The Thought Process of Shakespeares Hamlet Essay -- William Shakespea

The Thought Process of Shakespeares junctureIf ticktlement 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 opposition of the prevailconsciousness. The obligatory cultural baggage that comes along with Hamlet heeds piffling attention to the incestuous Claudius while focusing entirely on the swart Danes legendary melancholia and his resulting revenge delays. As Laurence Olivier introduced his 1948 film version, This is the tragedy of a human beings who couldnt make up his mind. By tracking the leitmotif of thought end-to-end the play, I will examine the conflicts that preclude Hamlet from unified decisions that flow to action. Shakes peare is not content, however, with the simple notion of thought as a unmixed signifier of the battle between the mind and the body. The real clash is a conflict of consciousness, of Hamlets oscillations between infinite abstraction and shackled solipsism, between erudition of the heroic ideal and of his limited means, between the methodical mishmash of sanity and the total chaos of insanity. I repeat between not unaccompanied for anaphoric effect, but to suggest Shakespeares conception of thought that is, a set of perspectivally-splintered realities which can 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 interrogative sentence into passages ... ...ble that someday the legendary cultural baggage that accompanies Hamlet will be lost, and future generations may wish to judge the play on its striking merits and not on its required-reading position. If that i s the case, they may very well make the play bad through their different perspective, one which we cannot yet appreciate, and Hamlet, already 4 centuries old, may disappear from our cultural consciousness. As the prince himself might say, perish the thought. whole kit 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 time out of the Circle (Illinois Northwestern University Press, 1950). William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (England Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982).