How does hamlet personify the ideas of the renaissance

He was unsure if what the spirit stated was true, and feared the consequences of carrying out its deadly orders. It is rather unclear by means of out the play whether Claudius did indeed murder the king, and Hamlet constantly postpones his scheme to gather far more and a lot more proof.

He is torn in between the burning want for vengeance and his inner yearning for truth and righteous action. Act II V. Claudius proves to be an effectual leader who suffers from guilt in his previous misdeeds. He even prays to God hoping that 1 day he can seek forgiveness.

The reader is thrown into a planet of shades of gray, where murders can repent and heroes lead to far more damage than might otherwise have been wrought. This second portion is in stark contract to the black and white morality presented earlier. When Hamlet applies his crucial humanistic pondering, he finds the complexities inherent in moral reasoning and action.

How can Hamlet genuinely take action that is meaningful and will attain a optimistic end? Hamlet yearns for divine directive, but in the silent humanistic universe, there are no easy black and white answers.

How can he successfully deal with Claudius and his actions without becoming like him? This philosophical reasoning eventually proves ineffectual, and Hamlet is forced to action. Whilst Hamlet and his mother are in a deeply heated argument, Hamlet hears a cry for aid from a tapestry. With no even pondering, Hamlet thrusts his sword into the tapestry, stabbing an eavesdropping Polonius dead. Is it the king? When she replies that he has done a barbaric issue, Hamlet replies that it is nearly as barbaric as killing a king and marrying his brother.

At this point Hamlet is consumed, and his inner philosophical discourse has been silenced. With no rules based morality to guide his actions and philosophical inquiry yearning no benefits, the young prince rather begins to act impulsively and rashly. He is consumed by revenge, and the correct or incorrect of his actions is lost on him.

Ironically, at this point he becomes no different than Claudius. Just as Hamlet is a son who seeks to punish a man who murdered his father, Hamlet has now deprived a son of a father.

At this point Hamlet is consumed by bloodlust. The ghostly apparition of his father appears again to remind him of his deadly quest to kill Claudius.

There is no hint of justice, just vengeance. When Hamlet confronts Claudius and is lastly in a position to achieve his revenge, the hollowness and folly of his quest is revealed.

Although he does not yet have an explanatory theory of his own, Claudius knows better. One final point on Polonius the avowedly politic huntsman. As such, he typifies an order of moral turpitude that extends far beyond the complexities attendant on what, after Kantorowicz, might be thought of as the two bodies inhabited by Hamlet and the Danish royal family.

Polonius imagines himself set apart by wiliness, experience, and commitment to the greater good. Shakespeare thus crafts a play world in which hunter and prey are interchangeable, and in which the art of hunting carries little trace of the nobility claimed for it by Gascoigne. However, as Claus Uhlig established some time ago, these lines have an intellectual and cultural genealogy that goes far beyond the imponderables of Shakespearean biography.

For one prominent if, in this respect, marginal group of moralizing humanists, the hunt pandered to the worst and most destructive instincts of humankind.

For as touchyng the death of a deare, or other wilde beast, ye know your selves, what ceremonies they use about the same. Every poore man maie cutte out an oxe, or a shepe, wheras suche venaison maie not be dismembred but of a gentilman: who bareheadded, and set on knees, with a knife prepared proprely to that use, for every kynde of knife is not allowable also with certaine iestures, cuttes a sunder certaine partes of the wildbeast, in a certaine order verie circumstantly.

So therfore wheras these hunters through continuall chasyng and eatyng of theyr venerie, gaine nothyng, but in a maner dooe them selfes also degenerate into wilde and salvage propretees, ye maie see yet, how through this errour of mine, thei repute theyr lyves ledde in more than princely pleasure.

Worse than bestial, in fact. For Lucretius, the venatorial lifestyle was an expression of the human condition before the advent of domesticity, language, and civilisation: primitive, but very far from innocent.

It was an all but feral community of appetitive violence, with human beings competing against one another and the animals on whom they preyed—whose flesh they ate for nutrition, whose skins they wore to ward off the cold, and whose superior vision allowed them to hunt their human predators by night.

Only with the passage of time would humankind, by stages, assume the characteristics with which to distinguish itself from the rest of the animal world.

