Hamlet & the melancholy character Essay

Hamlet, as the melancholy character has a lot to blame his sadness on. He is constantly occupied by the thoughts of revenge and death but these forces are counterbalanced by his need to be doubly legitimate of his uncles guilt. This drives him to answer irration on the wholey, prompting suggestion of madness and act impulsively which leads to the death of Polonius. He is whileipulated by several things throughout the play and is constantly feeling the burden of being impelled in mavin direction or the other by forces which were alien to him only a couple of days completionure when he was a scholar and the apparent heir to the throne.The ghost of his father leaves him with a task to be completed along with the grief of mourning a father and watching his mother become the married woman of the murderer, with what he considers indecent haste. Hamlet is motivated and driven by the uttering of his fathers ghost, his own filial obligation, and the brashness of the murderer in marryi ng his own mother to usurp his throne. He is driven to sometimes be lead and sometimes pretend to be mad to ensure that his thoughts are not revealed to his uncle Claudius. He is driven to misogynism by his apparent loss of belief in women after his mothers behavior.He is driven to collect the evidence to his fathers death at the hands of his uncle because his thoughtful temperament and learnedness do not everyow him to find arguments beyond reasonable doubt to form a seat for vengeful bring throughs. All these instances when he is driven in directions much against his own volition lead him to take that he is being manipulated at on the whole levels by situations and people. He is also, perhaps, suspicious of the fact that his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are apply to spy on him and manipulate him into certain actions or words.He implores his friend Guildenstern to play the pipe to romp the attention from his own discomfiture. But when he refuses to play claiming th at he does not have any acquaintance of playing a pipe, he accuses Guildenstern of being incapable of playing the pipe but manipulating him (Hamlet) like a pipe by blowing thoughts into his mind and subtly handling his emotions in a way as to chance on the notes desired by people around him. Hamlet is preoccupied with two things throughout the play. They are the buttocks for action and inaction and his dismay at being manipulated by several things and persons.Arguably, if Hamlet were not the fertilise to his own inaction, so many of the lives lost in the play would have been saved. all the same the final revenge he exacts is not his own doing but the foul play of Claudius that goes awry. He readily gives up all other purpose in his life and begins the journey of revenge (which he eventually discovers that he is singularly incapable of) when his fathers ghost reveals the secret of his death. Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember theeYe a, from the table of my memory Ill wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixd with baser matter yes, by heaven (1. 5. 103-110) Even one of the most famous soliloquies from hamlet are of the effect that Hamlet is being troubled by the cruel hand dealt to him by fate. To be, or not to be that is the question Whether tis nobler in the mind to poseThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die,to sleep, No more and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That remove is heir to,tis a consummation Devoutly to be wishd. To die,to sleep(3. 1. 58-66) Even his attempts to contemplate felo-de-se are his thoughts that are bound and led by influences foreign to himself. There is also evidence of much(prenominal) distrau ght thinking on the part of Hamlet in other instances.When he enquires his friends why they have come to meet him, whether they had come of their own volition r they had been summoned, he describes the state of mankind as an inanimate thing that is given too much value. What a piece of work is a man how noble in reason how infinite in faculty in form and moving how show and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a idol the beauty of the world the paragon of animals And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me no, nor woman neither,(2. 2. 291-297)Hamlet feels manipulated by his varied feelings and motivations. He sometimes feels he is just an instrument of revenge. In some instances he feels he is the sum of all contrasting wisdom which prevents him from taking any decisive action. All these contradictions and the preponderance of thoughts slightly self and the motivations behind actions and the multilayered questioning of wisdom i n taking or delaying a particular action make Hamlet the most complicated and accomplished characterization of Shakespearean tragedies and offers different meanings upon different readings.