The department of foreign language and literature course work theme : the motive of pretense and play in the tragedy "hamlet"

2 Deceeption and Pretense

In Hamlet, the pretense of madness was a huge part of this play. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet had severe consequences for all the characters. However, referring to the main protagonist Hamlet, he was mainly the character that has been affected negatively. Hamlet experiences different ways of loss throughout the play because of his decision to act mad. Furthermore, individuals who act over madness to take revenge must experience losses in their lives. To start off, individuals who act mad will misjudge others losing trust in people around. For instance, Hamlet accused Ophelia as he is acting irrationally to prove that he is mad.

Hamlet declares to Ophelia when Claudius and Polonius are spying on them, “Farewell, Or, if /thou wilt needs to marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well

/enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, /and quickly too, Farewell”(III.i.138-141). This quotation indicates that during the time Hamlet deceives people around him, he actually is losing his trust in his love Ophelia because he is misjudging her actions. He decides not to marry her anymore and accuses her that her beauty can make her a “whore”.

Throughout the play, Hamlet never declares his plan to take revenge to no one except Horatio. This also proves that in the long run, Hamlet is losing all of his trust to everyone, even to the girl he admired and was going to marry. Furthermore, even before Hamlet starts his plan and knows about his Senior Hamlet’s murder, he eventually lost his trust in his mother Gertrude. For example, Hamlet states in Claudius and Gertrude speech about Senior Hamlet, “ Why she, even she–O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason/ Would have mourned longer!–married with my uncle/ My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules”(I.ii.149-153). Shakespeare uses metaphor in this context to emphasize the pain Hamlet is feeling in his mother’s wedding. Hamlet thinks that he is as strong as Hercules to deal with this painful feeling he was seeing his mother marrying his uncle after only two months from Senior Hamlet’s death. At this point in the play, Hamlet starts to develop mistrust feelings towards his mother as he thinks that she betrayed his father and didn’t value all the love he gave to her. In this scene, Hamlet didn’t take into consideration whether Gertrude is betraying Senour Hamlet or she really has love feelings towards his uncle. He ultimately misjudges her actions too, like Ophelia, and lost trust in her after. This also can be proven as Hamlet never trust his mother to tell her his plans and that Claudius is the one who killed his father. In conclusion, when Hamlet acted mad, he starts to misjudge people around him, like Ophelia and Gertrude, leading him ultimately to lose his trust in people.

Second, Individuals who pretend madness will not be able to control their actions, thus they end up losing their love feeling in the people around them. For instance, when Hamlet couldn’t control his anger towards his uncle, he killed Polonius by mistake. This lead Ophelia, Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s love, to lose her sanity. She has been irrational and insane since her father’s incident. When the whole family gathered to talk about critical and extensive problems, she enters singing, “He is dead and gone, lady/ He is dead and gone,/ At his head a grass-green turf,/ At his heels a stone. Oh, ho!”(IV.VI.28-32). This quotation shows how Ophelia got insane over her shock in her beloved Hamlet and in Polonius, her father’s death. This shock affected her mentality made her drained and senseless to what is going around her and she ended up drowning in her house lake. All of this mess happened because of Hamlet’s unwise and impulsive actions. His anger blindfolded his sense of humor leading him to commit horrible actions and take impulsive decisions, like taking his sword out and kill the person behind the curtains as he thought he was Claudius.

Thus, Hamlet lost his love Ophelia because of his actions. Furthermore, Hamlet also lost his love for his mother because of his irrational actions. Also, because of Polonius’s murder, Hamlet starts to accuse Gertrude; destroying all the lovely and strong bonds between a son and his mother. For example, Hamlet discloses his feeling to Gertrud in an unpleasant way saying, “ You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife,/ And– would it were not so!–you are my mother”(III.IV.16-17), and he also states, “Have you eyes? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed/And batten on this moor? Ha, have you eyes?/You cannot call it love, for at your age/The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble”(III.IV.66-70). Again, because of his mistrust to his mother, his way and actions in expressing his feeling towards her are causing him to lose her love. As it is shown in both quotations, he obviously shows hate and derision feelings as he cannot accept or believe that his mother betrayed his father and fell in love with his uncle. He starts to put all the blame to her, the one who loves him, instead of Claudius, who hates him, even though the ghost told him not to hurt his mother. Thus, Hamlet experiences the loss of feelings of love his mother. Overall, Hamlet’s uncontrolled actions emitted from his fake madness caused his loss of love for Gertrud and Ophelia.

