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The Theme of Revenge That Dominates Hamlet |
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In both versions, however, the scene in which Hamlet follows the Ghost through the castle to hear its story sets up all the problems of the play. Revenge is the paramount concern of the play, and it reaches cosmic dimensions almost from the moment it is mentioned. It is an aspect of Destiny because it impinges on Hamlet's troubled consciousness yet pushes him beyond consciousness to active revenge: "O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else? / And shall I couple hell?" (I.v.92-3). After brief consultation with Horatio, he considers going off to pray, to sort out what the Ghost has told him, whereupon the Ghost reappears, commanding him to act. This does nothing so much as cause Hamlet to question whether the Ghost, who repeatedly intones from beneath (the place of hell), is really the devil, whom he compares to other denizens of the cellarage or underworld, such as the mole and pioner (miner). At the end of the long II.ii, when Hamlet determines to catch the conscience of the king by means of the play, he returns to the problem of the destiny of his soul: "The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil; and the devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps / . . . Abuses me to damn me" (II.ii.627-32). In the film version, the Ghost's stark insistence on revenge takes the form of grim disapproval. The Ghost is unmoved by Hamlet's emotion, as if he is taunting, or more exactly haunting, Hamlet until the re |
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Freud cites Goethe as the source of the interpretation of Hamlet as "paralysed by excessive intellectual activity" (306). Abel also cites Hamlet's tendency to rationalize and indeed to find "refuge in philosophy, just as he has already taken refuge in pretended madness" (Abel 55). The text provides evidence that Hamlet is quite aware of his tendency to consider the consequences of action rather than engage in action itself. The soliloquy in III.i that begins "To be or not to be" might as well have begun "To act or not to act," for what follows is an extended meditation on the consequences of, as it were, traveling to "undiscover'd country," which may mean the unknown of death but which may also mean the unknown more generally. The tendency in Hamlet to know what he knows very well indeed but to hang back from the unknown explains such phrases as, "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" (III.i.83-5). His awareness of consequences extends beyond the immediate circumstances of his enterprise, which points toward his awareness that the cosmos, or destiny, has a stake in the actions he takes. Abel says that the dramatic function of the soliloquy "To be or not to be" is to move Hamlet closer to the name of action and to action itself, as a meditation that "takes him from the plot into metaphysics, and then, turning him toward death, enables him to feel something metaphysical in the plot" (Abel 55-6). In other words, the soliloquy provides Hamlet with a way of reaching a meaning for his revenge enterprise that extends beyond the outlines of circumstance itself, toward something like destiny.The interpenetration of mental and physical, in particular the physical enactment of thought, is also consistent with Hamlet's having come to terms with the identification of his cursed destiny with enacted revenge. By the systematic application of reason he has concluded that physical act |
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