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Hamlet: Emotional Complexity
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Hello everybody, you are watching Eddie Sinle's Literature.
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I am Ardindra De. Today we are discussing
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the emotional complexity of William Shakespeare's Hamlet and
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the intricacy of the plot design that we
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find in Shakespeare's beautiful drama Hamlet. Along
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with Hamlet's personality, we'll try to gauge the very matrix
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by which Hamlet's character has been drawn and how far
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we can read Hamlet in different lights, in different sets
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of interpretations. But first of all, what is tragedy?
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The term tragedy or tragic drama is broadly applied especially to
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literary and to the dramatic representations of a kind of serious
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action, which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist that
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is the chief character in the play, with some tragic end.
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it obviously rouses a kind of pity and fear. Most precise and
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detailed discussion on the term, this tragic interpretation of pity and fear,
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properly begins with but not to be concluded with that theorem that
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Aristotle propounded in classical analysis in his book Poetics. Aristotle based his
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theory on introduction from the only examples available to him. Obviously, I
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am just mentioning the triumvirate as Kyla's so focus on the movies of that time.
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You can also read the proper explanation and definitions of tragic dramas in my other
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post that you will find in my description.
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Understanding Hamlet is a must because this is a classic piece. So when you
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are going to understand the very drama Hamlet, the very character of Hamlet itself,
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an intense debate and as well as for critical study. Now as a student
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you are reading Hamlet. Hamlet being such a tragedy, we will reach out
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its plot structure which Aristotle defines the soul of tragedy. Shakespeare
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has a definite design of plot, definite dramaturgic skill that he
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has used. So we will definitely have the same purpose of
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inheriting the character depicting the very character of Hamlet and how Shakespeare has
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been able to depict the character of Hamlet through his dramaturgic skills. We have the
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sole motive of understanding that. Hamlet opens at Elsinore's castle in Denmark with the return
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of Prince Hamlet from the University of Wittenberg in Germany. He finds
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that his father, the former king, has recently died
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and that his mother, Queen Gertrude, has subsequently married
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Claudius, his father's brother, his uncle. So, Claudius has
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assumed the title of King of Denmark and how
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his mother hastily married that uncle. Hamlet's Obviously, the
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sixth sense is something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
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It intensified when his friend and fellow student, Hosea, informs him
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that a ghost resembling his dead father has been on the
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metalment of the castle. Hamlet later confronts that ghost, who tells
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him that Rodius, his uncle, in fact murdered Hamlet's father and
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makes Hamlet infuriated by that particular notion of understanding and
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Hamlet swears to avenge the death of his father. Now, in order to
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disguise his feelings, Hamlet declares that from now on he will demonstrate an
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antedisposition, a kind of a madness. His behaviour appears to everyone but calling
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us to be a form of madness. Now, from this point of time,
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hamlet expounds into india character study okay now
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hamlet's madness the complexity of his personality grows
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up and the complexity of the plot intensified
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and the drama unfolds into a beautiful magic
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hamlet's emotional complexity or the very development of
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hamlet's personality that we find in sex period
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drama is of intense debate and understanding. Now ever since
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the defining term of how the plot should be, Aristotle's poetics sets
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forth a kind of a perfect design. Many dramas have been written,
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artistically effective and serious plots ending that kind of a catastrophe which
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Aristotle says fit and fail. So this has been tried. But the
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tragedies of Shakespeare or the like of Elizabethan dramatist like that
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Marlowe, George Chapman, Woodstar, Sir Francis Behmund and John Fletcher. These tried
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their best to confirm the rules of Aristotelian norms or Aristotelian dictums
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of that time. But the tragedy of Hamlet ever since it is
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being performed in the early 16th The role of William Shakespeare's
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Hamlet has remained a favorite, not only for the critics, not only for
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the actors, but for the common people. It simply draws or pulls the
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audience into that complexity of Hamlet's personality, because that is the very soul
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of Hamlet's drama. Nowhere in this complexity more apparent than in Hamlet's famous
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folio key in Act 3, Scene 1. Throughout this soliloquy, which
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happens at the very beginning of the act, 3 scene 1, he
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thinks about whether he should face life's hardships head on or end
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them by dying. So Hamlet's indecision is here a matter of discussion.
