Hamlet Tragedy Essay Research Paper The dramatis

Hamlet Tragedy Essay, Research Paper

The dramatis personae of mythical or literary tragedy are characters

towards whom fate slowly reveals inevitable destruction, but tragedy is

not limited to the unfolding of an unavoidable fate. In Hamlet, tragedy

extends its concerns into landscape and axial directionality. Landscapes

in plays of myth and literature give a specific location for imagining

the moods and elements for the particular genre. Axial direction refers

to the aim of the play’s action, as in what direction is the play’s

action aimed. The clowns at the grave, much like the ghost Hamlet,

orient the Dane prince to the psychology of verticality, and, by means

of homeopathic language, lead young Hamlet’s soul into memoria.

Any serious investigation of tragedy, and tragedy is vested in

seriousness, needs to track ideational antecedents (rather, go into the

past by means of tragedy’s relationship with past events). Aristotle

(1992) laid the first tie on the track to the modern understanding of

tragedy when he wrote the following:

Tragedy, therefore, is an imitation of a worthy or illustrious and

perfect action, possessing magnitude, in pleasing language, using

separately the several species of imitation in its parts, by men acting,

and not through narration, through pity and fear effecting a

purification from such like passions. (pp. 10-11; italics mine)

The action of tragedy is perfect since it is inextricably tied to fate.

There is no way out of the circumstances except onward and further into

them. The magnitude that tragedy possesses is a leap out of a personal

history and into the realm of mythology. Theater-goers from Aristotle to

present seek tragedy to witness “myth, which gives full place to every

sort of atrocity, [and] offers more objectivity to the study of such

lives and deaths than any examination of personal motivation” (Hillman

1964/1988, p. 81). Pity and fear (or terror) are principle emotions of

the characters of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The words, “Alas, poor ghost”

(Shakespeare, p. 894), marks Hamlet’s pity for the ghost, and terror is

expressed in his cry, “Oh, God” (ibid.)! Hamlet pities the skull of poor

Yorick at the open grave, and his imagination becomes full of terror and

abhorrence as he contemplates death (p. 927). The language of the Hamlet

tragedy is pleasing to the audience but not the characters, and it is

the possessive magnitude of tragedy’s language that pleases.

An obscure association rises when Chaucer’s idea of tragedy in the

Canterbury Tales is juxtaposed to the image of the grave in tragedy. The

monk defines tragedy as “a story concerning someone who has enjoyed

great prosperity but has fallen from his high position into misfortune

and ends in wreched-ness (sic.). Tragedies are commonly written in verse

with six feet, called hexameters” (Chaucer 1989, p.575; italics mine).

Contemporary associations with the metaphor of ’six feet’ leads to

imagining a grave, as in six feet under. Elizabethan graves were shallow

(Rogers-Gardner 1995) and bear no direct allusion to contemporary

notions of a grave’s depth, but, as meaning-making through imagination

takes place today, the association is allowed. What this obscure

excursion elucidates is the relatively mercurial influence that the

image of the grave provides tragedy. Somehow, the grave is difficult to

approach directly; therefore, by means of indirection I make my

direction known.

The deep impression of the grave’s image in tragedy is indirectly

contained in Nietzsche’s idea of the effect of tragedy. “Now the grave

events are supposed to be leading pity and terror inexorably towards

the relief of discharge” (1993, p. 106-7; italics mine). Nietzsche uses

the word ‘grave’ to carry a weighty importance for the plot of tragedy.

He does not use the grave plot as a weighty image for tragedy. Where do

some of the principal characters of tragedy lie in the end. Oedipus at

Colonos, Medea’s children, Antigone, Haimon, Polyneices, King Hamlet,

and Ophelia all relentlessly end in a grave plot. The very image of the

grave imbues people with pity and terror.

Pity is feeling which arrests the mind in the presence whatsoever is

grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human

sufferer. Terror is feeling which arrests the mind in the presence

whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with

the secret cause. (Joyce 1916/1970, p. 204)

Joyce uses the word “grave” much as Nietzsche does above, to express

serious importance. There is a grave pity for the human sufferer and a

grave terror of the secret cause in tragedy. For Hamlet, pity is the

emotion that enables him to feel into, in other words ‘unite with’, the

personal sufferings of his father’s spirit. Also, terror is the emotion

that binds

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать