Hamlet Textual Integrity Essay
"How has your understanding of the play's structure, dramatic techniques and language helped you appreciate its textual significance and importance?'
Playwright William Shakespeare created the revenge tragedy Hamlet over 400 years ago and yet it remains still, a forerunner in its genre because it is more than just a revenge tragedy; it is the first existential play to dramatize the human condition in all its complexity and depth. Through the play's structure, dramatic techniques and language, Shakespeare deeply explores concepts of verisimilitude being the quality of realism in something, and morality in a world which has lost its ethical bearings. It is through analysis of these ideas that an appreciation of the texts significance and its …show more content…
Shakespeare is famous for dramatizing social identity in many of his plays. Just when a character seems to identify completely with their social identity, Shakespeare strips away the appearance of social status and order and then begins to unravel the psychological order, expressing, ultimately, the multifaceted face of corruption in his characters. “You are the Queen, your husbands brothers wife, And, would it were not so, you are my mother.” Such scenes explore the deeper paradoxes of identity. Shakespeare challenges the significance of appearance through the constant distinction between appearance and reality by the unprecedented use of the aside and the soliloquy. The soliloquy is a continual reminder in Shakespeare that the inner life is by no means transparent to one’s surrounding world. This analysis of the multifaced nature of humans provides us with a window in which we observe our own nature, our own human traits. This exemplifies the effect Shakespeare's techniques have on the responder, establishing the play's great importance and textual significance through analysis of the concept of appearance versus
Playwright William Shakespeare created the revenge tragedy Hamlet over 400 years ago and yet it remains still, a forerunner in its genre because it is more than just a revenge tragedy; it is the first existential play to dramatize the human condition in all its complexity and depth. Through the play's structure, dramatic techniques and language, Shakespeare deeply explores concepts of verisimilitude being the quality of realism in something, and morality in a world which has lost its ethical bearings. It is through analysis of these ideas that an appreciation of the texts significance and its …show more content…
Shakespeare is famous for dramatizing social identity in many of his plays. Just when a character seems to identify completely with their social identity, Shakespeare strips away the appearance of social status and order and then begins to unravel the psychological order, expressing, ultimately, the multifaceted face of corruption in his characters. “You are the Queen, your husbands brothers wife, And, would it were not so, you are my mother.” Such scenes explore the deeper paradoxes of identity. Shakespeare challenges the significance of appearance through the constant distinction between appearance and reality by the unprecedented use of the aside and the soliloquy. The soliloquy is a continual reminder in Shakespeare that the inner life is by no means transparent to one’s surrounding world. This analysis of the multifaced nature of humans provides us with a window in which we observe our own nature, our own human traits. This exemplifies the effect Shakespeare's techniques have on the responder, establishing the play's great importance and textual significance through analysis of the concept of appearance versus