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Hamlet is alone on stage as he asks these questions about his
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purpose and life. I can't resist myself from reading this text.
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To be or not to be, that is the soliloquy. To be
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or not to be, that is the question. Whether it's nobler in
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the mind to suffer the strings and arrows outrageous fortune, or to
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take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them,
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to die, to sleep no more, and by sleep to say we
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end the heartache and the thousand natural sobs. That
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place is here too. It is a
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consummation, devoutly to be wished. To die,
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to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream.
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Hey, there's the rub, for in that
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sleep of death what dreams may come,
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when we have suffered of this mortal
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coil, must give us pause. There's the
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respect that makes calamity so long life,
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for who would bear the whips and scorns
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of time, the oppressors' wrongs, the proud men's
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consummity, the pangs of despised love, the laws'
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delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns
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that patient merit of the honor detects, when
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he himself might his quite was make.
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with a bare booking, who'd fuddle his
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beer to ground and sweat under a
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weary life. But that the dread of
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something after death, the undiscovered country from
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whose born no traveller's return, puzzles the
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will and makes us rather bear those
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ills we have. than
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fly to others that we know not of. Thus
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conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus
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the native hue of resolution is sickled o'er with
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the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great
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fit and moment with this reared their currents turn
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away and lose the name of action. This particular
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soliloquy by which we can straight head on to define
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Hamlet's mind. But do you know what is soliloquy? Soliloquy is
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a monologue in which a character reveals inner thoughts, motivations and
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feelings. Shakespeare extensively used this technique, particularly his poetic and rich
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kind of imaged stuff soliloquies are in play into Hamlet, in
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Macbeth or in King Lear. Particularly in this Hamlet, a play
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that you all know about a man whose mind may be his
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fatal flaw, thus the soliloquy form reaches its highest level. Now, this
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particular speech tells about his oscillations and vacillations, about the true extreme
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ends of his indecisions. He cannot take a decision whether he took
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revenge on his uncle or not. Now, this unique style of
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representing the mind through soliloquies is greatest here. Through this kind of soliloquies,
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Shakespeare reads the very mind of Hamlet. And we can, as an audience,
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enter into the domain of Hamlet's mind, into his soliloquies, into his telling
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of psyche, in telling of his mind's words. Now while understanding Hamlet
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you must pop up into those categories of soliloquies and try
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to decipher the very meaning of it. Here talking about Hamlet's
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and its originality we must say that Shakespeare must venture into
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telling a story of Hamlet in his own way. Shakespeare took
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no trouble to be original. However it would be misleading to
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say that he has summed up the old tradition. Of
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him we can say that T.S. Eliot as he tells the
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most individual part of war may be those in which the
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dead poets the ancestors assert their immortality vigorously. So in traditional
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individual talent the T.S. Eliot Watson is that he is a great talented
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artist if he follows classical features or the earliest dramatic styles and if he imbibes
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that spirit in his own writing. So Shakespeare is such a genius who has been
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spirited decisions but he has the unique way of telling his story and there is
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the genuinity, there is the greatest quality of Shakespeare. Now again if you
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talk about American poet Walt Whitman's famous Song of Myself, you can read
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this long poem. It was written in 1881 most probably, which illustrates the
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author's perception of death in an as an integral part of living.
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Spirit of death to be accepted with light, with much fun as
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we are leading the decisive end of life is death. it is
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not a crime so why i am telling about woodpens this particular point is that
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that sex fear visualizes the concept of death or the fear of death or the
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subject matter of death in hamlet's mind as it being interpreted through hamlet's mind hamlet's
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working and that intensive design of understanding hamlet through through all the words of Hamlet's
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mind that sex-fear is very close to psychological interpretation. In sex-fear Hamlet,
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whatever, or the projection of fear in Hamlet, that is the very
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ultimate of Hamlet's personality. is seen through a new light and that new
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light is not even though the lights or the shades or the colors are
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being drawn from ancient writers or the predecessors of Shakespeare but perceiving it or
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projecting it in a new way is entirely done by Shakespeare himself
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It is quite evident that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare to some extent
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adopted the drama traditions of the Seneca tragedy, which is also known
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as the Revenge tragedy or the tragedy of blood. This type of
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play derived from Seneca's favorite material of murder, revenge, ghost, mutilation, and
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carnage. But while Seneca had relegated such matters to
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long reports of offstage actions by messengers, Elizabethan dramatists
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usually represented offstage actions into onstage to satisfy the
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appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror.
