...Hamlet Final Essay What do you think makes Shakespeare’s Hamlet such a powerful and enduring play? Thesis William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) explores the intrinsic aspects of humanity creating a powerful and enduring play by subverting the audiences’ expectation of a revenge tragedy play. Shakespeare enables universal anthropological appreciation through the emphasis on the thematic concerns of: the mystery and transcendental nature of death, clouded grey areas in between the dichotomy of good and evil morals, and the twisted manipulative nature of human behaviour. Therefore, through critical study of the play, Shakespeare augments and connects to the audience’s perspective and interpretations. Body Topic sentence 1. Overarching idea i. Point ii. Quote iii. Technique iv. Elaboration Sample Sentence Linking sentence (concluding sentence) Body 1 – Death Death is the inescapable reality of human life as explored in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the fact that the living world is made of death and decay is visible anywhere there is life. 1. Hamlet’s bereavement over his father i. Bereavement is an inescapable reality in which all humans must endure. ii. “But I have more within which passes show – These but the trappings and the suits of woe” iii. Rhyming couplet iv. To reinforce Hamlet’s underlying argument to his grief over the finality of his father’s death. Bereavement is an inescapable reality, exemplified when Hamlet says...
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...There is no one way to have lived a good life; however, characters in texts such as The Aeneid, I Samuel, II Samuel, Consolation of Philosophy, and Hamlet all demonstrate one common theme. Each character from these works have a strong devotion to their God and that reliance on their faith have brought them opportunities for desired fame, fortune, glory, knowledge, wisdom, and power. These opportunities were directly influenced by their Gods and it was their servitude to God that presented them with a better life. Conversely, characters who did not comply with their Gods were punished by being stripped of opportunities they once had. Characters going against God’s word were then left to live a fateful unravelling, when they could have been rewarded...
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...Sidney Castro Mr. Strawn Philosophy in Literature 3 March 2014 Does Hamlet feign madness throughout the play or truly struggle with insanity? In William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, the king of Denmark is stripped of his wife, throne, and life by his envious brother, Claudius. The king’s young son, Hamlet, is the only one who properly mourns his death and immediately takes on the mission of avenging his father’s murder. In the process of carrying out this revenge, a troubled and restless Hamlet loses all that is dear to him — his family, friends, but most of all, himself. In the midst of his sorrow and frustration, Hamlet loses sight of his true self and turns into an impulsive, obscure, and seemingly madman. However, many scenes subtly reveal that Hamlet is deliberately feigning these fits of madness in order to disconcert King Claudius and throw the rest of the attendants off track. While Hamlet's "mad" behavior starts out as an "antic disposition," his mental state deteriorates over the course of plotting his revenge so that he ultimately ends up mentally ill and demented. The longer he put on this “antic disposition” act, the more it became genuine madness. In a way, Shakespeare teaches readers that it is impossible to wear an identity without becoming what one pretends to be. Through Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare exemplifies the idea that “one is what one pretends to be” and the importance of always living a life of authenticity in order to avoid morphing into a false...
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...headline stories of the decade. His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal- this aspect interested him most and it unifies his paintings from this period. Warhol stated that when Marilyn Monroe died ', I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns' For him, she symbolised the apex of the beauty that Hollywood glitz and glamour had to offer. She was a household name, and it is clear that, in her fame, Andy Warhol greatly admired and looked up to her. This is why i believe he painted her after her death Xx "...and you said you thought "...and you said you thought that coming so close to death was really like coming so close to life, because life is nothing." - A recount of a dialogue with Andy after the assassination atempt from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. In the early sixties Warhol became deeply interested in death. Searching for new material Warhol serched the media and became fascinated by pictures of electric chairs, car crashes, and race riots. As a result he created the Death in America series, and the viewers were shocked. Warhol blatantly depicted death over and over again shown off centered, layered, or ripped down the middle, and thought the photos were shocking they were also strangely compelling. On first viewing one searches the black image of the car crashes to find the bodies but once the mangled limbs come into view, it is impossible not to see them again whenever the image reappears. Like the crowd...
