HAMLET
‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet continues to engage audiences through its dramatic treatment of struggle and disillusionment.’ In the light of your critical study, does this statement resonate with your own interpretation of Hamlet?
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is in itself, a story of struggle and disillusionment, it resolutes in all characters of the play within hamlet affecting their ideas and actions, and evidently their destiny. Amid the play the audience is confronted with a plethora of events that are synonymous with the dramatic treatment of struggle and disillusionment, prominent themes being Hamlets disillusionment with his mothers marriage and his struggle to control his actions and emotions and ultimately his fate to live, Ophelia’s disillusionment with love and her struggle for hamlets affection and Claudius’s struggle to find solace in the regrettable murder of his brother. These themes in turn engage audiences through its dramatic treatment of struggle and disillusionment effectively.
Initially the audience is brazen by Hamlet’s loud outbreak in which we soon discover that he is dealing with the marriage of his mother Gertrude to Uncle Claudius. Hamlet is disillusioned with his widowed mother and the virtuous purity in which she previously obtained. Hamlet speaks of his bafflement to Gertrude through soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 4, “Rebellious hell, if thou canst mutine in matrons bones, to flaming youth let virtue be as wax and melt in her own fire”. Through soliloquy, Hamlet is disillusioned and questions his mother’s virtuous qualities and thus, questions his own destiny, if Gertrude can lose her innocence than so can Hamlet.
Hamlet struggles to find any peace of mind throughout the play and the power to avenge his father, in loss to contain emotions; he regards himself as a “rogue and peasant slave” in soliloquy of Act 2, scene 2 which signifies Hamlets disadvantaged state of insecurity and weakness, amidst his struggle of emotions, he questions his life “to be or not to be” in act 3, scene 1. Through this soliloquy, Hamlet struggles to find composure and considers suicide as an option to free himself from his problematic life thus struggling with his fate to live.
Character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia also engages in the acts of struggle and disillusionment amid concepts of love and relationships. Act 3 scene 1, reflects Ophelia’s disillusionment of Hamlets affection towards her, in soliloquy “I was the more deceived”, Ophelia projects the ideal that she was fooled by Hamlet, and in turn her disillusionment towards Hamlet. Among such rejection and the death of her father Polonius, Ophelia sings a song in Act 4, Scene 5, reflecting her struggle to obtain admiration from hamlet “and I a maid at your window”, this soliloquy signifies Ophelia’s determination in receiving affection from Hamlet, waiting on his command in hopes of acquiring it, in result this portrays Ophelia’s struggle to gain fondness from character Hamlet.
In the midst of the tragedy, King Claudius is reminded of his evil act in the play that Hamlet organises, and in result he feels regret and anguish in act 3, scene 3 soliloquy, “Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven It hath the primal eldest curse upon A brother’s murder”, in this quote, the audience sees the true side of Claudius and his struggle to accept what he has done for his queen and glory in repenting for his sins. This ultimately concurs to the ideology of Claudius’ struggle to find solace in his sins and his crime of regicide.
In conclusion, Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains all aspects of a tragedy in its dramatic treatment of struggle and disillusionment in engaging the audience. Key themes being Hamlets struggle and disillusionment with Gertrude, emotions, and fate, Ophelia struggle with love and affection and Claudius’ struggle with his regretful actions of regicide signifying Shakespeare’s play of struggle and disillusionment.
By Karly Daglis.
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