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You must understand the very prospect of Elizabethan audience.
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Most of them were illiterate. Thomas Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy
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established that popular genre in the English and its significant
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aftereffect in its own time, most famously in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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A play they adopted the revenge play conventions and turned
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them inside out. Rebecca Bushnell's Tragedy: A Short Introduction
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He mentions this particular line that Hamlet is a revenge
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tragedy that questions every aspect and convention of the revenge
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tragedy plot while it reproduced them. So why I am
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mentioning these references is that Shakespeare copied the type of
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blood from other Seneca style as well as from kids
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but his representations of horror. that he projects in
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this particular play is through the Seneca motives of
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bloodshed, Seneca motives of violence and other things. But
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what is Shakespeare's genuine quality is representing Hamlet's mind.
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The Hamlet's mind is full of blood, is full of oscillations, full
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of fear, a kind of a psychotic, traumatic design of his mind,
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is Shakespeare's own and the horror the pain the black is
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inside of the hamlet's mind instead of the on-stage performances of the
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so many of the bloods so you must understand that hamlet's any
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performance entirely depend upon projecting hamlet's character and how hamlet's inner character
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is being depicted on stage by words, by imagining is one
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of the greatest understanding possible. The play interrogates why revenge motivates
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a plot, not by directly questioning the value of revenge, but
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by differing it. Hamlet has raised the most important question for
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all those who are capable of inquiring into truth, into life,
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into existence. The most important question of all questions is
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what is true happiness? Is there a possibility to achieve it?
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Is true happiness possible at all or is all momentary? Is
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life only a dream? Is there something substantial in it too?
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So, brooding over that soliloquy part that I have mentioned in Act 3, Scene 1,
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as if in a roundabout way, that is the very center point of our discussion,
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one should start reading Hamlet. It is quite impossible to understand Hamlet in first, second
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or third reading. In fact, gradually as you progress, you will understand the very character
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of Hamlet in different stages of your life. As if taking or making
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an indecision is itself a decision and that Hamlet like us
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always face in our lifetime many times.
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For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as much as for their ancient Greek
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and Roman predecessors, the very nature of tragedy seemed to require that
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it explored the sad stories of kings or at least of men
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and women dignified by royal blood or civil authority. An exemplary dramatic
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fall, one which stirred the emotions of pity and fear, a
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lesser mortal had to be a fall from the height of influence
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and honor. In fact, Shakespeare's all of the tragedies deal almost exclusively
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with the destinies of kings and princes, for whose fortune depends those
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of the nation they rule. However, there is one difference. Unlike the
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Greek tragedies, which were the tragedies of fate, Shakespearean tragedy is to
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some extent a tragedy of character. Fate does play a
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very large and important part. It is pre-eminently a tragedy of character. Because
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in Shakespeare, character is destiny. The fault lies not in their stars but
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in men themselves. In all of the Shakespearean tragedies, we can trace the
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tragedy to a certain fatal hero or weakness or predispositions in the hero.
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He has, in fact, in him something that offset him. all
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his virtue and brings about his downfall and death. That is a hamercia. In
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the case of the play Hamlet, there is no doubt that the tragedy of
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the prince is due chiefly to a fault of his own character, the indecision.
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There is in him what may be called a kind of a tragic flaw
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Hamlet is by nature a reflective type of man, very
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much given to philosophic speculation. It is true, as the
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proverb says, that a man must think before he acts.
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But Hamlet only thinks, brutes or buntly, meaning a thing,
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thinks, thinks, until and unless he loses all his capacity
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for action. In this particular logical explanation, it can be true
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that Hamlet is a tragedy of reflection. Hamlet is a thinker, a speculative
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intellect whose speculative intellect is tragically ineffective in this world of action, where
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a man is judged by what he does, not by what he thinks.
