For my essay, I want to try and combine the two prompts: Is revenge a worthy goal? and Whether or not Hamlet’s madness is real or feigned (or both).
Throughout the story, Hamlet only thinks about his father's death and revenge. I'm going to attempt to link both prompts together by explaining Hamlet obsession over his father's revenge, his crazy act turns into reality. He pretends to be insane but after his uncle's reaction to the play he really OBSESSES over the idea of revenge.
I can also talk about how revenge is such a high risk scenario (much to high of cost). Even though Hamlet gets his revenge in the end, so many extra lives where lost. Instead of killing only the king, due to Hamlets actions, five more people died ,including himself.
Now that I think about it, it may be a challenge to really link the two prompts but I will still give it a shot. Any extra thoughts will be appreciated.
Molly,
ReplyDeleteI think you're right to worry that you may be biting off a bit more than you can chew here. I DO see a potential link in these two topics in your suggestion that revenge might cause madness--(would this hold for Ophelia's madness as well, given that it is caused by Hamlet's mistaken 'revenge' on Polonious, who he thinks is Claudius?). Still, the key in any literary analysis is the ability to GROUND that analysis in the text under review. So, your first step ought to be to go back and see if you can find any passages that actively link the two topics--revenge and madness. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Hamlet's apology to Laertes just before their duel kicks off. You might want to go back and take a look at that one. I'll keep kicking this around in my mind and see if I can't come up with any other suggestions. In the end, in an effort to favor depth of analysis over breadth, you may want to pick one topic or the other, but I don't see why you can't give combining the two a go at least in your first draft