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...LIFE OF SHAKESPAERE JANUAR BIRTH DATE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE--- BACK SIDE According to tradition, the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-on-Avon on April 23, 1564. It is impossible to be certain the exact day on which he was born, but church records show that he was baptized on April 26, and three days was a customary amount of time to wait before baptizing a newborn. Shakespeare’s date of death is conclusively known, however: it was April 23, 1616. FRONT SIDE William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language . He was born on April 1564 . FEBURAR BIRTH PLACE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BACK SIDE PICTURES FRONT SIDE Shakespaere was born in the bard of Avon in United Kingdom. MARZ EARLY LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPAERE BACK SIDE William was the third child of John Shakespeare, a leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local landed heiress. William had two older sisters, Joan and Judith, and three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard and Edmund. Before William's birth, his father became a successful merchant and held official positions as alderman and bailiff, an office resembling a mayor. However, records indicate John's fortunes declined sometime in the late 1570s. FRONT SIDE William was the third child of John Shakespeare, a leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local landed heiress. APRIL WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S SCHOOL LIFE BACK SIDE Shakespeare probably began...
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...“Of Deaths Put on by Cunning and Forced Cause” – Death and Dying in Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale Abstract Shakespeare employs the concept of death in every genre he writes, and Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale provide insights into the revenge tragedy and late romance respectively. Drawing inspiration from a web article on death in revenge tragedies (namely, Hamlet), death seems to me the common emotional connector between Hamlet and the audience, which Shakespeare then exploits to enact a singular catharsis. Similarly, a dissertation on counterfeit deaths in the late romances and a web article on resurrection in The Winter’s Tale provide me the basis to argue that death and resurrection are successively utilized in the romance to draw a self-awakening in Leontes, which Shakespeare uses as a proxy for the audience. It is intriguing how Shakespeare employs death as emotional bridge between audience and characters across the two genres, creating the heightened emotional state necessary to deliver his concluding catharsis: death as redemption when not used as a tool for personal gain. Death appears many times in both Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale, serving to drive both the action of the play as well as the development of characters. In Hamlet, it is the murder of Old Hamlet that necessitates the act of vengeance, forcing into motion all subsequent plot developments and character deaths. According to Thomas, “The Winter’s Tale is structured on the counterfeit deaths and resurrections...
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...Waiting Many critics consider Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, rst performed in Paris in 1953, the most important twentieth-century play in the Western canon. Despite the undeniable historical and aesthetic signi cance of Waiting for Godot, however, the question poses itself: to what extent may an absurdist play—about two bums waiting on the side of a country road for a person who never arrives— still strike us as relevant today? is question cannot be answered univocally, but depends on the interpretive choices made in the actual process of producing Beckett’s play on stage. My goal as the director of this Kennedy eatre production is to create a thoroughly contemporary experience that evades the usual clichés many have come to associate with Beckett’s style, such as monotony and leadenness. From this vantage point, I will now identify two major challenges to any stage production of Waiting for Godot in 2010—challenges relating to the historical and metaphysical background of the play. e setting (country road, tree), costume items (bowler hats, halfhunter watch), and habits of the characters (the pipe-smoking Pozzo), as well as the poverty and frugality of the two protagonists (a diet of turnips, radishes and carrots for Vladimir and Estragon), clearly suggest earlier historical periods such as the Irish Potato Famine from around 1850, the wasteland of northern France in the wake of the trench warfare of WWI, or America’s Great Depression in the 1930s. e names of the characters...