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Really, this is the pragmatic world. This world is a world of hard
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and stern reality. and a man filled with moral
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idealism is doomed to tragic failure. In this sense,
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Hamlet is a tragedy of moral idealism. German scholar,
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German critic, Seligl has a fine remark in this.
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Now he finds that Hamlet is in fact in
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the labyrinth of thought. He cannot end what he
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begins. Life is
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for Hamlet a kind of a perfect complexity. There is duality in
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fact. The duality of happiness and unhappiness is the most fundamental and
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the most symptomatic. But there are a thousand and one dualities.
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the duality of love and hate, the duality of life and death, day and night,
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summer and winter, youth and old age and so on and so forth. But the
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fundamental duality, the duality that represents the man, that represents all other dualities is that
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of happiness and unhappiness. Now Hamlet had an accent. Now before he takes an accent,
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he thinks, will his accent be or make him happy or unhappy? Now life knows
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nothing of unhappiness. It is pure happiness. It knows nothing of death. It is
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pure light. It knows nothing of darkness. It is pure light. To know it
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is the very goal. Now in search of light our life leads. But there
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is other half of life that is dark. Our life is almost a vicious
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circle. One mischief lead to another and continued continued mischiefs grow out of mischiefs.
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Only mischiefs can grow out of mischiefs. And you go on living
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and moving in circle, you don't know what else to do. You do good,
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at least you think you are doing good, but the good never happens. Otherwise
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the world would have been working with good. So everything is not under our
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control. The happiness or unhappiness is the matrix of our living. Even though we
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deny death, life has the ultimate truth of death. So Hamlet has
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a kind of philosophical thinking and he broods over that
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thought again and again and his thinking is matured one
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but he delayed the action. Now another key feature I
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like to highlight that you have to find out conflict
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in Shakespearean tragedy particularly this Hamlet. The conflict between fate and
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free will that we will find in ancient literature. At the heart of every
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tragedy in fact lies a universal struggle between the human inclination to accept the
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fate absolutely and the natural desire to contest it. In Sobocles' writing,
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in Shakespeare's writing, both agree that force of destiny and choice
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have the power that control human life. But these greater rights
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espouses a perspective on the struggle born of specific time and
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culture. For the Greek Sobocles, fate for what powers human will?
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Sobocles' characters ultimately surrenders after resistance, recognition, and reversal to
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their destinies. But for Shakespeare, a Christian, the choice between good
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and evil represents one basic dilemma. For him, the human will
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is indomitable. So fate may ultimately win, a man must fight to
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the death, if necessary in order to remain the master of his own self, master
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of his own choices. While you are reading Hamlet, you must take in reference that
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of Socrates' race or Socrates' Oedipus story. Like Oedipus, Hamlet also begins with the death
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of a king. In Oedipus and Hamlet, we might think at first as the heroes,
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present crisis could be resolved if you could find the murderer and then revenge the
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death of the king. However, that is exactly not the case. And the drama continued.
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While Hamlet knows that his world is out of joint or rotten, he does not
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even know at first that his own uncle is the very murderer. Even
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he did not know that his own father has been murdered. He knows that
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his father is dead and his mother has married his uncle. The twist in
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the play comes early on when the ghost tells him who killed his father.
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Thus the truth that is the climax for Oedipus is the very beginning of
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a frustrated plot of revenge for tragedy. So what is climax in Oedipus?
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is in fact the very beginning of Hamlet. That is
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the very change in the subject. This particular lecture will
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lead you into the study of Hamlet. Instead of properly
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understanding Hamlet, you will beforehand get some knowledge either and
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either to make a very pure beginning of the play of the
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Hamlet into my other series of defining the drama or sections of definition of
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dramas and the type of Shakespearean tragedies and line by line reading of Hamlet
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and Macbeth and other tragedies I will just recommend you to go to this
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lecture of mine once again so that you can get a glimpse of Hamlet
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first and then venture into the text so like share comment and obviously subscribe to
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my channel to get this kind of post bye bye
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