⌛ Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet
Historia Regum Britanniae c. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes. Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet, Irwin From Marlowe, Shakespeare also inherited the idea that the purpose of the history play Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet to vivify the moral dilemmas The Negative Impact Of Globalization In Singapore power politics and to apply those lessons to contemporary government. He originally kidnapped the boys to seek revenge against Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet. William Shakespeare 's The Merchant of Venice. Macbeth is also depicted as a Herod Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet recalling Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet III when he murders Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet innocent children Thoreau And Martin Luther King Comparison Macduff in an obsessive fit Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet on by Libertarian Paternalism realization that he is childless and heirless.
Video SparkNotes: Shakespeare's Hamlet Summary
However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths.
Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust?
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Thus, Henry IV, Part I is really a study of the rise of Hal, who in the opening of the play appears to be a carefree time waster, content with drinking, gambling, and carousing with a motley group of thieves and braggarts led by the infamous coward Sir John Falstaff. Using a kind of Aristotelian mode of characterization, Shakespeare reveals Hal as a balanced hero who possesses the wit and humanity of Falstaff, without the debilitating drunkenness and ego, and the physical courage and ambition of Henry Hotspur, the son of the earl of Northumberland and chief rebel, without his destructive choler and impatience.
The plot of Henry IV, Part I advances by means of comparison and contrast of the court, tavern, and rebel worlds, all of which are shown to be in states of disorder. Northumberland, who failed to appear for the Battle of Shrewsbury because of illness, proves unable to call up the spirit of courage demonstrated by his dead son. Glendower, too, seems to fade quickly from the picture, like a dying patient. Falstaff is again the humorous but negative example, although he lacks the robustness in sin that marked his character in Part I.
The positive example or model is the Lord Chief Justice, whose sobriety and sense of responsibility eventually attract Hal to his side. The banishment of Falstaff and his corrupt code takes place during the coronation procession. With the Lord Chief Justice at his side, Hal prepares to enter the almost monklike role that the kingship requires him to play. It is this strong and isolated figure that dominates Henry V , the play that may have been written for the opening of the Globe Theatre. Hal shows himself to be an astute politician—he outwits and traps the rebels Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey—and a heroic leader of men in the battle scenes.
There is little or no humor in the play. Yet when Hal moves among his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, he reveals a depth of understanding and compassion that helps to humanize his character. His speeches are masterpieces of political rhetoric, even though Pistol, the braggart soldier, tries to parody them. With the defeat of the French at Agincourt, Hal wins an empire for England, strengthening the kingdom that had been so sorely threatened by the weakness of Richard II. Both tetralogies depict in sharp outline the pattern of suffering and destruction that results from ineffective leadership. In Henry VII and Henry V, one sees the promise of peace and empire realized through the force of their strong, patriotic identities. The lesson for the audience seems to be that under Elizabeth, the last Tudor monarch, England has achieved stability and glory, and that this role of European power was foreshadowed by the victories of these earlier heroes.
Another clear lesson is that England cannot afford another civil war; some capable and clearly designated successor to Elizabeth must be chosen. The play traces the falls of three famous personages, the duke of Buckingham, Katherine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey. Both Buckingham and Queen Katherine are innocent victims of fortune, while Wolsey proves to be an ambitious man whose scheming is justly punished. Henry seems blind and self-satisfied through much of the play, which is dominated by pageantry and spectacle, but in his judgment against Wolsey and his salvation of Cranmer, he emerges as something of a force for divine justice.
Of the plays that are wholly or partly attributed to Shakespeare, nearly half have been classified as comedies. There can be little doubt that Shakespeare enjoyed creating comic situations and characters and that audiences came to expect such fare on a regular basis from the playwright. The twin brothers are attended by twin servants, compounding the possibilities for humor growing out of mistaken identity.
Considerable buffoonery and slapstick characterize the main action involving the twins—both named Antipholus—and their servants. In one hilarious scene, Antipholus of Ephesus is turned away from his own house by a wife who believes he is an impostor. Egeon believes that his wife and sons are dead, which casts him deep into the pit of despair. This happy scene of reunion and regeneration strikes a note that will come to typify the resolutions of later Shakespearean comedy. Providence appears to smile on those who suffer yet remain true to the principle of family.
