The Analysis of Hamlet’s Character.doc

哈姆雷特的个性分析The Analysis of Hamlets CharacterContentsAbstract.1Introduction.21. The features of Hamlet.22.Some opinions about the feature of Hamlet .2II. Aspects of character2 1.Plots about Hamlet. 22.Hamlet and his Problems. 43.Hamlet and Metaphysical Doubt.84.Hamlet and Madness.95.Hamlet and Oedipus.115.1 the critical applicaion of Hamlet and Oedipus.115.2 Jones application of Freudian psychology to Hamlet and Oedipus.126.Hamlet and Ghosts .15III. Conclusion 16Reference.17The Analysis of Hamlets Character摘 要：哈姆雷特是英国戏剧史上最美丽的奇葩，它问世于1601或1602年，是莎士比亚戏剧创作的里程碑。作者通过对主人公内心矛盾的细致刻画体现了其在艺术创作中的成熟，并成功地塑造了在道德与复仇之间徘徊的人物形象，这也正是这篇论文写作的重点所在。 作者着力将哈姆雷特与当代的其他复仇悲剧区分开，极力地使复仇过程生动化和戏剧化，强调主人公内心的矛盾而非大肆渲染血腥的场面。剧作家的天分还表现在他创新的文学取材，以崭新的视角选取了与同时代其他作品不同的悲剧人物进行描述。 哈姆雷特的内心矛盾超越了作者所在的伊丽莎白时代。生活在各个时代的人们都能在哈姆雷特身上找寻到自己的影子。人们不断地在堕落与道德之间挣扎，哈姆雷特正体现了人类的这种命运。关键词：悲剧 ；矛盾 ；丰富 ；复杂 Abstract：Hamlet is without question the most famous play in the English language. Probably written in 1601 or 1602, the tragedy is a milestone in Shakespeare's dramatic development; the playwright achieved artistic maturity in this work through his brilliant depiction of the hero's struggle with two opposing forces: moral integrity and the need to avenge his father's murder. This is also what I want to talk about in this thesis. Shakespeare's focus on this conflict was a revolutionary departure from contemporary revenge tragedies, which tended to graphically dramatize violent acts on stage, in that it emphasized the hero's dilemma rather than the depiction of bloody deeds. The dramatist's genius is also evident in his transformation of the play's literary sources.Hamlet endures as the object of universal identification because his central moral dilemma transcends the Elizabethan period, making him a man for all ages. In his difficult struggle to somehow act within a corrupt world and yet maintain his moral integrity, Hamlet ultimately reflects the fate of all human beings.Key words：tragedy ；Contradiction；rich ；complexityThe Analysis of Hamlets Character. Introduction:Shakespeare's Hamlet, written around 1600, is one of the most problematic texts in all of literature. With the exception of certain Biblical texts, no other work has produced such a continuing, lively, and contentious debate about how we are supposed to understand it. In fact, one could very easily construct a thorough and intriguing history of modern literary criticism based upon nothing other than various interpretative takes on Hamlet (a task which has already been carried out by at least one historian of ideas).Given this critical confusion, we might as well admit up front that we are not going to arrive at anything like a firm consensus on what the play is about and how we should understand it. However, wrestling with this play is a very important and stimulating exercise, because it puts a lot of pressure on us to reach some final interpretation (that is, it generates in us a desire to make sense of all the elements in it, to find some closure), and, even if that goal eludes us, we can learn a great deal about reading poetic drama and interpreting literature from a serious attempt to grasp this most elusive work. If one of the really important functions of great literature is to stimulate thought-provoking conversations which force us to come to grips with many things about the text and about ourselves, then Hamlet is a particularly valuable work. To know the character of the hero is very important to understand the play. Let us see some main characters of Hamlet: the universal renaissance man; a fledgling crown prince who must be blooded; a melancholy intellectual suddenly confronted with problems outside the text books.The characteristics of Hamlet are very easy to see, such as: Introspective and thoughtful. Self-doubting and not certain of his own rightness. Intelligent. It is not only in his famous soliloquies that Hamlet speaks about who and what he is, but his progressive self-doubt and isolation mean that until he has decided upon action at the end of Act IV, his soliloquies are the most important vehicle for the expression of his true, rich personality.1 Peter Alexander, The Complete Man From Hamlet, Father and Son, New York: prentice Hall, 1955.Aspects of character1. Plots about Hamlet  One could read Hamlet simply, simplistically even, as a revenge tragedy. Hamlets father, the king of Denmark, is killed by his brother, Claudius, who, overriding the rights of succession, appropriates both the crown and the wife of Hamlets father. The ghost of the father reveals everything to his son, and all the elements of the revenge tragedy are in place: Hamlet has an obligation to avenge the murder, the usurpation, and the adultery. This he does by killing Claudius at the end of the play. However it is clear that Shakespeare both uses and distances himself from aspects of the genre (see Hamlets soliloquy III ii is now the very witching time of night, which begins diabolically as if he is the classic revenger corrupted by his revenge, but ends with a prayer (the verb is subjunctive) that he never be unnatural, the essential predisposition to goodness in his soul emerging). The theme of vengeance is partly a vehicle used by Shakespeare in order to articulate a whole series of themes central to humanity: · relationships between father and son, mother and son, and Hamlet and his friends · love relationships · power wielding · madness, feigned madness, dissembling · youth and age · action and inaction · corrupt power and power corrupting · the most significant existential questions; the existence of a god; to be or not to be; if it be now. 2 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy, 1586, Cambridge University Press, chapter 22  Readings of Hamlet are innumerable and various according to the personality of the reader, director, or actor. Hamlet is someone who both imposes himself on us through the complexity and mysterious nature of his character, which is to an extent almost indecipherable. His is also one around which our own personality can allow itself to be shaped. He is one of the rare characters of the theatrical world, perhaps the only one, who permits such constant exchange. Each of us, no matter what age, can recognise him/herself in Hamlet and can shape the myth of Hamlet in his/her image. 