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...-Henry Reyna – Zoot Suit 5. “Tender yourself more dearly!” -Polonius, Hamlet 6. “If you fail to prepare – prepare to fail…” -Steve Prefontaine, Olympic Gold Medalist 7. “Our intentions are far more different than our actions…” -Coach Adler LQHS 8. “Defeat distraction, or distractions will defeat you…” -Coach Adler LQHS 9. “Those who settle for less end with less…” -Coach Adler LQHS 10. “A good fall makes one wiser…” -Aesop 11. “If I were you I would turn back now and save some time and grief. Believe me; you’re heading in the wrong direction…” -Coach Adler LQHS, The Two Ants 12. “In the middle of the journey of our life – I came to find myself in a dark woods where the straightway was lost…” -Dante Alighieri 13. “Acta non verba” (Actions not words) -Latin Idiom 14. “Carpe diem” (Seize the day) -Latin Idiom 15. “A good student only needs to be told once!” -Coach Adler LQHS 16. “Every day wasted is another day you’ll never get back!” -Boyd Grant, Fresno State Basketball 17. “A future filled with regret is not a bright one…” -Koby Serreitelli 18. “If you remain organized you stay in control” -Elise Alverzez 2013 19. “Impossible is just a big word that gets thrown around by small people…” -Javier Duenas 2013 20. “The moment you decide to fail or not to try your best, you begin to close the doors to different opportunities in life…” -Jose Inzunza 2013 21. “You can just imagine when the fairytale...
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...What is our purpose of life? Where did we come from? What makes us who we are? These are just some questions that are frequently asked in our society. Is there a right or wrong answer? I don’t think we will ever know. There are many different beliefs, such as existentialist philosophies, scientific, and religious. Each one has a different answer to those questions. Some of the first true existentialist thinkers were a man named Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. They both challenged he foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. “Nietzsche was interested in the enhancement of individual and cultural health, and believed in life, creativity, power, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond” (Nietzsche 1). I feel that he was right, many people get caught up in what is going to happen in the future that they miss out on present. Why live a life if all a person is going to worry about is the unknown? “Kierkegaard said that is it especially important for people to have a meaningful existence. And meaning, he said, comes from whether or not people sense that their lives have a permanent significance. The problem is, though, that most people believe that their lives have importance only temporarily” (Kierkegaard 1). I agree with this completely, I feel without having meaning in life we would have nothing to live for. Many people believe that our purpose of life is already chosen for us. I on the other hand don’t agree...
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...examples of themes of this type are conflict between the individual and society; coming of age; humans in conflict with technology; nostalgia; and the dangers of unchecked ambition. A theme may be exemplified by the actions, utterances, or thoughts of a character in a novel. An example of this would be the theme loneliness in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, wherein many of the characters seem to be lonely. It may differ from the thesis—the text's or author's implied worldview. A story may have several themes. Themes often explore historically common or cross-culturally recognizable ideas, such as ethical questions, and are usually implied rather than stated explicitly. An example of this would be whether one should live a seemingly better life, at the price of giving up parts of ones humanity, which is a theme in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Along with plot, character, setting, and style, theme is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction. Mostly people regards themes as thesis or thesis as themes but there is a clear distinction between them which is given...
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...Trevor Thompson The meaning of life has been a topic of discussion throughout history that has sparked interest within the philosophical world. People wonder whether every person has a certain role that they are destined to play or whether they instead have the free will to choose for themselves. The discussion about life’s meaning prompted the philosophy of existentialism. Existentialists believe that life is inherently without meaning until an individual creates the meaning of his or her own existence. Many pieces of literature have been examined and declared as existential pieces, with a lot of them falling into the realm of The Theater of the Absurd and therefore absurdism itself. These texts contain illogical reasoning, nonsensical dialogue, cyclical plots, and no horizon of significance. In this paper, I will argue that if one looks at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead through an existential lens, they will see that it embodies the existential ideals of instability and that "existence precedes essence”. Instability is a key factor in an existential world. The stability that exists within most pieces of literature, namely created from the horizon of significance and the fulfillment of certain goals, does not appear. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead embodies the theme of instability because nothing that Rosencrantz, henceforth Ros, or Guildenstern, henceforth Guil, do actually allows them both advancement within the story. After flipping coins and landing on...
