Imagine living in a society where your social and economic rank determined the type of clothing you could wear. Quite frankly, I would not have survived in a society that dictated what I can or cannot wear. I would feel suppressed, as if someone was taking away my freedom. I strongly believe that what we wear defines us more than we think. In other words, fashion is an expression of who we are as an individual. However, this was not the case during the medieval period. The clothing in medieval Europe was dictated by the Pyramid of Power or a feudal system. Fashion during the medieval period was not just only about clothing, rather it dealt with economic…
Women often are judged outwardly based on their appearance, focusing their attention to the importance of dressing themselves well in order to balance with the societal pressure. In Deborah Tannen’s essay “Marked Women”, she asks herself that “what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men’s. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.” (270) which emphasizes how women can be marked. She implies that women have a certain duty to choose a style and can hardly dress without judgment being passed on their dressing. There are no “unmarked options”, everything we do is “marked”. Women express personas through clothing, reminding me of an observation developed in high school. It was a private Christian high school that had a strict dress code on our uniform. The uniform skirt was long enough to cover our knees, however, girls rolled their skirts up, trying to act pretty and sexy as…
Consequently, Hamlets’ tragic flaw leads to his downfall. His lack of action causes him not to kill Claudius when he has the chance, giving him the advantage. It can be seen that Claudius has the advantage to kill Hamlet when he states, “By letters conjuring to that effect/The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England” (4.3.65-6). Since Hamlet reveals that he knows that Claudius killed the former king, Claudius is deceiving Hamlet into going to England, where he will be executed. Hamlet reveals his knowledge of the murder when he puts on the play, re-enacting the former King’s murder. Now Claudius knows that he must kill Hamlet in order to avoid getting caught and stay on the throne. Claudius tells Hamlet that he is sending him to England for…
The young prince of Denmark, Hamlet has recently lost his father. Right after this melancholy, his uncle, Claudius, takes over the entire property of his past away father: his crown and his wife (Gertrude) who is Hamlet's mother. These chain heartbreaking misfortunes leave deep wounds on the soul of young Hamlet and his soliloquies, allowing the audience to enter his agitated mind, reveal these spiritual scars.…
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said “Good literature substitutes for an experience that we ourselves have not lived through.” By this Solzhenitsyn meant that literature often gives us scenarios and conflicts that we might not experience in our lifetime. This is shown through the literary work Hamlet by William Shakespeare. After reading Hamlet I disagree with this quote because authors often exaggerate the truth to make a story more interesting.…
As C.G Jung once said, “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” In Willam Shakespeare's Hamlet, the protagonist Hamlet and antagonist Claudius struggle with basic of notions of right and wrong bringing their morality into question. The murder of an innocent, the abuse of the women closest to them and, the quest to murder one another are simply the indications of how both characters are morally weak.…
The primary function of the first soliloquy is to reveal to the audience Hamlet's profound melancholia and the reasons for his despair. Hamlet explains, with an outpouring of disgust, anger, sorrow, and grief that everything in his world is either futile or contemptible.…
Hamlet decides to get more information / prove what the ghost was saying before doing…
Justice is something all human beings strive for. Whether it be for selfish intent or for someone you love. It all runs within our mind. To give an example of justice and how we all strive for it I have chosen Hamlet. Hamlet is the main character and his feelings and wants are expressed well enough to elaborate on.…
Hamlet strips away the veneers and smoke screens that trap our minds, forcing us to confront the raw human condition in all its pain and glory. For this reason, Hamlet has never ceased to enthral audiences since its conception, and has been critically scrutinized for centuries. Shakespeare explores ideas that are universally understood: the human need for vengeance, human glory as well as human failings, and the unavoidable presence of death. Collectively, these ideas compose a deep probing of the human condition. On a personal level, Hamlet has been worthy of my interpretive study because it has provoked me to engage with my surroundings more critically, questioning established values, norms and codes of behaviour that had previously held my conviction.…
We as people bear the onerous task of decision-making every day of our lives. Some decisions are small, and thus require little or no thinking, while others are major and require difficult pondering. On the other hand, some people choose to base their actions on whatever their heart tells them to do. They say we should “trust our gut feeling;” however, our most important decisions in life should not be made based on our inner feelings. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet must decide between avenging his father’s death by murdering his uncle, or letting his kingdom go to the grave father and rot under his uncle’s corruption.…
In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, justice, revenge, and love were big themes in the play. The concept of justice is hard to understand in the play, also agreeing that Hamlet also receives justice or revenge for his murdered father. By killing his uncle Claudius, does Hamlet truly receive justice or did he seek revenge for his father’s death? Was Hamlet’s doings for the love of his father or the hatred of his uncle? Justice is key for Hamlet because he thinks that he receives justice for the death of his uncle, but really it is just revenge.…
In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare conveys these two main factors fate and flaw to demonstrate the depiction of Hamlet’s demise. A flaw is an imperfection, or defect in someone’s behaviour. Fate is the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power.…
Hamlet’s indecisiveness to act leads to the deaths of his beloved mother Gertrude, his only love Ophelia, her father and brother, along with his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet is a young, childlike character who is also a student of life due to his contemplating nature in which he is always questioning everything “to be, or not to be: that is the question” (Act III, Scene I). Hamlet delays to act because he does not know how to respond to Claudius’ action because secretly that is what he wanted—to kill his father and marry his mother. Not in actuality, but deep down in the recesses of psychological turmoil almost all sons love their mothers to such an extent that they are jealous of their fathers, and wish to take their…
Shakespeare’s timeless work of literature, and one of the most popular plays to this day, Hamlet, was not just a tale Shakespeare himself thought up on his own with no inspiration from outside sources. Shakespeare’s wonderful writing stems from not only his natural talent, but from his influence pulled from the great writers who came before him. Literature builds upon itself; every work of literature in existence has some inspiration from another work. Excluding any outside influence from a work of literature is something that is just not possible. Shakespeare took inspiration from some of the best works in literature, and it resulted in one of the most known and loved plays to this days. Works that…