Hamlet-3

                                                                           Hamlet

                                                                        Plot Summary 

   Plagued by royal treachery, vengeful scheming, and an unsettled ghost, Denmark is ripe for destruction. Directly following King Hamlet’s recent death, the widowed Queen Gertrude has hastily remarried Claudius, King Hamlet’s own brother. Young Prince Hamlet is galled by his mother’s disloyalty and sulks darkly in Elsinore castle. At midnight, the rambling ghost of King Hamlet exposes a hidden treachery to Prince Hamlet: Claudius fatally poisoned the slumbering King Hamlet in order to steal his crown and his queen. The phantom king begs Hamlet to avenge his foul murder. Prince Hamlet agrees and feigns insanity to disguise his bloody motive.

                                                                    

   King Claudius is troubled by two pests. First, young Fortinbras of Norway has raised his army against Denmark in order to reclaim his father’s lost land. Claudius suppresses Fortinbras’ challenge but allows the hotheaded young Prince to pass peacefully through Denmark on his way to fight Poland. Claudius’ second nuisance is his deranged nephew and stepson, Prince Hamlet. Claudius employs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s former friends, to spy on the mad Prince. Polonius, the King’s principal advisor, argues that Hamlet’s insanity is nothing more than love sickness. Ever watchful of his daughter’s chastity, Polonius ordered Ophelia to reject Hamlet’s lusty admiration. To prove that this rejection has caused Hamlet’s mania, Polonius plants his daughter in Hamlet’s path and hides with King Claudius to spy on their fixed encounter. The Prince’s mania appears more sinister than expected, and Claudius is unconvinced by Polonius’ explanation. 

Prince Hamlet hires a group of traveling actors to perform “The Mousetrap” for the royal audience. Because the play closely mirrors the murder of King Hamlet, both Hamlet and his confidant, Horatio, will study the King’s reaction for signs of his guilt. Horrified by the performance, King Claudius prays for forgiveness. However, because he still possesses his crown, his queen, and his ambition, his prayers prove insincere. Hamlet nearly slaughters the kneeling King, but he halts his vengeful sword when he remembers that a soul killed in the midst of prayer flies directly up to heaven. 

In Queen Gertrude’s chamber, Hamlet chastises his mother for her lusty disloyalty. Spying behind an arras (curtain), Polonius perceives Gertrude’s danger and cries for help. Hamlet mistakes the spy for King Claudius, and plunges his sword into the curtain. Polonius is slain, and King Claudius sends Hamlet to England as punishment. Aboard the ship, Prince Hamlet intercepts a treacherous letter from Claudius, which orders the King of England to execute Hamlet. Botching Claudius’ scheme, Hamlet forges a new letter, naming the spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as those condemned to die. 

Polonius’ death and his dishonorable burial drive Ophelia to insanity. The maiden ultimately dies, drowned in a suspected suicide. Laertes, Polonius’ son, returns with a mob from Paris and demands retribution against Hamlet. Claudius proposes a rigged fencing competition between the Prince and Laertes: Hamlet’s sword will be blunted, to protect Laertes, while Laertes’ sword will be sharp and poisoned, to slay Hamlet. As planned, Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned sword. In the scuffle, they exchange rapiers and Hamlet slices Laertes with the toxic weapon. Both are doomed to die, but the King and Queen die first. Queen Gertrude falls dead from a poisoned chalice meant for Hamlet and, after the fight with Laertes, Hamlet slashes and kills King Claudius with the poisoned rapier. With his dying breath, Hamlet supports Fortinbras’ appointment as the next King of Denmark. Surrounded by the royal massacre, Hamlet pleads with Horatio to tell his tragic story to the world. 

Hamlet-2

                                                      LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE
The exact date of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564 is unknown. However, it is customary to celebrate his birth on April 23rd, the same day of his death fifty-two years later. Growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon, ninety-six miles outside of London.
    Shakespeare’s world was one of high infant mortality, rampant disease, an average life expectancy of thirty years, an influential monarchy, and a growing popularity of the theater. Marrying Anne Hathaway in 1582, a woman eight years his senior, Shakespeare soon fathered three known children. He ventured to London in the late 1580s, competing with fellow playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson for theater space, reputation, and audiences.

