VOCABULARY LIST 8

• Abase: to reduce or lower, as in rank, office, reputation, or estimation; humble; degrade.
• Abdicate:  to renounce or relinquish a throne, right, power, claim, responsibility, or the like, especially in a formal manner.
• Abomination:  anything abominable; anything greatly disliked or abhorred.
• Brusque: abrupt in manner; blunt; rough.
• Saboteur:  a person who commits or practices sabotage.
• Debauchery: excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures; intemperance;  seduction from duty, allegiance, or virtue.
• Proliferate:  to increase in number or spread rapidly and often excessively.
• Anachronism:  something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, especially a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time.
• Nomenclature:  the names or terms comprising a set or system.
• Expurgate:  to purge or cleanse of moral offensiveness.
• Bellicose:  inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; pugnacious.
• Gauche:  lacking social grace, sensitivity, or acuteness; awkward; crude; tactless.
• Rapacious:  given to seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed; greedy.
• Paradox:  a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.
• Conundrum: anything that puzzles.
• Anomaly: an odd, peculiar, or strange condition, situation, quality, etc; an incongruity or inconsistency.   
• Ephemeral:  lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory.
• Rancorous:  showing malicious resentfulness or hostility; spiteful.
• Churlish:  like a churl; boorish; rude; peasant-like.
• Precipitous:  of the nature of or characterized by precipices (steepness).

Hamlet is quite the unique character.  In fact, he is something of an anomaly for displaying so many split-personalities that is often actually seen in today's society.  Already thinking of the incest of his new parentage as an abomination, Hamlet's level of disgust over his uncle Claudius quickly proliferates into something much more rancorous after the discovery of his father's murder.  After seeing the name of the thrown abased from a Hyperion to a Satyr and seeing the gauche, new king glut himself in his own debaucheries, Hamlet's precipitous state of mind declines into an even further conundrum, where he promises the ghost of his father to avenge his death.  Whether his vengeance take place in the form of abdicating his uncle from the thrown or expurgating his sins, Hamlet turns into a bellicose and almost churlish saboteur in the kingdom.  He visits his love, Ophelia, in a brusque manner which only sets things on a more dramatic scale, since the nomenclature of the hierarchy of the kingdom would have it that her father is the adviser to the king himself.  Not to mention that throughout the play, Hamlet displays ephemeral mood-swings that trouble the others around him, especially since the ghost of King Hamlet has haunted his son with ringing paradoxes of his death.  With King Claudius serving as a metaphorical anachronism as a king, it will be interesting to see how Hamlet deals with the situation.