Its appetites, variously hypostatised, remain. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Lucretian vision was vividly adapted by the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo, principally in his companion pieces The Hunt and Return from the Hunt. The first of these see figure 7 shows a hunting landscape in which human and animal predation, and vulnerability, is indistinguishable. In the centre left, a man wearing a lion skin grapples with a bear attacking a lion attacking a bear; the look of helpless terror on his face suggests that he is set to join the corpse on the lower right hand side of the painting, replete with a slashed throat and defensive wounds to his arms.

Others, following John of Salisbury, worked biblical variations on the theme. Although Oppian was untroubled by the moral or existential status of hunting, he viewed it in related terms.

Although Gascoigne frequently evinces pity for the animals pursued in the hunt, such ambiguities do not suit his purpose. The Noble Arte avoids them accordingly. As this second example intimates, Shakespeare had a firm grasp on the centrality of cunning to the hunt, on both literal and metaphorical levels.

But compare Angelo and Troilus, who both turn to venatorial cunning in flattering themselves that they are set apart from the everyday appetites that drive their worlds.

By projecting the cunning of others, both Troilus and Angelo insulate themselves against the realities of their appetitive strategizing. With his usual perspicuity, Claudius is alert to the problem. But he is not in a position to do much about it. As a prudent Machiavellian, he has elected to reduce his exposure by hunting through others; he is therefore limited by the competence of his agents. The weapons at his disposal are unfit for the task at hand.

Using them would be to resemble an archer shooting into the wind with arrows that are not heavy enough to penetrate it: they would be blown off course and would fail to hit their intended mark. He has therefore turned to different weapons in seeking to give Hamlet his due. In wronging Laertes while in the clutches of madness, he has resembled an archer who, while practising his craft at home, misses his target and inadvertently harms his sibling. So sorry. Unsatisfactory though Laertes must find this travesty of an apology, the fact that he is himself only feigning reconciliation in the lead up to their fencing match allows him to maintain his composure, matching dissimulation with dissimulation.

Osric senior, perhaps. In reality, Laertes plans to kill Hamlet within minutes. In his Art of Rhetoric , Thomas Wilson lists numerous representative examples of social weakness and venality that the orator might relate in order to win the goodwill of his listeners by amusing them. One relates to. In telling of the encounter between Laertes and Hamlet, Shakespeare allows for no such pleasurably ironizing distance: their mutual dissembling succinctly encapsulates a world of moral decrepitude.

It is, furthermore, one deployed with deft cunning, and ensures that Hamlet stays off his guard as Laertes prepares to murder him. The trap will nevertheless fail to accomplish its ends, and will fall back on the heads of Laertes and Claudius alike. The moral is repeated in Proverbs , and cognate forms of it appear in numerous biblical texts. Such language was understandably appealing to dramatists working in the revenge tragedy tradition, in which the act of vengeance more often than not gives the revenger a share in the crime he sets out to put right.

Why is Hamlet a better play than those by Chettle and Marlowe? In place of moralistic didacticism, he converts venatorial discourse into the emblem of a moral order that is disconnected from itself—one in which everyone is alienated from everyone else, and not just from the pantomime Machiavels amongst them.

Just as much as Erasmus, the Shakespeare of Hamlet sees hunting as an expression of the community and commerce of cunning—of interchangeably animalistic guile masquerading as virtue, of appetitive force disguising itself beneath the ceremonial brocade of nobility.

Where Shakespeare differs from his great humanist predecessor is that he does not therefore condemn hunting as a deviation from a gold standard of morality.

In his hands it is a metaphor through which to comprehend the way things are, however disagreeable these might seem to be. Humankind eats animals to sustain itself, and yet the human body must ultimately serve as food for animals. Nor are they intended to sound as if they are. A fisherman, hunter, falconer, or fowler might be exceptionally skilful in his art, but he cannot thereby efface either his animal nature or what this represents.

If human beings inhabit a world in which everything feeds on everything else, then notions of their ontological distinctiveness or of a hierarchy of natural virtue begin to seem ridiculous. In the sphere of moral philosophy, cunning is more than an agent of consuming decay. It becomes a universal solvent. Of course, their immediate sense is that the Ghost, despite his heavily armoured appearance, makes no noise as he passes them; but stalking is also the unobtrusive means of proceeding favoured by the stealthy predator or huntsman.

The Ghost is in pursuit of something—be it revenge, Hamlet, or the Norwegians against whom Francisco, Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio are standing guard. Then, the coming of the dawn forces him to flee.

