Sunday, October 27, 2013

WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN I THINK OF ACT III

I thought about a few things while reading Act III of Hamlet, but namely, revenge as a whole stands out to me the most.  There are a couple types of revenge that I've accumulated in my mind throughout my life.  There is a passive revenge where one schemes against another in order to point out their error or debase them privately or in a social manner, and there is an aggressive revenge usually falling out with some sort of face-to-face conflict.  In Act III, we see Hamlet doing a little bit of the two.  He first devises a plot to weed out Claudius's guilt through the plays, but then, as he was about to take revenge upon his uncle and slay him, he found him praying and noted that his uncle may not go to Heaven following his death.

I also think about guilt and suicide when studying Act III.  The guilt comes from Claudius, who refers to the common allusion to the Biblical parable of Cain and Abel when confronting his sin against his brother, but he finds himself unable to sincerely ask God for forgiveness, because of what he has gained through his sins, making him a much rounder character.  Also, the suicide part comes in when Hamlet gives the famous soliloquy "to be or not to be."  He philosophically states mankind's cowardice of taking their own lives simply because of the unknowns that lie ahead after death, and because of this, he also powers through his own personal conflicts that must be resolved before his own death.

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