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"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.
In 1774, William Richardson sounded the key notes of this analysis: Hamlet was a sensitive and accomplished prince with an unusually refined moral sense; he is nearly incapacitated by the horror of the truth about his mother and uncle, and he struggles against that horror to fulfill his task.
The Hamlet is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1940, about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi. Originally a standalone novel, it was later followed by The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), forming the Snopes trilogy .
The entire second act comprises Hamlet. The audience gets involved during this segment when one audience member is asked to portray Ophelia for the Nunnery Scene. The rest of the audience makes up Ophelia's subconscious , divided into three sections representing her ego, superego, and id .
(Hamlet's dying request to Horatio)... The rest is silence. (Hamlet's last words) Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest....so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
The Hamlet of the supposed earlier play also uses his perceived madness as a guise to escape suspicion. Eliot believes that in Shakespeare's version, however, Hamlet is driven by a motive greater than revenge, his delay in exacting revenge is left unexplained, and that Hamlet's madness is meant to arouse the king's suspicion rather than avoid it.
Eliot uses Lady Macbeth's state of mind as an example of the successful objective correlative: "The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion….", as a contrast to Hamlet. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him.
Also available are the complete texts of Hamlet Studies (vols. I–XXV, 1979–2003). Hamlet on the Ramparts is devoted only to two scenes of the play, I:4–5. It has numerous sections on what goes into analysis, facsimiles of some 18th-century editions, and a viewer with which two sets of material can be viewed on the same screen.