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...The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness – from overwhelming grief to seething rage – and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others." The play was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime It has inspired writers from Goethe and Dickens to Joyce and Murdoch, and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella". Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet. He almost certainly created the title role for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time. In the 400 years since, the role has been performed by highly acclaimed actors and actresses from each successive age. Three...
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...A kinder, gentler philosophy of success by Alain de Botton The Text ‘a kinder, gentler philosophy of success, is a Speech, spoken by Alain de Botton. In this Text Mr. Botton proves his case by phrase some arguments. He starts the text with a contention by saying, that career crises aren’t a personal problem.” I think that we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises” Botton proclaims. The things we thought that we knew about ourselves suddenly in an imaginable was become a sort of reality to us. By reflecting over some thoughts he can conclude that we are surrounded by snobs. This is maybe why we have this so-called career crises and career anxiety. The “snob phenomenon” doesn’t depend on where on the country you come from, but it is more like a global disease so to say. Here Mr. Botton again come with a sort of conclusion” A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery”. This snobbery often appears on jobs these days. It is so important to have the right job, to earn a nice sum of money and telling about it if anybody asks so you don’t get the cold shoulder. The opposite of a snob is someone who doesn’t care about your achievements. This could be your partner or your mother - someone who respects you without putting you in the social hierarchy. The time we live in is filled with people who love material goods. But this is not the reason why we care so much about our...
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...Horatio, to watch with them. When he sees the ghost, he decides they should tell Hamlet, the dead King's son. Hamlet is also the nephew of the present King, Claudius, who not only assumed his dead brother's crown but also married his widow, Gertrude. Claudius seems an able King, easily handling the threat of the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras. But Hamlet is furious about Gertrude's marriage to Claudius. Hamlet meets the ghost, which claims to be the spirit of his father, murdered by Claudius. Hamlet quickly accepts the ghost's command to seek revenge. Yet Hamlet is uncertain if what the ghost said is true. He delays his revenge and begins to act half-mad, contemplate suicide, and becomes furious at all women. The Lord Chamberlain, Polonius, concludes that Hamlet's behavior comes from lovesickness for Ophelia, Polonius's daughter. Claudius and Gertrude summon two of Hamlet's old friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to find out what's wrong with him. As Polonius develops a plot to spy on a meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia, Hamlet develops a plot of his own: to have a recently arrived troupe of actors put on a play that resembles Claudius's alleged murder of Old Hamlet, and watch Claudius's reaction. Polonius and Claudius spy on the meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet, during which Hamlet flies into a rage against women and marriage. Claudius concludes Hamlet neither loves Ophelia nor is mad. Seeing Hamlet as a threat, he decides to send him away. At the play that night, Claudius runs...
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...The In Dr. Michael Sandel’s video, “The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number”, the issue of utilitarianism in regards to policy making is discussed. In particular, the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are called into question and applied to modern day scenarios that illustrate how difficult it can be to create a policy based on utilitarianism alone. Several issues arise throughout the course of the discussion that create doubt as to its effectiveness as well as convincing evidence in support. In the opening segment, Dr. Sandel speaks about Jeremy Bentham’s idea of utilitarianism. Benthem believed that a society must maximize happiness (utility) in order to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. He argues that a community is the sum of all its parts and so in deciding on a policy or law for that particular community, all the benefits of a decision must be compared with all the negative impacts of the decision and whatever maximizes the balance of pleasure over displeasure is the correct decision to make. In order to put this in a more modern perspective, Dr. Sandel introduces two cost-benefit analysis’ created by two major American companies that were used in making important business decisions. They did this by placing a dollar value on utility. The first analysis was done by Phillip Morris, a cigarette manufacturer, on a decision of whether or not the Czech Republic should increase the tax on smoking. In the study, Phillip...
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