Monday, November 17, 2008

"Let Be"

If we recall Hamlet's mood earlier in the play we see that they were not very stable. During the wedding ceremony or presentation of the royal couple he was pesimistically gloomy. He was behaving as a child who was being forced to sit down and drink his morning tea when all he wanted to do was to play outside in the garden or be anywhere else. Afterwards when he was left alone he was sulking at the lost of his father but then he was angry at the fact that he felt the love his mother felt for her deceased husband was false. he says "frailty, thy name is woman". The next moment he was punning with his friend who came to pay him a visit and after recieving news of his fathers ghost he went into desperation. Once he has heard from the ghost what i feel he wanted somebody, anybody, to confirm (that his uncle planned to kill his father) then he was sort of like a man on a mission.
i feel Hamlet has always known what he wanted to do to his uncle but he just needed a little push. sort of like a child who's training wheels have just been taken off. "To be or not to be" i would consider as that pep talk a person gives themselves before they make a major commitment. (like when a man is about to propose and isn't really sure he wants to give up his bachelorhood but is sure that he doesn't want to loose his love but still wants to wait until the final moment to "hang himself" as they say, because something, anything opened his eyes to show him that this is the best thing to do) Well that is exactly what happened to Hamlet, i feel.
He knew that there was someting about his unlce that did not sit right and when the ghost told him he was the murderer, what did Hamlet say? "OH my prophetic soul!". He was just waiting for someone else to say something vile about the man. Then he wasn't sure as to whether or not he could carry out the task of murdering his uncle and he said the famous lines "To be or not to be". He was doubting himself but that did not stop him from his determination because he still sought ways to prove his uncles guilt. Hence the play he had the actor act for the royal household. He wanted to see his unlce reaction, more obvious he could not be. Then his final resolve came when he concluded that men were nothing more then dust. It did not matter if you were a king or a commoner, educated or not, once dead we are all the same.
Its good that he comes to this conclusion because in a way i feel that his mind found some sort of peace. In my rational he reasoning was that once he killed his uncle, this man was going to become worm food the same way he would be one day aswell. I dont think he was viewing death as a question of having to then go to heaven or hell, because if we recall he once stopped from killing the king because he was praying and he did not want his soul to go to heaven and with Guildenstern and Rosencrantz he didnt want the king of England to give them anytime to pray for forgiveness of their sins, i think he started to view death as what it was, a natural course in life which all men, sinners and saints, must undergo.

2 comments:

john Mcvey said...

I never felt that Hamlet questioned where he would go when he died. I think he was more concerned with whether or not the ghost was real or if he was just imagimimg what he wanted to hear.

Jean Studies Shakespeare said...

So let me get this straight -- you think that he finally came to peace with what he'd done and what was going to happen to him? I felt that "To be or not to be" was a question of "to live or to commit suicide," not whether or not to kill his uncle. I'm a bit confused as to which you mean about that particular soliloquy?