  Shakespeare wrote an average of two plays per year for a company called Lord Chamberlain’s Men. A new playhouse named the Globe, which opened in 1599 on the banks of the Thames River, soon became the famous home stage of Shakespeare’s theatrical masterworks.
  In his popular tragedy, Hamlet, the young Prince Hamlet vows to remember his murdered father, saying, “‘Remember thee? / Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe.’” (Act 1, Scene 5, lines 95-97) Many scholars interpret this reference as a playful nod to the Globe theater and its audience (Greenblatt, 1686).
                                                           

   Perhaps Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy, Hamlet  is a play fraught with questions. As critic Stephen Greenblatt asks, “Why does Hamlet delay avenging the murder of his father by Claudius, his father’s brother? How much guilt does Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude...bear in this crime? How trustworthy is the ghost of Hamlet’s father ...?What exactly is the ghost...? Why is the ghost, visible to everyone in the first act, visible only to Hamlet in Act 3? Is Hamlet’s madness feigned or true, a strategy masquerading as a reality or a reality masquerading as a strategy?” (Greenblatt, 1659).
  Scholars estimate that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1600. The ambiguity of the composition’s history results largely from three conflicting versions of the text, all published at different times. As Greenblatt notes, the play and all its versions seem designed to breed uncertainty.
                                                         

  Hamlet is a play of unanswered questions written by a playwright whose life remains largely obscure. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. He was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Legend has it that Shakespeare penned the very epitaph under which his coffin still rests. It reads,
“Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.”

Hamlet

                                   Foreword

John Keats wrote-

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us………

Many art works still capture the attention and attraction of our mind centuries after centuries. Their novelty never dies. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is such one.It’s beauty lies in the intricately knit issues of major human concern like revenge, suicide, death,gender, sex, religion and finally family. It would have been better to nominate family values first in the above listing. For Hamlet’s commitment to retain family values above all; not to kill one’s step father, the new husband of his own mother; and thus destroy the meaning of family, in spite of the killed father’s insistence.

But the primitive urge lay undying within Man to revenge,  gears up the whole action of the play. Hamlet weaves together three revenge plots, all of which involve sons seeking vengeance for their fathers’ murders. Ultimately, the play calls into question the validity and usefulness of revenge

Hamlet’s musings on suicide, especially the “to be or not to be” speech, are legendary and continue to direct discussions of the value of life and the mystery of death. But Hamlet himself never commits suicide. It is Ophelia, who never mentions the possibility of taking her own life, who drowns, seemingly as a result of some combination of madness and despair.

And,  Death threads its way through the entirety of Hamlet, from the opening scene’s confrontation with a dead man’s ghost to the bloodbath of the final scene, which leaves almost every main character dead. Hamlet constantly contemplates death from many angles. He is both seduced and repelled by the idea of suicide, but, in the famous gravedigger scene, he is also fascinated by the physical reality of death. In a way, Hamlet can be viewed as extended dialogue between Hamlet and death.

Hamlet’s attitude toward women is notoriously sexist and stems from his disgust at his mother’s sexuality and seeming unfaithfulness to his dead father. This outlook eventually spills over to include all women, especially the hapless Ophelia, who has virtually no power or control, even over her own body. To some extent, the play also considers notions of masculinity (or lack thereof). Claudius warns Hamlet that his grief is “unmanly” and Hamlet notoriously refers to himself as a promiscuous woman when he finds himself unable to avenge his father’s death, which, again, circles back to Hamlet’s association between women and deception. Hamlet’s attitude toward women reveals something about him more than it reveals women’s true nature. Family is a significant theme in Hamlet. The play is notorious for the way it dwells on the issue of incest – Gertrude’s marriage to her dead husband’s brother, Hamlet’s fixation on his mother, and even Laertes’s obsession with Ophelia’s sexuality.

 It’s also important to note how the play is particularly concerned with the way politics impact the dynamics of family relationships, especially when domestic harmony is sacrificed for political gain. Also of importance is the fact that Hamlet involves three revenge plots that all hinge on sons avenging the deaths of their fathers.

My study of Hamlet started from my under graduate course and then continued again on  my post graduate course which induced me  to delve deeper and deeper in the mysterious attraction of Hamlet for many years. The result is produced in the forthcoming pages along with the original play.I am sure that the mystery and power of Hamlet will never end as  Hamlet represents the whole humanity in many senses.                                                                                                                                                                     Vaiyavan