Finally, individuals who fake madness will lose their friends and lose their innocence eventually. For instance, Hamlet declares, “ Without debatement further, more or less,/ he should the bearers put to sudden death,/Not shriving time allowed”(V.ii.47-49). At this point in the play, no one is able to tell if Hamlet got insane for real or he still acts. However, he committed an action that ended his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, lives. Again, his acting affects his brain making it

senseless to what is appropriate and rational and what is not. Additionally, as soon as he knew that his friends have some connection to Claudius, he admits that they betray him. Hamlet has no evidence for his conclusions, he is now having mistrust to anyone in his life. After Ophelia’s death and his mother’s loss, It is expected that Hamlet will act in this impulsive way. Also, he does not only lose his friends but also he hurts them badly. He asked the King of England to kill them without any doubt. Thus, Hamlet lost his friends because he decided to act mad and irrational. Furthermore, Hamlet lost his innocence throughout the play. At the very beginning, Claudius killed Senior Hamlet and Hamlet’s mother married Claudius immediately, which causes a big chain of events that causes Hamlet’s loss. Hamlet had to be in this mess when he was just a child, living with all of these killers, treasons, and blood. This all cases his loss of morality; which pushes him to kill his friends, hurt his beloved Ophelia and his mother as well.

Hamlet states in his first line on the whole play, “A little more than kin and less than kind”(I.ii.65). Shakespeare made this Hamlet’s first line in purpose, He wanted to give a clue to the readers and the audience that Hamlet was a good guy and everyone in Denmark loved and respect him for his good manners and values. This proves that Hamlet experiences all of these losses because of the environment he was surrounded by and not because he was evil like Claudius who killed his brother to be the next king. Thus, Hamlet’s loss of innocence is the main reason for all the problems he had been through and for all the impulsive decisions he made. Overall, When Hamlet pretends that he is mad, he lost his friends with his innocence as well. In conclusion, faking madness in Hamlet is a significant factor that plays a huge role in the play. Because of this plan, Hamlet experiences different types of losses causing a lot of blood on the ground ultimately. First, Hamlet lost trust in his family members; Ophelia and Gertrud. Second, he lost the love he had in his life; his love for Ophelia as she died because of him and his love for his mother through the hate speech he gave to her. Then, he lost his closest friends, who came from England to help him, because of his irrational way of thinking. Finally, he lost his innocence as he decides to strip off all his manners and values to be like Claudius.

From The Murder of Gonzago to Hamlet's pretence of madness, Hamlet is a work obsessed with acting and deception. Gillian Woods explores how the play unsettles distinctions between performance and reality and how it thus exposes the mechanisms of theatre.

Hamlet – both the character and the play in which he appears – is deeply concerned with performance. In his very first scene, Hamlet polices the boundaries between

performance and reality. When his worried mother asks why his grief ‘seems ... so particular’ (1.2.75) with him, Hamlet ignores her main point (why does he grieve more intensely than other bereaved sons?) and snatches at the idea of ‘seeming’:

Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not ‘seems.’ ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, [good] mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, [shapes] of grief, That can [denote] me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’ (1.2.76–86)

Outward displays of emotion are untrustworthy, Hamlet reasons, because a person could ‘play’ or mimic them. Indeed, even his own sincere demonstrations of sadness are compromised because it would be easy to feign them. So while Hamlet’s mourning clothes, sighs and tears ‘seem’ to express his grief, Hamlet insists they are not significant: his inner feelings are his true meaning. This relationship between ‘show’ and ‘authenticity’, ‘performance’ and ‘reality’, preoccupies Hamlet throughout the play. When he discovers that his uncle has murdered his father, Hamlet interprets the news as a lesson in deceitful appearances: ‘meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!’ (1.5.107–08). However, the tragedy complicates any easy moral distinctions between acting and authenticity. Hamlet himself, despite his petulant outburst against ‘seeming’, cannot escape the human impulse to perform. Not only does he successfully adopt an ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.172) to deflect attention from his revenge plot, but his endless soliloquising makes him all the more theatrical, even as he meditates on ‘that within which passes show’. At the very moment Hamlet insists that his mourning is authentic and internal, he seems deliberately to parade his grief for all to see. In this tragedy, Shakespeare explores the ways in which performance exists in and shapes reality.

