My Year 12 Hamlet Essay!

[jakesilove]

Hey all!

Found a couple of my old Year 12 essays, and thought I'd type them up and post them here. There will hopefully still be a few more to come. This is a Hamlet essay that I drafted about halfway through the year, so it's definitely far from the final thing. However, it's word for word exactly what I wrote in Trials. It's not even nearly perfect, and the grammar is a bit shit if I do say so myself. Hope that it helps some of you! Feel free to pass the link around to your friends



Hamlet is a play of procrastination and tragedy. To what extent do you agree with this statement?


To feel a sense of fulfilment requires an absolute knowledge of oneself. There may be no deception, no self-doubt, no hesitation in regards to understanding the essence of being. As Wilde states, ‘the aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly’. Hamlet is a man who struggles with this acceptance, a man who fails to understand his method and as such attempts to live as one he idolises. In Hamlet, Shakespeare displays the eternal fight for self-acceptance evident in every human being, and while this is often misunderstood as inaction in the case of Hamlet in fact it becomes apparent that the key realisation is to cast aside those one strives towards replicating. Hamlet’s extended thoughts lead to careful action, rather than distract from it. His existential thoughts regarding mortality helps drive his understanding forward, which combined with his subconscious desire to overcome his own appearance to face his reality concludes with a fulfilled Hamlet, willing to end his life.

In essence, Hamlet is a play of metamorphosis, one in which Hamlet mustovercome the various facades he attempts to impose upon himself. To be content, Hamlet must realise himself, and in order for that to be achieved ‘one may not be a revolutionary, an example or a martyr’ (Hesse). This sums up the three personalities he seeks to replicate in order to overcome his apparent inaction. The example; Old Hamlet. The martyr; Laertes. The revolutionary; Fortinbras.

Hamlet’s quest for truth begins by overthrowing the pressure of Old Hamlet’s reign. ‘So excellent a king’ (I, ii) as come before, Hamlet feels unable to live up to his father’s glory. And yet, it is clear to Hamlet that Claudius is to his father ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ (I, ii). The use of religious imagery during his first soliloquy and throughout the text is indicative of Hamlet’s personal state, and in fact explains his misconceived procrastination. Rather than procrastinate, Hamlet believes in the moral righteousness of revenge, unlike any other character in the play. Thereby Hamlet’s comparisons to others in fact halts his own self-realisation.

Laertes and Fortinbras represent to Hamlet all that he should be. Men of supposed ‘action’, rather than achieve their ends as Hamlet wishes to they in fact are disappointed or corrupt, with Fortinbras offended at the way he took his throne, and Laertes becoming a victim of his ‘own corruption’ (V, ii). Again, we see Hamlet’s comparison to other’s strengths hindering his own progression. In the murder of Polonius the audience is given a brief glimpse of Hamlet’s insecurities; for a moment, he is acting as his foils. He is abiding by Hesse, who theorises that ‘Men are transitory… but in all by which we pass on, from potentiality into action, from possibility to fulfilment, we have our share in this true being of God’. Through acting as his facades, though, he inevitably causes the first casualty of the text. He continues to compare himself to Fortinbras through his soliloquy in Act IV, jealous of those who ‘go to their graves like beds’ ‘even for an egg-shell’. The allegory of Denmark as an egg-shell has several meanings, but it primarily serves to enflame Hamlet due to his apparent inaction in comparison to Fortinbras’ army.

Only though the expunging of these self-imposed facades does Hamlet achieve self-realisation. ‘Let be’ (V, i), the loophole in his iconic mortality soliloquy, describes his final acceptance of his own being. Through acceptance, he achieves his goals, both to maintain his moral and religious integrity and reinstate the prior Kingship of Elsinore.

To Hamlet, there is a duplicitous dichotomy between the two Kingships as he sees them. There is the King on the throne; Claudius, corrupt and poisonous, and the honour of the Kingship that had been lost after the death of his father, Old Hamlet. Hamlet seeks to reattain this second kingship and thereby reinstate the immortality of the throne. Hamlet is obsessed with immortality, and this is a constant theme amongst all existential literature and thought. Fortinbras attempts to achieve immortality through the conquering of Norway, Laertes through the maintenance of his family’s good name and Hamlet through the cleansing of the dehumanised ‘adulterate beast’ (I, v). Hamlet sees ‘behind the existence… without a past, without a future, behind… sounds which decompose from day to day… and slips towards death, the melody stays the same’ (Satre) and must find a way to return the melody to its original sense, the sense through which Hamlet idolises.

Hamlet believes in mortality in an anti-Dorianesque manner. Rather than immortality of being he subscribes to the immortality of soul and status. Because, what is physical existence but the ‘quintessence of dust?’ (II, ii). The repetition of soft ‘s’s sounds instils into the audience the beauty of his statement, juxtaposed against the clear existential angst and the spiralling nihilism present in his mind. His shift from humanist (‘What a piece of work is man!’) to existentialism not only portrays his lack of procrastination, as he is progressing an argument, but also foreshadows in some ways the moral conclusion to the play. The ‘tragedy’ of Hamlet is in fact that the protagonist’s inability to accept death in a Humanist sense, rather than an Existential one, and thereby come about his eventual regression in thought and in act. His acceptance of death allows him to devote his life to a purpose; that purpose being the restoration of order as he understands it.

He reveals reality by overthrowing his self-imposed façade and thus gives him the ability to think for himself. From his pessimism in Act IV of ‘your fat King and your lean beggar is but variable service’ to believing that there is a ‘divinity that shapes [his] ends’ (V, ii), the situation only reaches its climax upon the final self-realisation of a character mired in personalities he believes he must take on. While ‘to be, or not to be’ (III, i) is alluding to his possible suicide, it is also referring to his rigid way of thinking at this point in the text. His final ‘let be’ (V, ii) states that he has overcome this; finally, he understands that there are more option than that present itself to him.

Hamlet is not a play of procrastination, but rather of understanding. It is a bildungsroman, an epic, a tragedy until it’s conclusion. For in the climax we see a character who understands his life thoroughly enough to accept its end. Rather than being an eventual tragedy, it is tragic until Hamlet’s realisation. We see ‘a man born to noble life… plunge into the sea of blood and lust which men call living… and yet never become deformed’ (Hesse). Rather, the murder of a friend, the suicide of a lover, the poisoning of both parents and the slaughter of an innocent leave Hamlet free from moral concern, free from doubt and thereby free from the necessity of life.