Hamlet is a Coward???

When looking deeply into the soliloquy present in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, I noticed many things that I had previously skimmed over. I understood the events better and got a firmer grasp on some of the hidden elements of the play. Unfortunately this came too late as I wasn’t able to use it on the impossible quote test we just took, but there isn’t much I can do about it now. Recognizing an element of Hamlet’s persona on the other hand can never come too late. One element that really struck me, and was an element that I briefly broached in my essay, but did not really talk about in depth was the presence of Hamlet’s cowardice, or at least what I saw as cowardice. I may be completely off here, but hey, you got to take some risks in life.
Throughout the entire play, Hamlet constantly has thoughts about getting revenge on Claudius for killing his father. Hamlet sees the ghost in Act I and the ghost tells him that Claudius purposefully killed him to get the throne and start an incestuous relationship with King Hamlet’s ex-wife Gertrude. The thing about these thoughts is that they are just that, thoughts for he does nothing to ever act upon the thoughts. Every now and then, he undergoes periods of renewed conviction when he sees something in others that he admires, but after reinforcing his convictions, he goes back to doing nothing about them. A prime example of this is in his soliloquy in Act II when he talks about him being a rogue and a peasant slave. He states that he has ample motive to exact revenge, but does nothing calling himself a coward. He compares himself to a player that can act sad and speak words of grief when a death occurs, while he can do nothing but act sad. This again occurs in his soliloquy in Act IV when he admires the Norwegians for marching to their deaths for nothing more than honor and a patch of land not even big enough to bury all of their bodies. Here again, he complains about himself being a coward and states that he will change because he has a great argument to act as his father was killed and his mother stained. In both instances, Hamlet states that he will change and act, and in Act III, he does put on the play as promised, but once confirming Claudius’s role in his father’s murder he again does nothing. In Act IV, he makes a key distinction that essentially personifies Hamlet throughout the play. He states that his “thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth” (4.4.66). The key word here is again “thought” as he wishes for his thoughts to be bloody while he does nothing to act upon his thoughts. Even when he does actually do something, it is a disastrous occasion as most of the royal family dies leaving only Horatio alive. Hamlet always requires an outside source to renew convictions that never actually come into fruition. He is afraid of the outcomes of his actions as he states in the soliloquy in Act IV, and this fear and cowardice causes him to only renew his thoughts and never act upon them.

Invisible Oppression

The title The Invisible Man always causes thoughts of some science fiction thriller to rush through my head because the concept of invisibility is somewhat unknown to man. Sure, things can be camouflaged to appear invisible and they can hide from appearance by using things as cover, but true invisibility, and here I am talking about a condition when any seeing creature can look at you an see through you, has never been accomplished. Also, man is always afraid and extremely interested in the unknown, so I figured Ralph Ellison would take some weird approach on explaining invisibility through some obscure scientific concepts to satisfy his own interests. I was actually quite excited to read about something that could probably really spark my interest. The only problem was that I was completely wrong in my assumptions of the possible subject matter.
After reading through the first couple of pages in the novel, I realized that Ellison is going to explore a more figurative invisibility, but one that is just as interesting a topic, the inability of people to see the state of race relations. This topic is really only introduced a good ways into the novel when a fight breaks out between the people at the Golden Day saloon as one of the black veterans comments about a white man named Norton being blind to race relations. Despite the real discussion taking place in the meat of the novel, the introduction really struck me because of the fact that it is true, not the part about a man stealing electricity to light his home under a building but the part about how many are blind to the problems around them. In the case of civil rights, it took a man like Martin Luther King to come out and shed light upon an issue that many had chosen to turn a blind eye. In the case of the independence of many countries, such as India, it took a man like Gandhi to band the people together to strive for a goal that people had previously thought impossible or invisible. In the case of women’s rights, it took people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to band women under one banner to get the privileges they deserved. In all of these cases, the problems were apparent but remained invisible to the public until there was light shed upon the issue, light that could be taken as synonymous to the large amount of light present in the mans home. It is as if he is trying to fight his invisibility with an abundance of light so he becomes relevant again. This same light is shed upon Norton when he comes into the Golden Day saloon and witnesses the fight and hears the “doctor” talk to him about race relations. I will admit that I am a bit behind on my reading, but I can only guess how the rest of the novel will go as we learn more about the narrator’s invisibility and how he came to see himself in that way.

Raising the Bar

As we continue to read what I see now to be an amazing play by Shakespeare, the plot constantly thickens and becomes more interesting. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical at first, at least in terms of the play being as good as it is thought to be. Before we read the play in class, some motifs and themes were discussed such as the sense of duty many of the characters displayed and the presence of many questions, but the sheer genius and numerous meanings the one could take from the play were also talked about a great deal. This to me kind of set the bar rather high, in terms of the confusion I was expecting to feel and the multiple meaning I was expecting to find, for Hamlet, a play that is widely regarded as one of the greatest tragedies of all time and an extremely famous play recognizable to almost all of the educated population. Although the bar was set rather high, I had a hard time believing that the bar could ever be met for how could one play be so full of meaning and wordplay to warrant the extensive study that had been done and the extensive study that we were going to do on it. When Ms. Clinch said that we could easily spend more than three months unraveling the mysteries of the play, my skepticism only increased. True, Shakespeare is brilliant, but I had read his plays before and not been completely lost.
Then…. we started reading the play, and I was not disappointed, although I not sure if that is a good thing or not at this point in time. The meaning is in abundance as there are multiple ways you can read the novel and the confusion is at an all time high as if I attempt to read any of the play by myself, I find myself completely lost. In terms of meaning, we have discussed four or five scenes that can be interpreted in multiple ways. That it already twenty-five different reading that can be done on the play and that is not even scratching the surface. An example of this is with the scene when he is with Ophelia. Hamlet can be seen as angry the whole time, or angry after a little bit; he can be seen as knowing that Polonius and Claudius are listening at the beginning of his talk, the middle of his talk, or never during his talks. On top of this, the wordplay is rather unbelievable as one word can have two or three meaning each offering a different perspective of the scene.
So far in class, we have read through Act IV, and it has definitely gotten interesting as I can only anticipate how Hamlet will go about ruining Claudius after missing his chance to kill the man after hearing his confession. I also wonder how Gertrude and Ophelia will end up when all is said and done. I guess all I can hope is that the ending matches the interest and confusion of what I have read so far. I am pretty certain that I will not be disappointed.
Now, it is time to get off of my friends laptop and watch the SUPERBOWL.