The Contrast Between Imaginary, Appearances and Reality That Leads to Confusion and Pain in Hamlet

The Contrast Between Imaginary, Appearances and Reality That Leads to Confusion and Pain in Hamlet

  • Submitted By: denysee19
  • Date Submitted: 12/07/2013 7:22 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1699
  • Page: 7
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The Contrast between Imaginary, Appearances and Reality that Leads to Confusion and Pain in Hamlet


The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare at the beginning of the seventeenth century (1600/1601). It depicts very precisely reality and his victims, but also the naive ideals of the main character, Hamlet, who ends being completely destroyed for he dared to open his soul to spirituality and revenge, despite his weakness.
The plot of the play is based on one of Saxus Gramaticus` chronicle and it is a “Revenge`s Tragedy”, like Sir Thomas Kyd`s “Spanish Tragedy” (1585). Hamlet develops traditional motifs like the ghost and has been firstly categorized as a “problem play”. In this play, Shakespeare shows the reader/auditor how complicated love can be, but also aspects from death, treachery, lies and plots, without offering a solution to all these (Anghelescu, 124).
According to the sixteenth-century French humanist, Michel de Montaigne, the world of experience is a world of appearances, and human beings can never hope to see behind those appearances into the “realities” that lie behind them (Sparknotes).Therefore, he demonstrates us how in this play, people suffer with or without their knowledge and this is happening because appearances are all around, they mix up with the imaginary, trying together to avoid as much as possible reality. “The opposition between ‘to seem’ and ‘to be’ represent the fundament of the entire play and it is mentioned from the very beginning by Hamlet; it is not an abstract philosophic problem, but the problem of behavior and human values itself” (Kettle,157). So this is the main idea around which characters and ideas revolve, the difficulty of living in this complex juxtaposition of dimensions , on the grounds of which I will present and develop my ideas and arguments, such as: feigning madness, boundaries, ghosts, auditors and players.
First of all, I have to mention that Hamlet is a...

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