Hamlet & the melancholy character Essay Example for Free

Hamlet the melancholy character hearHamlet, as the melancholy character has a lot to blame his sadness on. He is constantly intermeshed by the thoughts of revenge and death but these forces ar counterbalanced by his need to be twice sure of his uncles guilt. This drives him to be boast irrationally, prompting suggestion of madness and act impulsively which hold outs to the death of Polonius. He is earthipulated by several things throughout the play and is constantly feeling the burden of being impelled in one direction or the other by forces which were alien to him only a couple of eld back when he was a scholar and the app arent heir to the throne. The ghost of his father leaves him with a travail to be completed along with the grief of mourning a father and watching his mother baffle the wife of the murderer, with what he considers indecent haste. Hamlet is motivated and driven by the uttering of his fathers ghost, his cause filial obligation, and the brashness of t he murderer in marrying his own mother to usurp his throne. He is driven to sometimes behave and sometimes pret residue to be mad to ensure that his thoughts are non revealed to his uncle Claudius. He is driven to misogyny by his apparent loss of belief in women after his mothers behavior.He is driven to collect the evidence to his fathers death at the hands of his uncle because his thoughtful disposal and erudition do not allow him to find arguments beyond reasonable doubt to form a basis for vengeful natural actions. All these instances when he is driven in directions much against his own volition lead him to believe that he is being manipulated at all levels by situations and people. He is also, perhaps, suspicious of the fact that his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are used to spy on him and manipulate him into certain actions or words.He implores his friend Guildenstern to play the holler to divert the attention from his own discomfiture. But when he refuses to play cl aiming that he does not have both knowledge of playing a pipe, he accuses Guildenstern of being incapable of playing the pipe but manipulating him (Hamlet) kindred a pipe by blowing thoughts into his mind and subtly handling his emotions in a way as to hit the notes desired by people around him. Hamlet is preoccupied with two things throughout the play. They are the basis for action and inaction and his dismay at being manipulated by several things and persons.Arguably, if Hamlet were not the prey to his own inaction, so many of the lives lost in the play would have been saved. regular(a) the last-place revenge he exacts is not his own doing but the foul play of Claudius that goes awry. He readily gives up all other purpose in his life and begins the journey of revenge (which he eventually discovers that he is singularly incapable of) when his fathers ghost reveals the secret of his death. Ay, thou poor ghost, while reminiscence holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember t heeYea, from the table of my memory Ill wipe past all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there And thy didactics all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixd with baser matter yes, by heaven (1. 5. 103-110) Even one of the most famous soliloquies from hamlet are of the effect that Hamlet is being troubled by the cruel hand dealt to him by fate. To be, or not to be that is the question Whether tis nobler in the mind to puzzleThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die,to sleep, No more and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That mush is heir to,tis a consummation Devoutly to be wishd. To die,to sleep(3. 1. 58-66) Even his attempts to contemplate self-annihilation are his thoughts that are bound and led by influences foreign to himself. There is also evidence of such distrau ght thinking on the part of Hamlet in other instances.When he enquires his friends why they have come to meet him, whether they had come of their own volition r they had been summoned, he describes the state of mankind as an inanimate thing that is given too much value. What a piece of work is a man how noble in reason how infinite in faculty in form and moving how pull up and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a paragon the beauty of the world the paragon of animals And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me no, nor woman neither,(2. 2. 291-297)Hamlet feels manipulated by his varied feelings and motivations. He sometimes feels he is just an instrument of revenge. In some instances he feels he is the sum of all contrasting wisdom which prevents him from taking any decisive action. All these contradictions and the preponderance of thoughts somewhat self and the motivations behind actions and the multilayered questioning of wi sdom in taking or delaying a particular action make Hamlet the most complicated and accomplished characterization of Shakespearean tragedies and offers different meanings upon different readings.