How might Shakespeare have come to transform this relatively minor feature of the story into the paradigm that governs social and interpersonal relations in his Hamlet? Less speculative explanations are also available. Within these, the trickster uses his wily cunning to entrap the innocent, and to relieve them of their purses.

The most compelling explanation for the hunting framework of Hamlet can be found in revenge tragedy, particularly in its Senecan inflection. Something of the sort is hinted at in the preceding references to Kyd, Marlowe, Chettle, and the two lost Aeschylus plays, but much literary excavation remains.

Through a show of false friendship, he has lured his brother and his nephews back to Mycenae. Although Thyestes suspects a trap 3. But by the time this mode reached the zenith of its popularity to the chagrin of commentators like Nashe in the years around , English playwrights had begun to exploit its dramaturgic potential.

One prominent marker of these qualities is that Shakespeare far exceeds his rivals in the creative adaptation of the Senecan hunting motif. That is, to capture and to rape Lavinia—both as an expression of their lust and as a means of wounding her father. There is no sense here of a moral order being restored in the fashion, however imperfect, of The Spanish Tragedy : Shakespeare uses the hunt to suggest that they are all as bad as each other.

Without question, Shakespeare knew the Phaedra well. Hippolytus, son of King Theseus of Athens absent on a mission to the underworld , is preparing to go out hunting one morning.

He arouses the passionate desire of his stepmother, Phaedra, who determines to seduce him in a form of amatory hunt. With animals to track and kill in honour of Diana, sex or other Venusian pursuits could not be further from his mind.

An awkward exchange ensues, and Hippolytus flees. Theseus immediately vows to kill Hippolytus in revenge or punishment, and constrains his father Neptune to hunt Hippolytus down. Once Hippolytus is dead and elaborately dismembered ripped apart by his own hunting equipment and in the natural landscape he revered , Phaedra confesses her unbearable guilt and kills herself.

Theseus is wracked with remorse. The moral of the story? Humankind should be wary of attempting to exert potentia or potestas power or forceful control over the conditions of its existence fortuna.

That responsibility belongs to nature natura , the entity that Hippolytus shapes at once to honour and to dominate through his hunting.

Typically, the Chorus gets it wrong—and does so in revealing terms. What the Chorus overlooks is that natura itself is an appetitive hunter, both in the violence of the wild qua Diana and in love qua Venus.

In that humankind often errs on account of its passions, it may seem compromised—venal, one might say—when judged against transcendently virtuous constructions of morality. The Senecan irony is that nature itself, like its predominating deities, is no different.

Hippolytus likes to think of himself as an apex hunter, but he belongs to a landscape that will in time consume him. Natura is the only truly potent exponent of the chase, and is as inscrutably deadly to Hippolytus as Hippolytus must seem to a deer or boar. The Chorus approves. Circumstances differ, but the delusional arrogance of humankind remains unsullied. It takes a special kind of credulity to discern the workings of providence, the gods, or a hypostasised nature through the interstices of the Danish court.

The distinguishing feature of Hamlet is that Shakespeare makes fortuna the expression of human agency alone. Fate is other people, and its medium is their cunning: human slings; human arrows. Versions of Christianity are a prominent feature of the play, but they too fail to cohere. Those who prevail, such as Claudius and Fortinbras, do so because they consciously Claudius or unconsciously Fortinbras recognise and exploit the appetitive nature of the world and, in some measure, the reality of their place within it.

Kingship along with the entire apparatus of honour, order, and moral authority exists in virtue of the violence and guile with which it is acquired and maintained. Those characters that take themselves to be hunting in the interests of some other cause, howsoever virtuous or heartfelt, fail to comprehend themselves or the world around them.

They condemn themselves thereby. In time, this unrelentingly cynegetic vision of fortuna will, of course, consume Fortinbras just as surely it consumes Claudius. That is the nature of things. It is the opposite of Cicero; the antithesis of the moral philosophy at the heart of the humanist project. Although the De officiis ranks hunting as an honourable pastime when pursued in careful moderation, Cicero is at pains to stress that the guileful qualities required in the hunt are inimical to the freely civic good, grounded as that is in reason and language.

