Free Hamlet Essays: Interpretation of Hamlet :: The Tragedy of Hamlet Essays

Keys to Interpretation of crossroads   William Shakespeares juncture is, at heart, a piddle away some suicide. Though it is surrounded by a fairly standard revenge plot, the plays core is an intense psycho dramatic event about a prince gone mad from the pressures of his station and his unrequited love for Ophelia. He longs for the ultimate release of killing himself - but why? In this respect, Hamlet is equivocal - he gives several different motives depending on the situation. But we teach to trust his soliloquies - his thoughts - more than his actions. In Hamlets own speeches lie the indications for the methods we should use for its interpretation.   Hamlets case for suicide is the death of his father, the late King Hamlet - or at least this is what he tells the world. He claims his fathers death as the reason in his first soliloquy (1.2.133-164), but we are led towards other reasons by the evidence he gives. In the famous to be or not to be soliloquy, he says For who would bear... the pangs of despised love... when he himself might his quietus bind/with a bare bodkin? (3.1.78-84). The word despised is glossed as unrequited - and thus we are led to speculation that Ophelia, not the late King, is the received cause of his suicidal urges. The claim that he is mourning his father seems to me to be at best an excuse - in the public eye as he is, Hamlet cannot sink so low as to be moved to kill himself by a woman.   This is an example of a phenomenon that we line of descent throughout Hamlet - the separation of what is stated on the surface from the implications a few layers beneath. The play works on two levels - the revenge drama works as a backdrop for Hamlets internal psychodrama. It is clear that Shakespeare intends for Hamlets thoughts to be superior to his outward actions in interpretation of the play. After listing either the outward signs of his depression, he tells his mother that he would prefer to be considered on the basis of his thoughts These indeed seem/For they are actions that a man might play/But I have that within which passes show/These but the caparison and the suits of woe (1.2.86-89). Yet Hamlet, for all the disdain for played action that he shows here, also appreciates its power, in his remarks on the players soliloquy on Hecuba (2.