Shakespeare also unites the act of unmasking with the concept of winning a new life in the fifth act of The Comedy of Errors. The characters are, however, largely interchangeable and lacking in individualizing traits. Types rather than fullblown human beings people the world of the play, thus underscoring the theme of supposing or masking. Shakespeare offers a gallery of familiar figures—young lovers, a pedantic doctor, a kitchen maid, merchants, and a courtesan—all of whom are identified by external traits.
They are comic because they behave in predictably mechanical ways. He had already used this collection for his erotic poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece ; now he plundered it for stories about pairs of lovers and the changes effected in their natures by the power of love. In The Taming of the Shrew, he was also improving on an earlier play that dealt with the theme of taming as a means of modifying human behavior. By the end of the play, she has been tamed into behaving like a dutiful wife. Her sister Bianca, on the other hand, has many suitors, but her father will not allow Bianca to marry until Kate has found a husband. The process of taming sometimes involves rough and boisterous treatment—Petruchio withholds food from his pupil, for example—as well as feigned madness: Petruchio whisks his bride away from the wedding site as if she were a damsel in distress and he were playing the role of her rescuer.
In the end, Kate turns out to be more pliant than her sister, suggesting that an ideal wife, like a bird trained for the hunt, must be instructed in the rules of the game. Shakespeare reinforces the theme of transformation by fashioning a subplot featuring a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly, who believes he has been made into a lord during a ruse performed by a fun-loving noble and his fellows. The Two Gentlemen of Verona takes a comic tack that depends less on supposing than on actual disguise. The main theme of the comedy is the rocky nature of love as revealed in male friendship and romantic contest. Although Proteus deserves worse punishment than he receives, he is allowed to find in Julia the true source of the romantic love that he has been seeking throughout the play.
These pairs of lovers and their clownish servants, who engage in frequent bouts of punning and of horseplay, perform their rituals—anatomizing lovers, trusting false companions—in a forest world that seems to work its magic on them by bringing about a happy ending. As in the other festive comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona concludes with multiple marriages and a mood of inclusiveness that gives even the clowns their proper place in the celebration.
After this experiment in romantic or festive as opposed to bourgeois comedy, Shakespeare next turned his hand to themes and characters that reflect the madness and magic of love. There is also a satiric strain in this play, which depicts the foiled attempt of male characters to create a Platonic utopia free of women. The King of Navarre and his court appear ludicrous as, one by one, they violate their vows of abstinence in conceits that gush with sentiment. Even Berowne, the skeptic-onstage, proves unable to resist the temptations of Cupid. As if to underscore the foolishness of their betters, the clowns and fops of this comic world produce an interlude featuring the NineWorthies, all of whom overdo or distort their roles in the same way as the lover-courtiers have distorted theirs.
When every Jack presumes to claim his Jill at the close, however, Shakespeare deputizes the princess to postpone the weddings for one year while the men do penance for breaking their vows. The women here are victorious over the men, but only for the purpose of forcing them to recognize the seriousness of their contracts. Presumably the marriages to come will prove constant and fulfilling, but at the end of this otherwise lighthearted piece, Shakespeare interjects a surprising note of qualification. Perhaps this note represents his commentary on the weight of words, which the courtiers have so carelessly— and sometimes badly—handled. Although he again presents pairs of young lovers whose fickleness causes them to fall out of, and then back into, love, these characters display human dimensions that are missing in the character types found in the earlier comedies.
The main action, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, takes place in a wood, this time outside Athens and at night. The fairy powers are given free rein to deceive the mortals who chase one another there. By the end of the play, however, the young lovers have found their proper partners, Oberon and Titania have patched up their quarrel, and Bottom, whose head was changed into that of an ass and who was wooed by the enchanted Titania while he was under this spell, rejoins his fellows to perform their tragic and comic interlude at the wedding reception.