The play Hamlet commissions the travelling players to enact gives his obsession with performance a specifically theatrical focus. Staged at the Globe in 1601, Hamlet was originally produced at a time when professional theatre was a relatively new medium (the first playhouse opened in 1567). Renaissance plays are particularly self- conscious about their own theatricality, as their writers explored the technical

possibilities and ethical implications of the form. The play staged at Elsinore gave audiences at the Globe an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the entertainment they had paid to view. What kind of truth can be told through theatre? What sort of impact do plays have on those who watch them? These were questions that moralists and playwrights debated endlessly.

Theatrical entertainment was not restricted to London. The itinerant actors who appear at the Danish Court reflect early modern practice. Professional players, like Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, frequently toured venues across the country, performing in schools, universities, country houses, town halls and drinking houses.^[1] Some ventured even further afield. A German album amicorum or friendship album (a Renaissance cross between an autograph book and a scrapbook) compiled by Franz Hartmann (1597–1617) includes a watercolour painting possibly depicting English players on their way to perform at the Frankfurt fair.^[2] The picture captures some of the excitement that also accompanies the entrance of the players in Hamlet. Brightly costumed and carrying their properties in full view, the illustrated players are a spectacle on horseback, travelling to, and generating anticipation for, their next performance. Similarly, a trumpet ‘flourish’ (2.2.368) heralds the players’ arrival at Elsinore; their very entrance is clothed in pageantry.

The play, “The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” written by the famous William Shakespeare is one of constant drama just like most of his works. It is based on lies, deception, greed and revenge. It is an act within a play, the characters in it pretend to be something they are not. The characters act like they are friends, but are plotting behind each other’s back. They act as a family, but in reality, they are strangers concealed by their need of revenge and greed. Hamlet is a play in which nothing can be taken at face value: appearances are frequently deceptive, and many characters engage in play-acting, spying, and pretense. The dialogues have hidden meanings, and if looked twice one might be surprised. Soliloquies reveal the real motives and the true natures of the characters.

The main character of the play, Hamlet, is seen as an insecure teenager, who is doomed to seek revenge for his father’s unfortunate murder by his own uncle. Who have married his mother and have taken over the throne. The lack of grief and mourning from his mother and uncle makes him mad and leads him to be depressed. Upon finding out that his uncle
The play is mainly based on deception, Hamlet deceives everyone by acting mad and letting people believe that he’s mad. King Claudius deceive Hamlet and the kingdom by killing their former king and his brother, King Hamlet. Polonius deceives
Hamlet by, spying on his conversations. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deceive Hamlet by pretending to be his friend, but in reality, they are there because of the King and Queen’s orders. Because of all the pretenses, acting and disguising, they all end up killing each other, and their enemy Fortinbras take over the Castle and the kingdom of Denmark. Shakespeare is trying to convey that, the lack of honesty leads to unchangeable and life altering mistakes, it is an applicable message to all.

On a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Discovered first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar Horatio, the ghost resembles the recently deceased King Hamlet, whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne and married the king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. When Horatio and the watchmen bring Prince Hamlet, the son of Gertrude and the dead king, to see the ghost, it speaks to him, declaring ominously that it is indeed his father’s spirit, and that he was murdered by none other than Claudius. Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the dawn.

Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness. Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behavior and attempt to discover its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in conversation with the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia: he orders her to enter a nunnery and declares that he wishes to ban marriages.

A group of traveling actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s guilt. He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet imagines his uncle to have murdered his father, so that if Claudius is guilty, he will surely react. When the moment of the murder arrives in the theater, Claudius leaps up and leaves the room. Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer would send Claudius’s soul to heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate revenge and decides to wait. Claudius, now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent to England at once.

Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He draws his sword and stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime,

he is immediately dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death.

In the aftermath of her father’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the river. Polonius’s son, Laertes, who has been staying in France, returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. When Horatio and the king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the prince has returned to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship en route to England, Claudius concocts a plan to use Laertes’ desire for revenge to secure Hamlet’s death. Laertes will fence with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will poison Laertes’ blade so that if he draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a backup plan, the king decides to poison a goblet, which he will give Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or second hits of the match. Hamlet returns to the vicinity of Elsinore just as Ophelia’s funeral is taking place. Stricken with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had in fact always loved Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio that he believes one must be prepared to die, since death can come at any moment. A foolish courtier named Osric arrives on Claudius’s orders to arrange the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.