HOW DOES SHAKESPEARE EXPLORE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE THEME OF APPEARANCE AND REALITY AND HAMLET'S COMMISSION TO AVENGE HIS FATHER'S DEATH?

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KEVIN BEDFORD

HOW DOES SHAKESPEARE EXPLORE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE THEME OF APPEARANCE AND REALITY AND HAMLET’S COMMISSION TO AVENGE HIS FATHER’S DEATH?

William Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” between 1599 and 1601.  Court and politics played an important part in Elizabethan life, just as they do in “Hamlet” where the Court, in late Elizabethan England, was full of lies and deceit.  God gave us destiny and choice.  Destiny is what God wants all to follow.  Choice is human will that leads to sin.  An example of human choice is Claudius killing his brother Old Hamlet, the King of Denmark so that he can be King and, in turn, marry Gertrude.  He can only maintain an illusion of Kingship through lies and deceit.

The Chain of Being was the way the Elizabethans viewed their universe.  It demanded that the lowest peasant should be the best peasant and the monarch should be the best monarch.  God has placed each of these people in that place.  If a noble is to become King then he will be by God’s will not his own.  The Chain of Being is disrupted in “Hamlet” by Claudius, the brother of the King Hamlet of Denmark.  This is an example of a person going against God’s will.  But it must also be questioned whether Hamlet’s role of avenger, although a conventional theatrical stock character, is equally disruptive.  

Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan philosopher condemned revenge as ‘a kind of wild justice’. (York Notes).  He argued ‘it does offend the law [and] putteth the law out of office’ (York Notes).  The Christian Church insisted that vengeance was God’s business not man’s.  However, Helen Gardner writes in “The Historical Approach to “Hamlet”.  That in 1584, Queen Elizabeth’s respected chief minister Burghly, who was a law-abiding and God-fearing man like all other men, endorsed the Bond of Association which was signed by thousands of people in England, swearing to “take the uttermost revenge” on any who had a hand in or who would benefit some advantage from the assassination of Elizabeth.  So within “Hamlet” Shakespeare raises the question through Hamlet whether it is right to avenge the murder of his father, alongside the question whether Hamlet’s deceitful methods of discovering the truth were disruptive to Denmark’s social fabric.

Does Hamlet put on an act of antic disposition as he knows subconsciously that it is not his duty to kill Claudius, even after the ghost of his father tells him to?  The ghost is not immediately given Hamlet’s approval as he cannot be sure what the ghost wants is right, so he puts on the act of antic disposition ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ Hamlet (Act 1 Scene 2 Line 174-5).  By Hamlet putting on the act of antic disposition he is going against God’s will and breaking the Chain of Being.  We can see he puts on the act of antic disposition, as he does not talk in verse but prose.  Harry Levin supports this view “through out the rest of the play, until his feelings come to the surface again in the last Act, his medium for dialogue is his own kind of antic prose.  The exceptions to this rule are consistent: the soliloquies and his confidential interviews with Horatio and the queen.”  Shakespeare used the contemporary dramatic convention that all his main characters that were educated and were of nobility would talk in verse, whereas peasants and mad people talked in prose.  Hamlet’s “antic prose” is to get the truth, to see if Claudius did kill his father, so that he can do the revenging on behalf of his father ‘As I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on’ (Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5).  Others die on the way as part of the human waste, a consequence of Tragedy.  “We enter the consciousness of Hamlet on absolute terms, as if the problem that had confronted him and released his entire mind into our keeping and understanding,” wrote John Bayley in “Shakespeare and Tragedy” (1981).  Shakespeare means us to understand Hamlet, as we hear his thoughts in his soliloquies, when he tells us the truth with no pretence, ‘ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.’ Hamlet’s second soliloquy in Act 1 scene 5.

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‘O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right’ (Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5).  Suggests that he is a reluctant avenger, sworn to be their ‘scourge and minister’ out of duty to his father.

Shakespeare places Claudius at the centre of the corruption and deceit in the play as he is the King, and law maker.  He use the situation to his advantage: ‘Though yet(1) of our dear brother’s death the memory be green, and that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow ...

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