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Critical Essay - Hamlet

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William Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy, Hamlet, orchestrates an ability to challenge responders within the modern milieu through the universal conflict between religious faith, social pressures and autonomous desires within the individual. Remaining as unwavering spectres across contextual constraints, Shakespeare evokes the contention between Religion and Humanism through Hamlet and challenges the quintessence of womanhood through Ophelia. In effect, Hamlet’s continuing significance, to a chief extent stems from Shakespeare’s ability to expose the plethora of expectations forced upon the individuals across societies and generations . Hamlet’s quandaries, fore grounded against the breakdown of social stratums in a dystopic Denmark, locate the immortalised dilemma of reason versus action. Within the Jacobean age Hamlet’s division originates from the simultaneous pull of the Old Regime and the conventions of Revenge conflicting with his equally strong inheritance of a Protestant teaching in a fundamentalist religious context. Fintan O’Toole’s description of this contention as the “two value systems, two world views in competition” and Hamlet’s inability to escape either poses his central moral dilemma . Hamlet’s Soliloquy orchestrates a remarkable spectrum of emotions, as an expression of his inner torment due to conflicting ideologies. In Hamlet’s ’Hecuba’ Soliloquy, his divisive state commences with heavy self-criticism through exclamatory tones “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” and a cumulative description of the player’s enviable reaction “in a dream of passion/..his visage wanned/tears in his eyes/a broken voice." He furthers his censure with a motif of comparison to the foils within the play through exclamation “For Hecuba!” where caesura deliberately breaks the beat of the Soliloquy’s iambic pentameter, lending heavier emphasis to his aggravated state. Irony in the accumulation of violent verbs “drown the state../cleave the general ear with horrid speech” accentuates his feelings of inadequacy. The medial caesura “the very faculties of eyes and ear. Yet I” overtly juxtaposes the martial virtues he envies with his own cowardice and inaction, exacerbate

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