Hamlet

Hamlet’s Procrastinated Revenge Hamlet’s revenge was indeed procrastinated, but was Hamlet’s death worth it? By looking at Hamlet’s inability to get his revenge one can see that he uses the existential idea of bad faith because he avoids the option to kill Claudius due to the responsibilities he will receive. He uses Appearance vs. Reality to show his madness, but yet he is in fact sane. Shakespeare achieves this by using imagery throughout the play. In the beginning of the play, Shakespeare demonstrates that in the play Hamlet, he plugs in the idea of existentialism quit often in Act 1. He uses existentialism because it conveys a certain image in those scenes. When Hamlet’s father dies Hamlet is convinced that he shouldn’t live without his father. During the first two months of his father’s death he becomes suicidal and thinks to himself that “Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst self – slaughter! O God, God How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” (Shakespeare, 1.2. 129-134).This demonstrates that Hamlet’s love for his father is so intense that he feels that there is no meaning in life without his father and he just wants to end his own life. Shakespeare conveys the existential idea of life is absurd because Hamlet doesn’t want to create a meaning in for his life In Hamlet’s train of thought at the time he believed that without his father around he has no more meaning in his life and he wished he could end his own miserable life. Shakespeare achieves this by using imagery and repetition by stating “O God, O God” and it uses imagery because of Hamlet’s speech you can picture how miserable he felt during his speech. In the middle of the play, Shakespeare uses Appearance vs. Reality because Hamlet appears to let actors perform his favorite play, but in reality he makes the actors recreate how Claudius killed his father to see if his facial expression tells the truth that obviously states that Claudius did, in fact kill is father. Before the play started, Hamlet told Horatio that “There is a play tonight before the king. One scene of it comes near the circumstance which I have told thee of my father’s death. I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot, even with the very comment of thy soul Observe mine uncle. If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, It is a damned ghost that we have seen, and my imaginations are as foul.” (3.2.68-76). This demonstrates the Hamlet had a mischievous plan to seek the truth of his father’s death. Once Hamlet notices that Claudius’s reaction to the re-enactment was guilty, Hamlet knew what had to be done, but when he had the chance to kill his guilty uncle, he refused to do it because if he did it when he had a chance Claudius would have met his father in heaven. This uses imagery because readers can picture the entire scene with Hamlets style of thinking and can foreshadow what Hamlet might do next. In the end of the play, Hamlets procrastination has finally ended when he finally decides to kill the treacherous Claudius. When Hamlet seeks to end Claudius’ life he a new problem… Laertes. With Laertes’ family dead and gone he is in no emotional state to live a happy life. Instead he chooses to blame Hamlet for his Ophelias death and chooses to challenge Hamlet in a duel to death. Claudius planned the duel so he can poison Hamlet’s cup, Laertes’ sword and finally end the nuisance to his problem, but to no avail. Gertrude drank the poison instead and Hamlet cut Laertes with Laertes’s own sword after Laertes cut Hamlet. Before Laertes died, he told Hamlet “Lo, here I lie, Never to rise again. Thy mother’s poisoned. I can no more. The king, the king’s to blame.” (5.2.320-322). Once Laertes spoke the truth to Hamlet; Hamlet cut Claudius with the sword and also forced him to drink the poisoned cup. Since Hamlet knew he was going to died very soon he told his only faithful friend Horatio “O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity a while, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story.” (5.2. 345-350). This demonstrates how much Hamlet really cares and trusts Horatio. Hamlet and Horatio have this bond between their friendships. Readers can imagine that they treat each other as if they were brothers. They always had each other’s backs. Shakespeare uses Appearance vs, Reality because throughout the ending Claudius makes it appear that the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes was for fun but in reality he demonstrates that it was really to kill prince Hamlet. Shakespeare also uses Literary Device imagery because throughout the fencing match, readers can see the image of the whole fencing match and all the tragic deaths that occurred. So throughout the play, Shakespeare creates this great, dramatic and tragic play that uses a lot of literary devices and themes that makes reader image everything that goes on throughout the play. Shakespeare uses Appearance vs. Reality for most of Hamlet’s roles since he chose to “put on an antic disposition on” (1.5.173). Although Hamlet’s inability to take action to kill Claudius was procrastinated and led to both of their deaths, Hamlet also had to solve a problem within himself to keep acting crazy and him actually turning crazy. Throughout the book Hamlet uses the existential idea of bad faith because Hamlet didn’t know how to handle the responsibility of his life to kill his uncle, loving Ophelia, and mourning his father’s death.

Works Cited
NO FEAR Hamlet, 2003 by Spark Publishing, New York