Thursday 10 October 2019

Renaissance literature

Assignment
Paper :1
The Renaissance literature
Name : payal chudasama
Roll no:24
Sem: 1 M.A. part : 1
Batch: 2019-21
Email I’d:
chudasmapayal1997@gmail.com
Enrollment no: 2069108020200005
Submitted to:Dr. Dilip Barad sir smt.S.B Gardi English  Department bhavanagar.
Topic : Discuss about  the “Hamlet” play.
☆   Introduction of  “Hamlet” play:
Hamlet is the first tragedy in Shakespeare's series of great tragedies which is believed to be published in between 1601 and 1603. This play is one of his successful, perfect and best plays ever known. Hamlet centers on the problems arising from love, death, and betrayal, without offering the audience a decisive and positive resolution to these complications for Hamlet himself is ambiguous and the answers to these problems are complex.

William Shakespeare
In Shakespearean tragedies, thethe characters are presented with abnormal state of mind. But Shakespeare does not allow this abnormal state to be dominant action. It provokes the suffering to the protagonist. The supernatural elements in the dramas of Shakespeare are subservient to the main action. It provokes the protagonist to do certain actions. Shakespeare links the supernatural elements with the natural. Hamartia leads the downfall of the characters in Shakespearean plays. Hamartia is a kind of force that is already inherited in characters which works as a spiritual force. And it ultimately leads to destruction. The use of this force makes the Shakespearean tragedy different from the Greek tragedies.
It was a common tradition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to borrow ideas and stories from earlier literary works. Shakespeare could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark, a prose work by the French writer and Thomas Kyd's Ur-Hamlet.
In the original version Hamlet’s uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The prince pretends to be weak to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge. But, Shakespearean version varies making his Hamlet a philosophical-minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain.
Shakespearean Hamlet can be studied as a Revenge play influenced by Seneca, the father of this genre. Shakespeare has revived the Senecan tragedy, in this sense, it is a Renaissance play. Here, Shakespeare uses the scene of violence, killing, murdering and bloodshed as Seneca used in his tragedy to satisfy the need of Elizabethan audiences. This revival made it Renaissance play. As a Renaissance character, Hamlet is suffering from the hangover between the medieval belief of superstition and reason, the belief of Renaissance. But, as a Renaissance student, he doubts on the appearance of the ghost. Hanging on the verge of scientific and superstitious belief is one of the features of Renaissance man. He doubts on the ghosts and thinks that it may be devil attempts to lure him to the crime. As a Renaissance character, Hamlet feels deeply and watches others to see what their feelings are. As a student of psychology, he experiments the crime through the similar story that matches to his father's killing. He wants to take revenge against his uncle when the crime is identified. And man centered philosophy of the Renaissance could be seen in the figure of Hamlet.
☆   “Hamlet”   as  revenge tragedy:
Yes  this  tragedy  is  revenge tragedy.  Same situation  like “Macbeth” tragedy. Revenge  is most  important  part in this tragedy. Tragedy  Of “Haffman"  this tragedy is  best  example of revange  tragedy.
☆ Introduction Character  of this tragedy:
{1}Hamlet:
The prince  of Denmark. Hamlet is the protagonist  character  of this  tragedy. Hamlet is the central  character. And he is also  hero of this tragedy. Hamlet is the son of Gertrude and  late king Hamlet.
{2} Claudius:
 The king of Denmark  . And Hamlet’s  uncle  , and the play’a antagonist.  Claudius  is villain   of the play. 
{3} Gertrude:
 She is queen  of Denmark . She is mother of Hamlet  and she was recently  married  to claudius  Gertrude  loves Hamlet  deeply , but she is a shallow,  weak woman who  seeks  affliction and status more urgently  than  moral rectitude or truth.
{4} polonius :
The  Lord Chamberlain  Claudius’s  court pompous, conniving  old man. Polonium is the  father of Laertes and ophelia.
{5} Horatio:
Horatio   is close friend of  Hamlet.  Who is studied with the  prince of university in Wittenberg.  Horatio  is the loyal and  good  person   Throughout of the  this play  Horatio  always  held  to Hamlet.
{6} Ophelia:
 Ophelia is the daughter of polonius . She is very beautiful woman. Ophelia  love with Hamlet   ophelia  is a sweet   and innocent  young girl.  Who is obeys her father and her brother, Laertes
☆  Theme of this play:
《1》 The Impossibility of Certainty