3 Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll, Hamlet character. Gunter Narr Verlag Tubingen, 1985 Laurence Olivier (a famous critic) said that he could have played Hamlet for a hundred years and still found something new in him on each performance; the character is ambiguous, almost impossible to grasp, as is the language of the play.4 William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Cambridge University Press,1817 Instead of impoverishing the play this ambiguity makes it all the more rich and textured. It is precisely this mystery which allows each reader and actor to engage in a personal and intimate reading of the character, and to share his complexity. Hamlet is himself, you, me, he is all of us; being all of us he is universal, the myth which each of us, in our own individuality, tries to understand and comes to recognise in our own nature.5 S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 24 June 1827 What are the main characteristics of this fascinating and, hence, unforgettable character? Interpretations are legion and only the main ones are cited here.  · His "madness". Feigned and assumed or progressively real. Most of the characters in the play have something to say about Hamlet's presumed or pretended madness. · His sense of humor and playfulness. This increasingly embitters through the method of puns and paradoxes. These are his weapons of choice for use against those in his life, he cannot trust. · His preoccupation with his own and other mortalities, with the role of time and the inevitability of death, underlying the images of progressive corruption and mortality. Hamlet meditates on the possibility of his own death, and on the significance of death. · His delay. In the first act, Hamlet says he will "sweep" to his revenge, but in the last act he says he has plenty of time. In between, he blames himself repeatedly for his delay and calls himself a coward. · His supposed misogyny. "Frailty thy name is woman!" is only one of the things that Hamlet has to say about women. 6 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, Washington Square Press, 1988.2. Hamlet and his Problems If the heroes of the great classical tragedies are all confronted by choices, it is because they are all obliged to resolve them in one manner or another: once the decision is taken, everything else follows, accompanied by acts of majestic nobility or, at the other extreme, of abject decay and ruin. For Hamlet nothing is simple, everything raises questions. His dilemma is not only about what decisions he should take but rather whether he will be able to make any decisions at all.7 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917-1932, Cambridge University Press, 1932   According to some interpretations, Hamlet makes no decisions and instead projects the image of an indecisive, inactive and passive individual, a romantic incapable of action who is in some ways snivelling and pathetic; he is nothing but a compulsive talker taking pleasure in his own words. Jean-Louis Barrault said of him that he is the hero of unparalleled hesitation. He astonishes us with soliloquies of unequalled beauty, his emotions are of stunning force, but he does not evolve beyond them. This is why T.S. Eliot regarded Hamlet as a failure and said that it presented a character dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it exceeds the events that occur. Why so much emotion and so little action?  One of the most famous pieces of writing on Hamlet is also one of the most critical. Eliot views the play as an "artistic failure" because Hamlet's strong feelings are given inadequate explanation.  Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an special temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution - of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's - which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.  Two writers of our time, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll the University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, observing that they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art; and as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticise it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for "interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their "interpretation" of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare's design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from The Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's Hamlet must have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in The Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the "madness" of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly "blunts" the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the "madness" is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to The Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes - the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes - for which there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play, of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each.