ARUN S DSOUZA

SR 4 C

ST MARY'S CATHOLICHIGH SCHOOL

ENGLISH COURSEWORK - PRE 1914 PROSE

23RD APRIL 2003

Q. IN THE PLAY "HAMLET" BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, WHAT IS THE DRAMATIC SIGNIFICANE OF ACT III SCENE IV?

Hamlet is known to be the most popular play written by Shakespeare. It is also, by a significant margin, the longest of Shakespeare's plays. It has been translated to many languages and has become the subject of excited and critical debate more than any other work of literature.

The play was written around 1602 or 1603 at a period of time when Elizabethan London was a melting pot of unprecedented intellectual and artistic ferment. In Elizabethan England the conviction that retaliation for murder was solely the prerogative of the state and its legal institutions clashed with an irrational but powerful feeling that private individuals cannot be blamed for taking vengeance into their own hands, for ensuring that the punishment truly answers the crime. This response, arguably always lateen in criminal cases, was likely to become especially forceful when, as sometimes happens, the law proved impotent or else too corrupt to pass sentence. As Bacon conceded, 'the most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to punish; else a man's enemy is still before hand, and it is two for one'. Reasoning of this kind presumably gave the 1584 Bond of Association what shaky justification it had. It was also likely to generate clandestine sympathy for avengers who found themselves in the position of Shakespeare's Hamlet: unable to obtain legal justice for the premeditated killing of a parent, sibling, or child because of lack of circumstantial evidence and/or of a court prepared to deal with the culprit.

For Shakespeare at the turn of the century, when he addressed himself to the Hamlet story, contradiction and ambiguity of attitude towards revenge would have been part of the air he breathed. He must also have been familiar with a considerable body of literature, much of it dramatic, in which revenge was a central preoccupation and motif.

Chronologically the first of what it has become customary to refer to as Shakespeare's 'great tragedies', Hamlet must have been written shortly after Julius Caesar (1599), another if very different revenge play. At tow moments in Hamlet the killing of Caesar is remembered. Julius Caesar had contained a vengeful ghost. It also adumbrated, existing between Caesar and his prot? Brutus, a troubled father-son relationship which, for some reason, seems to have occupied Shakespeare's imagination to a considerable extent around the turn of the century. Hamlet complicates the motif by directing attention to three linked father-and-son pairs: old Hamle6t and the prince who has inherited his name but not his kingdom, old Fortinbras and a son whose situation parallels that of Hamlet but whose character is very different, Polonius and Laertes. All three fathers die by violence. All three sons feel it incumbent upon them to exact a revenge, but the response of each to his task is wholly individual.

Hamlet is universally popular because the central character is somebody to whom few people can feel indifferent. The audience can identify with Hamlet as a kind of spokesman for their own experience of the bewildering human conditions. Hamlet frustrates any attempt to reduce him to a tidy analysis. He demands that we sit through and share his trials again and again. He is fascinating because he is so passionately interested in things himself. He cares about the theatre. He is excited and tested by language and irritated by its misuse. He is at times full of energy, minting ideas more quickly than we can keep up with and at times he is dejected and forlorn as he registers his isolation and powerlessness.
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There is also the absorbing debate about sexuality and sexual morality. As society continues to change the nature of that debate shifts but the basic issues dealt with in Hamlet remain fundamental to man and this is perhaps the reason why a four hundred year old text in Elizabethan English continues to excite people from so many different cultures and ideologies.

Act 3 Scene 4 takes place in Gertrude's closet. Here a series of fast paced events takes place. Hamlet "speaking daggers" to his mother, Polonius murdered accidentally, Hamlet's second and final meeting with the ghost, the ...

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