In the Tusculan Disputations , 2. On the most fundamental level, Cicero distinguishes between wisdom sapientia and cunning, craftiness, guile, or trickery calliditas , just as he writes of calliditas being punished for masquerading as the virtuous species of practical wisdom, prudentia. Calliditas , as he takes considerable pains to stress, is simply not the Roman way. For instance, Cicero notes that individuals have particular dispositions and talents of body and mind ingenia : some can run quickly, some are cheerful, and some are earnest.

Others have natural cunning. Hannibal was one such, and so was the Roman who defeated him, Quintus Maximus. A better example, however, was the Athenian ruler Solon—who as a young man found a way to thwart the letter of the misconceived law in urging the conquest of Salamis, an island that Athens had been contesting with Megara.

Annibal was craftie. In which kinde, the Greeks. Nor does Solon feature in the De officiis alone. In the version known to Shakespeare:. So one daye he ranne sodainly out of his house with a garland on his head, and gotte him to the market place, where the people straight swarmed like bees about him: and getting him up upon the stone where all proclamations are usually made, out he singeth these Elegies he had made.

Only a parallel, but an intriguing one: Hamlet uses his cunning in a similar way in assuming madness and in framing a work of poetic invention and to similar ends to make claims that would, if expressed openly, thwart authority and invite punishment. Solon is another figure who invites comparison with Hamlet, but whose example Hamlet is unable to match. Returning to the De officiis , Cicero is explicit that no matter how impressive individual talents like cunning might seem, they threaten to undermine the foundations of the civic life: it is imperative that they be translated into a persona consonant with the public good.

Not all kinds of natural talent—low cunning, to take the example closest to hand—are obviously compatible with the doctrine of upstanding civic personae , but Cicero is sure in his prescriptions. Different dispositions will translate into different personae , but the very fact of rational translation ensures that the stain of appetitive, and animalistic, calliditas is removed. The cunning man, as discussed, might exploit the qualities of his ingenium in becoming a military commander.

Indeed, things could hardly be otherwise: honestas and decorum , the rationally derived qualities that define all personae , have equal claims to natural and to civic virtue. The important exception to this universalism is the category of slaves. Cicero chooses not to explore why slaves are slaves; that is a matter of fortune.

He is content to note that although they can be bought and sold, and must often be disciplined, they should be treated with justice. Furthermore, Aristotle believes that potential slaves should be hunted like animals to ensure their efficient acquisition.

This is not a metaphor. There is another and more anxious strain in the De officiis , one that acknowledges the potential for discord between the res of a naturally cunning disposition and the verba of virtuous public life.

For instance, stipulating that there are two kinds of crime—those of violence and those of deceit—Cicero comes down hardest on the latter. Manifestly, Cicero is concerned at the scope for pretended virtue within his Rome. Dissemblers call into question everything that is distinctive and valuable about civic virtue, and therefore cannot be tolerated.

Despite the rhetoric of book 1, reason and the law here are anything but the culmination of a union between differing ingenia and the honour and decorousness of public personae. Reason therefore requireth this: y t nothing suttelly, nothing fainedly, nothing deceitfully be done. Cicero has law and philosophy regulating not particular acts of crafty dishonesty, but dishonest craftiness itself.

On the one hand, then, Cicero projects his blithely circular confidence that all manner of thing shall be well, and that ratio as expressed through honestas and decorum ensures that the personae taken on by Roman citizens are at once morally praiseworthy and their true, natural, selves. What of the persona in this appetitive world?

Is it possible to develop a settled sense of self when human existence is shown to depend on mutual predation—when, depending on the perspective from which a scene is viewed, a character is likely to be hunter, prey, or a little of both? See figure 8, which shows a stalking cow but illustrates the principle clearly enough. For the most part, it was used for forms of fowling but could also be used for larger mammalian prey, like deer; in the latter case, it was closely associated with poaching.

Whistles, calls, lures, and decoys have been discussed at various points above, and the huntsman would go to extraordinary and sometimes slightly comic lengths to pass undetected—from camouflaged clothing greens and greys were most favoured to dressing up as a tree so that birds might be tricked into approaching his traps see figure 9.

As one might expect from one who defines himself against mere seeming, Hamlet summons hypocrisy only to disdain it. Like the different personae that Achilles and Patroclus put on to obscure their appetitive excesses from themselves, virtue is on this account used to plaster over the rotten core of Danish life.

At the same time, Hamlet appears open about playing the hypocrite himself. Yet the fact of the matter is that he wants to use daggers on her, or thinks he does. Rather than killing his mother, he seeks to enlighten her, or at least to make her change her ways.

