Search for Meaning in Shakespeares Hamlet :: Shakespeare Hamlet Essays

Search for Meaning in Shakespeares HamletBut I will delve one deoxyguanosine monophosphate below their minesAnd blow them at the moon (3.4.208-10)What is real? This question, begged by manhood from day one, imbibems to grow in importance and urgency as the twenty-first century looms on the road ahead. When religion, culture, family, and meaning are all strained to good turn second fiddle to the almighty dollar, where do we turn for consciousness? I think the answer is that we turn inward. After all, there moldiness be something within the human animal to suggest a moral, or a message, or at least an explanation. Hamlet deals specifically with this introspection, this hunt club for meaning. Prince Hamlets world has come apart at the seams and he is desperately fumble for some sort of guidance. He needs a foundation, a ancient principle, an answer of even the smallest kind with which to build a coherent worldview. Unfortunately, Hamlets philosophical free-fall may be a result of his own inability to tie in to a world outside of his own grief and confusion. He is maven and resourceful in the world of ideas, save flat-footed and indecisive in the world of actions. Whereas Shakespearean characters such as Hotspur and Coriolanus suffer from shortsightedness and snowstorm judgements, Hamlet suffers broad abstract thoughts and paralyzing ambivalence. This may be why the play has been able to so stalwartly defend its V.I.P status in the Western heathen conscious. Any thinking modern citizen knows what it means to fit round ideals into straightforward realities. Therefore, it makes sense for Hamlet, one of our foremost fictional figures, to have trouble unified his internal ideals to the external world. In his introduction to the Norton edition of the play, Stephen Greenblatt points out that Hamlet, seems to see an epochal shift not only in Shakespeares career but in Western drama. Greenblatt is referring to the dominance of Prince Hamlet s psyche over all aspects of the plays status and mood. Hamlet transports its audience into the Princes mind and forces them to look at the world from the inside(a) out. The view is startling. It is the source of the plays unanswered questions and thought provoking ambiguities. Shakespeare lets us see the world through the eyes of a man struggling to influence whether any of it even matters.