The Thought Process of Shakespeares Hamlet Essay -- William Shakespea

The Thought Process of Shakespeares villageIf Hamlet from himself be taen away,And when hes not himself does wrong Laertes,Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.Who does it then? His madness. Ift be so,Hamlet is of the faction that is wrongdHis madness is poor Hamlets enemy.(V.ii.230-235) Hamlets self-description in his apology to Laertes, delivered in the appropriately distanced and divided third-person, explicitly fingers the greatest antagonist of the playconsciousness. The obligatory heathenish baggage that comes along with Hamlet heeds little attention to the incestuous Claudius while focusing entirely on the gloomy Danes known melancholia and his resulting revenge delays. As Laurence Olivier introduced his 1948 take on version, This is the tragedy of a man who couldnt make up his mind. By tracking the leitmotif of thought throughout the play, I will examine the conflicts that preclude Hamlet from unified decisions that lead to action. Shakespeare is not content, ho wever, with the simple notion of thought as a mere signifier of the battle between the mind and the body. The real brushing is a conflict of consciousness, of Hamlets oscillations between infinite abstraction and shackled solipsism, between recognition of the heroic ideal and of his limited means, between the methodical mishmash of saneness and the total chaos of insanity. I repeat between not only for anaphoric effect, but to suggest Shakespeares conception of thought that is, a set of perspectivally-splintered realities which grass be resolutely conflated, for better or worse, only by the mediating hand of action. Any discussion of Hamlet, a work steeped in contradictions and doubles, necessitates inquiry into passages ... ...ble that someday the legendary cultural baggage that accompanies Hamlet will be lost, and future generations whitethorn wish to judge the play on its dramatic merits and not on its required-reading position. If that is the case, they may very well make the play bad through their different perspective, one which we cannot yet appreciate, and Hamlet, already four centuries old, may disappear from our cultural consciousness. As the prince himself might say, perish the thought. Works CitedFredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham Duke University Press, 1991). Franco Moretti, Modern Epic (New York Verso, 1996). Marjorie Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (Illinois Northwestern University Press, 1950). William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (England Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982).