The dictates of nature and of sincerity collide. Why then does Shakespeare not have Hamlet use the language of the hunt to describe his antic disposition? To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that in Hamlet , hypocrisy is not the courtly tribute that La Rochefoucauld would have paid to virtue by vice. Rather, virtue is simply one mode of simulation and dissimulation at the disposal of hypocrite. Hypocrisy, in its turn, is how one stays alive. That is, to counterfeit a letter from Claudius condemning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in his place, thereby removing the net in which he is trapped and enabling him to escape.

Crucially, he informs Horatio that this plot was not the child of either his reason or his willpower. Before he understood what he was doing, he had engaged in an instinctive form of deception that was at once evasive and retributive; his brain, as an organ of his body, used its powers in the service of its naturally cynegetic appetite, not of rationality or moral deliberation.

Again, Shakespeare exploits a dramatic metaphor to emphasise the point. In performing instinctively, his brains are like an actor taking to the stage without a script, and without a comprehension of the significance or scope of the part he must play.

In response, Horatio trims and shuffles with his usual tact until Osric enters to offer light relief. Claudius is the only character in the play able to comprehend an approximation of this state of affairs.

Take his chapel scene soliloquy. Claudius is no less ambitious a usurper than Richard, but his soliloquy demonstrates greater moral and psychological complexity than anything Shakespeare gifted his charismatic hunchback.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Much more might be said of this soliloquy. Birdlime was an adhesive substance that a fowler would produce from mistletoe berries or by boiling down the bark of holly trees. When a bird could be enticed to land on these sticks or branches by the use of decoys, lures, or calls , it would attempt to escape, all the while covering more of its feathers in birdlime and more fixedly sealing its fate: see depiction in figure 9.

Although this method of taking birds was manifestly very effective, its messiness and cruelty make it easy to see why descriptions of it are generally absent from early modern venatorial writings. Yet while Claudius clearly acknowledges his crime, his struggle is of a different kind and seeks a very different sort of freedom. His aim is not divine forgiveness, which he acknowledges as impossible in the circumstances, but a dispensation with which to salve his conscience while retaining both the cause his ambition and the fruits his throne and wife of his crime.

As such, Claudius realises that he runs the risk of further embroiling himself in sin. In struggling for a special dispensation for his crimes, he knows that he is not fully penitent, and that he is further neglecting his duties towards God. Having already lived with the guilt of killing his brother for several months, perdition—whether real or imagined—does not trouble him overmuch. For him, the real benefit of his prayer is that it offers a sort of catharsis.

His psychological balance restored, he continues about his business with intelligent equanimity. The culminating irony is that this posture of penitence succeeds in furnishing Claudius with a form of deliverance, and an immediate one at that. Perhaps Hamlet would have found an excuse to baulk in any circumstances. But as the chapel scene unfolds before us, we can be in no doubt that seeming virtue has its uses. Maybe so, but this strikes me as too neat a reading, flattening out something central about who and what Hamlet and the other inhabitants of Elsinore think they are.

We recall that Hamlet strikes a different note earlier in the play. If, however, the governing metaphor of existence is one of the hunt, the personae that one adopts are the products of appetite, fear, and suspicion.

The significance of these personae could not be further removed than it is from the Maskenfreiheit , or freedom conferred by masks, imagined in the nineteenth century by Heine: it affirms a world in which hypocrisy and misrepresentation are not a choice one makes but an ineluctable state of being. Within this space, human affairs are incontestably bogus, but there are no resources with which to convert them to comedy, or even to satire; there is no neglected order against which to measure the mendacity of everyday life.

But as a world of mutual predation and deceit means that it can only express itself through other hypocritical guises, it has no means of escape that do not further ensnare it. In this, as we shall see over the course of the next three chapters, he is entirely successful—whether through his antic disposition, or by masquerading in the roles of the revenger, philosopher, moralist, poet, lover, wronged son, wounded friend, man of the stage, or agent of providence.

Far from having Hamlet express something of his true being through his urge to perform, Shakespeare has him employ the personae to guarantee his alienation from himself and the world around him.

Because they are the work of artifice, expedience, and stunted vision, the personae obscure reality and thereby make understanding it all but impossible: Hamlet can no more fit himself to them than he can escape them or bring himself to understand their true nature.

