Stricken To Obsessed: How Hamlet Did It In One Fell Swoop

12 November 2012
From Grief-Stricken to Obsessed: How Hamlet did it in One Fell Swoop Everybody knows that person who is obsessed with something really strange. From trying to stalk their celebrity crush to needing to buy every single pair of sunglasses they see, they have strange urges to do strange things. Hamlet is like those people; throughout the play he becomes obsessed with getting revenge. At the end, he does everything, including losing his own life, to kill the one who killed his family. If one had just read the beginning, however, one would not know how this change came to be. He, unlike most people, did not switch over time. There was one climactic event in which he switched from being forlorn to enraged. It all changed when
In fact, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s only book with a dumb-show that is important to the plot. Hamlet tells the head of a group of actors to let “your clowns speak no more” in the dumb-show (3.2.40). It is very unusual to not have an actor speaking during the dumb-show, because dumb-shows were for the lower class who didn’t understand well. By doing this, Shakespeare furthers the theme of acting because, since Hamlet is manipulating the actors, he is becoming an actor too. The dumb-show also does opposite of what it normally does, because in Hamlet the uninformed audience would be doubly confused about the “argument of the play”, whereas in a normal dumb-show there is somebody there to explain to the audience what the show was about (3.2.137). Normal dumb-shows didn’t confuse people, but Hamlet caused this one to be confusing so that he could hold the audience’s attention. This furthers the importance of acting in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, because using something usual in an unusual way is a creative technique and people should recognize when the author does this because it is usually something important. Not only was the dumb-show “unusual at the time of writing Hamlet”, but “it is rare in plays [for the dumb-show] to fulfill a higher function” rather than just be a spectacle to the audience (Pearn 386, 402). Shakespeare uses a dumb-show
Since there was no presenter for the dumb-show, as is inferred to have been instructed by Hamlet, Hamlet acts as a ‘presenter’ of sorts and that his action helps him finally break Claudius down. Hamlet, throughout the mouse-trap, uses cryptically suggestive, but apparently harmless, phrases like “[to] poison in jest,” to ‘present’ to Claudius that the play is an allusion to his murder (3.2.234). Hamlet acting like the presenter that is traditionally used in dumb-shows to explain their meaning allows the audience to see he is being an actor. Acting like the presenter is pivotal to this plan, and thus his plan of revenge is carried out. Hamlet also makes remarks to Ophelia like “brief…as a woman’s love,” which is just teasing her where it hurts (3.2.153-154). Hamlet is clearly not only trying to insult Ophelia, but is acting in such a manner to manipulate her into feeling guilty as well. This acting reveals once out of about a thousand times how he cannot get over his mother marrying Claudius, so he just hates all women forever. Hamlet’s goal for the entire play scene is to “[force] attention on [the] features of [the play] which will strike home to the guilty” (Prior 194). This is Hamlet’s most daring move yet, so of course he went all out on everyone he was angry at. This isn’t so much as Hamlet’s acting as it is him acting out of character, so he’s just purposely