This afterpiece is a burlesque rendition of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, whose tale of misfortune bears a striking resemblance to that of Romeo and Juliet. His scheme is frustrated only by the superior wit of the heroine Portia during a trial scene in which she is disguised as a young boy judge. Though the settings are contrasted and the action of the play alternates between the two societies, Shakespeare makes his audience realize that Portia, like Antonio, is bound to a contract set by her dead father which threatens to destroy her happiness. When Bassanio chooses the leaden casket, she is freed to marry the man whom she would have chosen for her own. Much Ado About Nothing likewise has a dark side. The main plot represents the love of Claudio and Hero.
Claudio confronts his supposedly unfaithful partner in the middle of their wedding ceremony, his tirade causing her to faint and apparently expire. The lovers are later reunited, however, after Claudio recognizes his error. Like Claudio and Hero, they are converted into lovers who overcome selfishness and pride to gain a degree of freedom in their new relationships. The comedy ends with the marriage of Claudio and Hero and the promise of union between Beatrice and Benedick.
His behavior, especially his hilariously inept handling of legal language, is funny in itself, but it also illustrates a favorite Shakespearean theme: Clownish errors often lead to happy consequences. His daughter Rosalind enters the forest world in disguise, along with her friend Celia, to woo and win the young hero Orlando, forced to wander by his brother Oliver, another usurping figure. She proves successful in winning the support of the audience by means of her clever manipulation of Orlando from behind her mask. Two characters—Touchstone, the clown, and Jacques pronounced JAYK weez , the cynical courtier—represent extreme attitudes on the subjects of love and human nature.
He remains outside the circle of happy couples at the end of the play, a poignant, melancholy figure. Twelfth Night also deals with the themes of love and self-knowledge. Motifs from other earlier Shakespearean comedies are also evident in Twelfth Night. Viola and Sebastian are twins a motif found in The Comedy of Errors who have been separated in a shipwreck but, unknown to each other, have landed in the same country, Illyria. Complications arise when Olivia falls in love with Viola, and the dilemma is brought to a head when Orsino threatens to kill his page in a fit of revenge. Sebastian provides the ready solution to this dilemma, but Shakespeare holds off introducing the twins to each other until the last possible moment, creating effective comic tension.
The scene in which Malvolio finds the letter and responds to its hints, while being observed not only by the theater audience but also by an audience onstage, is one of the funniest stretches of comic pantomime in drama. When Malvolio attempts to woo his mistress, he is thought mad and is cast in prison. Although he is finally released not before being tormented by Feste the clown in disguise , Malvolio does not join the circle of lovers in the close, vowing instead to be revenged on all those who deceived him. In fact, both Feste and Malvolio stand apart from the happy company, representing the dark, somewhat melancholy clouds that cannot be dispelled in actual human experience.
By this stage in his career, Shakespeare had acquired a vision of comedy crowded by elements and characters that would be fully developed in the tragedies. Legend suggests that he interrupted his work on the second history cycle to compose the play in two weeks for Queen Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff by then familiar from the history plays portrayed as a lover.
What Shakespeare ended up writing was not a romantic but instead a bourgeois comedy that depicts Falstaff attempting to seduce Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, both wives of Windsor citizens. He fails, but in failing he manages to entertain the audience with his bragging and his boldness. This is the only strain of romance in the comedy, whose major event is the punishment of Falstaff: He is tossed into the river, then singed with candles and pinched by citizens disguised as fairies. Regardless of whether this act has a ritual purpose, the character of Falstaff, and the characters of Bardolph, Pistol, and Justice Shallow, bear little resemblance to the comic band of Henry IV, Part I.
In fact, T he Merry Wives of Windsor might be legitimately seen as an interlude rather than a fully developed comedy, and it is a long distance from the more serious, probing dramas Shakespeare would soon create. The play differs from the earlier romantic comedies, however, because the hero rejects the heroine, preferring instead to win honor and fame in battle. When Bertram finally assents to the union he bears little resemblance to comic heroes such as Orlando or Sebastian; he could be seen in fact as more a villain or perhaps a cad than a deserving lover.