One that for all its charisma, can never emerge as the singular self that he and many of his students seek to reveal. Fate is other people. In whose sequence one always belongs. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Remember him in your prayers. From its first scene to its last, Hamlet is preoccupied with the attempt to make sense of the past. Its power, inaccessibility, and ambiguity are everywhere present—animating plot, motivating action, and occasioning headaches that are personal and political, evidential and existential.

In what follows, I want to steer this critical discussion in a new direction. Specifically, I want to explore the notion that Hamlet is concerned less with the claims of the past on the present than with exposing the perspectives from which the shifting present apprehends, appropriates, and frequently reshapes that which has gone before it. To say that one is remembering something may be to give it the stamp of lived experience, inward authenticity, or naturalness.

To say that something belongs to the historical record may be to endow it with cultural authority. What Hamlet takes pains to delineate is that in each case, the past can assert no identity of its own. Whether mediated in mnemonic or historical form, it can only exist through modes of representation that are as subject to partiality as they are to distortion.

Although Hamlet and many others in the play invest considerable amounts of energy in pretending otherwise, the pasts to which they respond are a product of the imperatives and desires with which they, in the present, are inescapably absorbed; the past is revealed as another screen on which they can project the personae and pretence of their disconnected moral vision.

From there, I move to consider the vulnerability of memory, and the concomitant ease with which people forget. I show that much of the dramatic charge carried by these lines depends on the Aristotelian distinction between remembering and recollecting, and on the ambiguous metaphors on which early modern mnemonic discourse depends. Rights of Memory and the History of the Danes. Having just discovered that the Danish throne is his for the taking, Fortinbras begins to think of legitimation.

Although he is otherwise portrayed as a young man in a hurry—content with a half line before pushing on—we are left to infer that, as he contemplates the throne he has long coveted, he is on his best behaviour. This is understandable. Horatio finds himself with the ear of the incoming monarch; if he is to prosper in Denmark, he must establish his place within the new regime.

Be that as it may, the claim advanced by Fortinbras is deeply problematic. Put as simply as possible, these memorial rights do not exist anywhere other than his own head.

He has my dying voice. No need for psephology to tell which way the wind is blowing. Claudius opts for diplomacy to counter this aggression, and his decision appears to pay off. If such a moment arrives, Shakespeare does not allow us to see it. When Fortinbras next appears, he is already on campaign. Hamlet, oppressed by thoughts of his inactivity in the matter of revenge, responds to these comments with the only remotely favourable verdict on Fortinbras in the play.

Claudius knows all about ambition, and recognises Fortinbras as a threat: a Scandinavian Hotspur, minus the impetuous charm. It reveals more far about his own preoccupations than it does about the character of his Norwegian rival. Hamlet filters Fortinbras through the prism of his own anxieties and preoccupations, and Fortinbras emerges in the image of unlikeness. As Hamlet maintains that the accomplishment of particular ends is incidental to his own identity as a son and prince, so he maintains that it means nothing to a son and prince whose strutting conviction he admires.

In the attempt to win it as his own, he challenged Old Hamlet to single combat:. Old Fortinbras lost the combat, was slain, and forfeited his claims to Danish territory; had Old Hamlet lost the combat and been killed, the present Danish territories would have come under Norwegian dominion.

The best explanation is perhaps that Shakespeare inadvertently preserves the residue of the Hamlet legend in its earlier iterations, in which the Old Hamlet figure is an ambitious pirate rather than a monarch, but who is nevertheless challenged to combat by the King of Norway. Might makes right. Old Hamlet prevails in combat and his claim is vindicated; Old Fortinbras is defeated and his claim is vanquished.

All is determined by force of arms. Horatio offers no moralising gloss on these historical events, and even concedes that things could legitimately be viewed from other historical perspectives.

What to the Danes is valour might elsewhere look like cruelty, malice, pride, tyranny, or impetuous ambition. He is reading from the same received script as Horatio. For Claudius, by contrast, we know that valour is a dispensable virtue, emptied out and of significance only in retrospect; victory is its own reward and can be attained by any means.

Old Hamlet triumphed over his rival through strength, cunning, or ruthlessness, and it was his triumph alone that marked his fitness to rule. A related consideration is that for the duration of the sixteenth century, the historical Denmark was geopolitically dominant in the Nordic and Baltic regions. For those on the wrong end of this dominance, such as the influential Swedish historians Johannes and Olaus Magnus, appetitive thuggishness was simply the Danish way.

