'On Hamlet And Relativity In Richard Levin's Elusive Libido'

On Hamlet and Relativity
In Richard Levin’s Gertrude’s Elusive Libido and Shakespeare’s Unreliable Narrators, he postulates that there can be no clear answer regarding Gertrudes internal sexuality. Being that, Levin is accurate in this claim as the nature of relativity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet lies in the agendas and experience present within Hamlet and the Ghost.
Within the scope of the essay, Levin is correct when he claims that there can be no clear answer as Hamlet and the Ghost both believe Gertrude is guilty, opening the door to an unfiltered agenda. Unbeknownst to both Hamlet and the Ghost, they could very well be distorting information without knowing it, allowing their conclusions to be faulty and the actions thereafter being inherently
Even more so, these two concepts overlap throughout the play, allowing multiple perspectives of a single event to present themselves organically. Seeing that, what Levin refers to in his thesis regarding the lack of objectivity where “None of them can be considered objective, since they come from her son and late husband, both of whom believed they have been wronged by her, and each account is generated by and serves a specific agenda that is directly related to that wrong” (Levin 176). Truly, the concept of personal perception blockading truth is arguably the most relevant topic within the sphere of Hamlet’s relativity. For instance, Hamlet has an individual perception of women due to his personal experience that is provided fairly early on. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet expresses, “Let me not think on ’t. Frailty, thy name is woman!/A little month, or ere those shoes were old/With which she followed my poor father’s body,” (Shakespeare 1.2.146-148). The early philosopher Plato explores this idea in one of his well known texts The Republic, which explained his theory of forms. In the text, he suggests that any knowledge gained through the senses is not true knowledge at all, rather mere opinion. To illustrate, Plato provides a hypothetical to the reader titled The Allegory of the Cave; the scenario describes a situation in which a group of prisoners have been chained in such a way that they have only ever seen shadows of themselves or things passing behind them, which is to say they have never seen reality, merely only shadows. As a result, if one of the prisoners escapes and sees the real world, he rejects it, as all he knows is the perception he acknowledges through his individual experience. Seeing that, Plato’s allegory can apply to how the characters in Hamlet fundamentally behave in