet let’s out often. In this situation he feels he’s a disappointment to his father and guilty for not reprimanding his sinful uncle in comparison to Fortinbras, saying, “How stand I then,/ that have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,/excitements of my reason and blood,/ and let all sleep, while to my shame I see/twenty thousand men that, for a fantasy and trick of fame,/ go to their graves like beds…”(IV, IIV, 53-65). In a similar event, Hamlet, months after his father murder, acknowledges his lack of action, his overbearing guilt, and his masked fear of confrontation when he self criticizes, “Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be/ but I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall/to make oppression bitter, or ere this/ I should ha’ fatted all the region kites/ with this slave’s offal.”(II, II, 563-566).
By letting revenge be their top priority, Hamlet and Laertes were blinded by their emotions. Fortinbras, who remains calm throughout the play, is the only one to truly succeed. At the beginning of Hamlet, Hamlet mourns the death of his father and tries to understand why his mother married so quickly, especially with his uncle. He is so disgusted with the immoral state of Denmark that he wishes to die. He even contemplates suicide but his rational mind stops him from doing so.
Hamlet even seems to have forgotten the main reason why he is avenging his father’s death. Hamlet makes many decisions from not killing Claudius while he was praying to killing the innocent Polonius, and disobeying his father’s ghost’s instructions by tormenting his mother, and Laertes can be seen as the very opposite of Hamlet because he is everything that Hamlet is not. Hamlet’s delay of vengeance can also be seen as another
Friar Lawrence was the cause of their deaths for his irresponsibility and lack of urgency to solve the conflict he started. Although Romeo and Juliet met with no involvement by the Friar, he was the one who encouraged their love and married them. “In one respect i’ll thy assistant be, / For this
His disinterest in the world he knows is beautiful confirms the depressed state he is in. Hyperbole: Intentional exaggeration to create an effect. Example: “He would drown the stage with tears..” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 49) Function: The first player’s performance of the speech leaves Hamlet in an awed state. He then uses a hyperbole to say that if the player were to act out with the feelings that Hamlet himself had, “he would drown the stage with tears”. He uses this hyperbole to both show his admiration for the actor’s skill, and to reflect the passions that he is feeling toward his father’s death and his quest for
In Macbeth’s as well as Shakespeare’s thinking, all people in this life are just bad, stupid actors- shouting and running about and generally making a lot of noise and fuss but not much sense, and then they die anyway and become completely meaningless. With another metaphor, he considers his life is not different from an idiot's tale which is full of bombast and melodrama, but without meaning. Shakespeare may be so depressed when he wrote these final lines that he considers life as walking shadow and not real enough. In my opinion, when writing these lines, Shakespeare want to send us a message that life is something that we have to take as it comes and it is unpredictable, when being brought to life we have to accept it and to necessarily beautify it. The naked truth is