In due course, their accounts would be read with care by Belleforest. The most grosse and sencelesse proud dolts. Thus walkes he up and downe in his Majestie, taking a yard of ground at every step, and stamps on the earth so terrible, as if he ment to knocke uppe a spirite. Nor Barbary it selfe is halfe so barbarous as they are. Denmark was a nation of uncouth and unreflective bullies. That they are illusory is not seriously open to question.

But in another sense, Shakespeare marks them as delusional. Memories—real, imagined, and distorted—are the media through which this reality is cloaked and made decorous. As such, they are unreliable and easily compromised. O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths, to steal away their brains! Shortly afterwards, Horatio joins in with a variation on the theme: a diminutive of the treasure house metaphor the Greek and Latin thesaurus that had been a mnemonic staple since antiquity.

More of rhetorical memoria and the techniques devised to support it later in the chapter. The point to stress for now is that although Hamlet is chiefly concerned to ridicule Osric, his remarks imply the existence of a world in which human beings are unable to reconstruct things as they have experienced or observed them—one in which memories are partial or distorted or flattened out.

To put it a little differently, Hamlet allows us to infer that Elsinore is a place in which the variegated temperaments and dispositions of individual human beings mean that the past is at once subjective and tractable.

Subjectivity is obvious enough: the way in which one remembers something is contingent on where one was, how one felt, and whether one understood what one was experiencing when initially experiencing it. Their inherent subjectivity also makes memories irrefutable, at least on one level. But Shakespeare does not stop here. The nature of all individual experience means not only that memories are subjective, but that they are called to mind through the emotional or political dictates of the moment—in a word, that they are tractable.

This process of accommodation might be viewed as just another facet of embodied cognition in the human subject. In Hamlet , however, Shakespeare shows that such accommodations often slip over into fabrication, misrepresentation, elision, and deceit—sometimes as an act of volition, more generally without a character being conscious of the fact. For each sibling, the dictates of memory take second place to those of duty or inclination, leaving both of them with a ruptured sense of who they are and how they should behave.

Moreover, the notion of the memory as a repository of practical wisdom is one to which Laertes has himself been drawn. She is, however, careful not to commit herself to any course of action in acceding to it, and shifts the focal point of the discussion from her conduct to that of her brother.

Read or performed one way, this is a beautifully comedic tableau of family life. What she tells him of her relationship with Hamlet affirms the gossip, prying if not prurient, that he has heard at court. Outraged, and not trusting to the discretion of anyone but himself, he insists that she break off all communication with Hamlet. To comprehend the appalled sympathy with which Shakespeare imagines this moment, we must take a couple of steps backwards. In the second, by comparing Polonius to Jephthah 2.

We never learn what he thinks these sins are. No matter. She cannot be deflected. Fortinbras and the ambassadors enter, horatio explains, fortinbras wants hamlet to have a funeral of a solider. Humanism Renaissance an intellectual movement that greatly influenced Renaissance thinkers, writers, and artists. He is pointless and like an unweeded garden. His father is far superior to his uncle. Dying is just sleeping, but no one knows what happens after death.

Why deal with everything when you can just end it all? No Fear Hamlet Act 1 September 21, Hamlet Movie Questions July 22, Laertes gets ready to leave for France and cautions Ophelia against falling in love with hamlet as he cannot marry her.

Hamlet and the guards search for the Ghost. The ghost tells Hamlet that he was poisoned and killed by Claudius instead of being bitten by a snake.

Polonius sent Reynaldo to Paris to spy on his son Laertes. Claudius and Gurturde hire Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out whats wrong with hamlet. Rosencrantz and guildenstern tell claudius and gurtude that hamlet has organized a play for that eventing, they agree to attend.

Hamlet coaches the actors. Claudius wants to send Hamlet to England. Gertrude tells claudius hamlet has gone mad and murdered polonius. Sends rosencrantz and guildenstern to bring hamlet to him. Claudius tells a group of attendants what he plans to do with hamlet, confronts hamlet until he tells claudius where the body is and tells him he needs to be sent to england for his own good. Hamlet, rosencrants and guildensters on their was to the ship to england see fortinbras and his army on their way to poland and he tells hamlet they will fight over a small piece of land, hamlet compares himself to fortinbras soliloquy.

Ophelia, in her madness, sings Bawdy songs.