What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays (and maybe from every play written before it) is that the action we expect to see, particularly from Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge about what he is doing. This play poses many questions that other plays would simply take for granted. Can we have certain knowledge about ghosts? Is the ghost what it appears to be, or is it really a misleading fiend? Does the ghost have reliable knowledge about its own death, or is the ghost itself deluded? Moving to more earthly matters: How can we know for certain the facts about a crime that has no witnesses? Can Hamlet know the state of Claudius’s soul by watching his behavior? If so, can he know the facts of what Claudius did by observing the state of his soul? Can Claudius (or the audience) know the state of Hamlet’s mind by observing his behavior and listening to his speech? Can we know whether our actions will have the consequences we want them to have? Can we know anything about the afterlife?
Many people have seen Hamlet as a play about indecisiveness, and thus about Hamlet’s failure to act appropriately. It might be more interesting to consider that the play shows us how many uncertainties our lives are built upon, how many unknown quantities are taken for granted when people act or when they evaluate one another’s actions.
《2》The Complexity of Action
Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. How is it possible to take reasonable, effective, purposeful action? In Hamlet, the question of how to act is affected not only by rational considerations, such as the need for certainty, but also by emotional, ethical, and psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the idea that it’s even possible to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act, he prefers to do it blindly, recklessly, and violently. The other characters obviously think much less about “action” in the abstract than Hamlet does, and are therefore less troubled about the possibility of acting effectively. They simply act as they feel is appropriate. But in some sense they prove that Hamlet is right, because all of their actions miscarry. Claudius possesses himself of queen and crown through bold action, but his conscience torments him, and he is beset by threats to his authority (and, of course, he dies). Laertes resolves that nothing will distract him from acting out his revenge, but he is easily influenced and manipulated into serving Claudius’s ends, and his poisoned rapier is turned back upon himself.
《3》The Mystery of Death
In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. He ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, and the physical remainders of the dead, such as by Yorick’s skull and the decaying corpses in the cemetery. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in an ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the theme of revenge and justice—Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet initiates Hamlet’s quest for revenge, and Claudius’s death is the end of that quest.
The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world. Hamlet’s grief and misery is such that he frequently longs for death to end his suffering, but he fears that if he commits suicide, he will be consigned to eternal suffering in hell because of the Christian religion’s prohibition of suicide. In his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
 Hamlet philosophically concludes that no one would choose to endure the pain of life if he or she were not afraid of what will come after death, and that it is this fear which causes complex moral considerations to interfere with the capacity for action.
The Nation as a Diseased Body
Everything is connected in Hamlet, including the welfare of the royal family and the health of the state as a whole. The play’s early scenes explore the sense of anxiety and dread that surrounds the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. Throughout the play, characters draw explicit connections between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of the nation. Denmark is frequently described as a physical body made ill by the moral corruption of Claudius and Gertrude, and many observers interpret the presence of the ghost as a supernatural omen indicating that omething is rotten in the state of Denmark.”.? The dead King Hamlet is portrayed as a strong, forthright ruler under whose guard the state was in good health, while Claudius, a wicked politician, has corrupted and compromised Denmark to satisfy his own appetites. At the end of the play, the rise to power of the upright Fortinbras suggests that Denmark will be strengthened once again.



☆ Conclusion:
    This  play  suggests  many ideas.   This play  is  revenge. I have compare with  movie like  Haider . Ending  of the this play  is  very tragic.   This give suggest  many  ideas   like love ,revange, revange  is not good for life etc.

☆ Reference:
<1> Wikipedia
<2> spark note


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