Autor: Rafael Ferreira | Publicado: 2011-03-16T18:00:00-07:00

HAMLET: THE ESSENCE OF EACH ONE OF USDaniela Oliveira LopesGraduanda do Curso de Letras - Unipampa/BagéShakespeare was a great genius of his era. He was probably the writer who best described the human essence inside his plays; Hamlet is a clear example of a play filled with matters concerning human emotions. Elements like philosophical thoughts, irony, morally issues are constantly dealt during this play. Many paradoxes can be seen in Hamlet, which makes it a wonderful source of ideas that can always be discussed and analyzed in many different scopes.In this great Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is a character who is extremely conscious concerning all the wrong things that happen around him. He can not be considered a traditional hero, because while he tries to solve a situation that he sees as a wrong thing, he interferes negatively in many people lives, some of them are very important to him. He curses his uncle, berates his mother, scorns his possible future wife, insults her father, disappoints her brother and lacerates himself. The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment and a constantly quest for the true.A cycle of unfair things were happening in the kingdom of Denmark. Hamlet’s father has taken the previous king throne in a dishonest way. This situation happened again, but with some different circumstances. Claudio, Hamlet’s uncle, killed his brother to take his throne, and married the queen, Hamlet’s mother. The whole situation did not disturb people, everybody was pretending that things were normal and correct. Hamlet did not think this way, that situation was not acceptable in his point of view. He could feel that things were not right, even before knowing that his father was killed by his uncle. Hamlet is an honest, moral individual, who lives in a deceitful society. The true is presented in a very interesting way. A ghost, which can be related to our conscience, is the starting point of all Hamlet’s quests for justice and for the minimal order. It was necessary a creature from other world to come and demand the minimal order. Using this starting point Shakespeare wants to show us that the true is beyond our concrete world and someone has to look for it. The ghost is the one who gives the first shot to break the fake tranquility that people seem to live and Hamlet is the person that is in charge of looking for the true. Hamlet wants the true and he wants justice. The only way that he finds to reach his goal is to pretend that he is mad. This attitude is a paradox. The most conscious person in the story has to pretend unconscious to make people aware and to show everybody where the true is. Hamlet tries to reach the true using a lie. There is the sanity covered with a mask of madness. While we read Hamlet, a question remain in the air, we wonder all the time, what being insane really is. When we compare Hamlet and Horatio, his best friend, we can see two characters that have personalities which are totally the opposite. Hamlet is the lack of measure, the conscious that is shown is a controversial way, while Horatio is the balance in the play. Love and hate are two feelings that are side-by-side in Shakespeare’s masterpiece. Hamlet loves deeply some people and he hates his uncle. This character, like all of us, has the capacity to have these two strong feelings like those that are the opposite, at the same time. The love that Hamlet feels for Ophelia can also be seen as a paradox in this play. He has showed her in many ways that he loved her, and we all believe that his love is real. However after the ghost event his attitudes started to change towards her and all the people around him, he did not thrust in almost anyone. He loved Ophelia, but he had to lie, he has said things that made her believe that he did not love her. Ophelia could not see that he still loved her. She could not image that his attitudes were part of his plan for justice. Hamlet was focusing just on his objective. Ophelia has put all her life and dreams on Hamlet’s hands, the love that they felt for each other was the foundation of her life. After Hamlet has changed his behavior towards her, her life became empty. Her life has lost the meaning. Her father, Polonius had been killed by Hamlet; she had no one to support her. She was an alone woman in the world. Being a female in a kingdom filled with chaos and deceptions, the innocent Ophelia force to keep silent and obey to the domineering men in her life. All these elements made her take the first decision in her life, for the first time she took control of her own life, the first time that she had the power to decide what she wanted. She has facilitated her own death; she wanted to put an end on everything. There is a very paradoxical scene during Ophelia’s burial. Two clowns are in a cemetery discussing the fact that Ophelia drowned herself, and therefore should not receive a Christian burial under Christian law. However, one of the clowns points out that her death was declared as a natural death rather than a suicide, and therefore they must dig the grave for her. As the clowns work, they tell each other jokes and one of them sings happily. In this scene there is a context of a death and the men who were supposed to be gravediggers, dull people, are represented by clowns. This can be understood as another paradoxical element in Shakespeare’s play. This can be seen as a big reflection concerning human life, after we die, we are just a pile of nothing, that’s why we have to try to build true values while we are alive, because after we die, the only thing that will remain are the seeds that we have planted on society. Hamlet pretends to be mad, but at the same time he does not pretend that the reality is right, like all the other people around him. He acts in order to solve a situation that can not be borne by him anymore. We can not find someone that has all Hamlet’s personality treats and ideas, but there is no doubt that inside each one of us there is something of this amazing Shakespeare’s character. We all have questions, we all think about life and we all have a restless mind in a certain way, but some of us never take an action to change the things that we don’t agree with. Hamlet had the courage to break with the whole cycle of attitudes and actions that in his point of view were extremely wrong.