Measure for Measure has at the center of its plot another bed trick, by which a patient and determined woman Mariana manages to capture the man she desires. That man, Angelo, is put in the position of deputy by Duke Vincentio at the opening of the action. He determines to punish a sinful Vienna by strictly enforcing its laws against fornication; his first act is to arrest Claudio for impregnating his betrothed Juliet. He asks for a measure of her body in return for a measure of mercy for her brother. Thus, Angelo commits the deed that he would punish Claudio for performing. Through another substitution, however, Claudio is saved. Some critics have argued that this interpretation transforms Duke Vincentio into a Christ figure, curing the sins of the people while disguised as one of them.
Whether or not this interpretation is valid, Measure for Measure compels its audience to explore serious questions concerning moral conduct; practically no touches of humor in the play are untainted by satire and irony. For about four years following the writing of Measure for Measure , Shakespeare was busy producing his major tragedies. It is probably accurate to say that the problem comedies were, to a degree, testing grounds for the situations and characters he would perfect in the tragedies. His earliest—and clumsiest—attempt at tragedy was Titus Andronicus.
From Seneca, the Roman playwright whose ten plays had been translated into English in , Shakespeare took the theme of revenge: The inflexible, honor-bound hero seeks satisfaction against a queen who has murdered or maimed his children. She was acting in retaliation, however, because Titus had killed her son. He and the wicked queen Tamora are oversimplified characters who declaim set speeches rather than engaging in realistic dialogue. He never comes to terms with the destructive code of honor that convulses his personal life and that of Rome. With Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare reached a level of success in characterization and design far above the bombastic and chaotic world of Titus Andronicus.
Some critics have in fact faulted the tragedy because its plot lacks the integrity of its poetry; Romeo and Juliet come to their fates by a series of accidents and coincidences that strain credulity. The tireless Friar Lawrence attempts, through the use of a potion, to save Juliet from marrying Paris, the nobleman to whom she is betrothed, but the friar proves powerless against the force of fate that seems to be working against the lovers. Although it lacks the compelling power of the mature tragedies, whose heroes are clearly responsible for their fate, Romeo and Juliet remains a popular play on the subject of youthful love. At least three years passed before Shakespeare again turned his attention to the tragic form.
Instead of treating the subject of fatal love, however, he explored Roman history for a political story centering on the tragic dilemma of one man. That is, he might have presented the issue of the republic versus the monarchy as a purely political question, portraying Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Antony as pawns in a predestined game. Instead, Shakespeare chose to explore the character of Brutus in detail, revealing the workings of his conscience through moving and incisive soliloquies. By depicting his hero as a man who believes his terrible act is in the best interest of the country, Shakespeare establishes the precedent for later tragic heroes who likewise justify their destructive deeds as having righteous purposes.
The tragic plot is developed by means of irony and contrast. Caesar appears to be a superstitious, somewhat petty figure, but in typical fashion, Shakespeare makes his audience see that, just as the conspirators are not free of personal motives such as jealousy, so Caesar is not the cold and uncompromising tyrant they claim he is. Brutus and Cassius quarrel before the end, but they nevertheless achieve a kind of nobility by committing suicide in the Roman tradition.
For Brutus, the events following the assassination demonstrate the flaw in his idealism; he could not destroy the spirit of Caesar, nor could he build a republic on the shifting sand of the populace. In Julius Caesar , one witnesses a tragedy that is both politically compelling and morally complex. Although the revenge theme is an important part of Julius Caesar , it dominates the action of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As a result, Hamlet delays his revenge—a delay that has preoccupied audiences, readers, and critics for centuries. These explanations, while appealing, tend to shift attention away from other, equally significant elements in the play. When Hamlet finally acts, however, he does so in the role of an avenger and scourge.
Rowse, A. Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet, David Scott Critic George Steiner Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet all Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes. The process of taming sometimes involves rough and boisterous treatment—Petruchio withholds food from his pupil, for example—as well yellow earth film feigned madness: Petruchio whisks his bride away from the wedding site as if she were a Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet in distress Comparing Polonius And Ophelia In Shakespeares Hamlet he were playing the role of her rescuer.