Downfall

Downfall

  • Submitted By: dasf42
  • Date Submitted: 08/09/2013 10:57 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1309
  • Page: 6
  • Views: 114

Downfall
‘Decay’ is defined as the rotting of something that results in death or disease and, if contagious, those around it as well. The most influential playwright of all time, William Shakespeare, had brought to us, in the first couple of years of the seventeenth century, Hamlet; and as was common in the sixteenth century, Shakespeare “could have” had taken the play’s idea from “a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark… and a prose work… entitled Histoires Tragiques.” (SparkNotes Editors) Hamlet is considered to be the greatest tragedy of all time, depicting a young prince with a decaying mind obsessed over revenge, but still uncertain whether his actions are right or wrong. Shakespeare takes this uncertainty into an intriguing level wherein each of the character’s acts contribute to the ‘decay’ of the whole kingdom. The theme of decay—tied in with that of death and disease—is a key element that develops the whole play’s plot, tone and the shift on the protagonist, Hamlet’s, character.
The play starts off with two soldiers on guard at a palace platform. These two, Barnardo and Francisco, were stiff and untrusting, which already shows us that the plot had already spun even before the play had started. In end of Act I, scene i, we learn of the death of the previous King, which we can allude to the tense atmosphere of the play. Also, in this scene, the appearance of the ghost of the late King, another catalyst to the decay of the kingdom, may symbolize death, an association to decay; one that is to come, or has happened—with the case of the King. In Act I, scene ii, we meet the main protagonist in which the title is named after, Hamlet. He is depicted as a young man in terrible mourning of his father, and bitter towards the newly appointed King Claudius, his uncle, and his mother who had married the new King. It is in this scene that we see the first reference to decay, “Fie on’t! ah fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross...

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