Briefly discuss the timeless appeal of the mighty drama Hamlet.
A.The appeal lies in its combination of intrigue, emotional conflict and searching philosophic melancholy.
B.The play opens with Hamlet appearing in a mood of world-weariness occasioned by his father’s death and by his mother’s hasty remarriage with his father’s brother. While encountering his father’s ghost, he is informed that Claudius has murdered his father. Thus, he is urged by the ghost to seek revenge. But he has none of the single-minded blood lust of the earlier revengers.
C.It is not because he is incapable of action, but because the cast of his mind is so speculative, so questioning and so contemplative that action seems like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero.
D.Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting, and bearing the burden of the duty to revenge his father’s death, he is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action.
E.His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. For such a figure, Shakespeare uses soliloquy and monologues.
F.This play is Shakespeare’s most detailed expose of a corrupted court. Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy and treachery and corruption at the royal court.