DRJ#4 Hamlet, Act 4

Act 4 to me feels sort of like the eye of the storm. Both the act before this and after it, are full of all these dramatic happenings. Act three has the play within a play and finishes with the murder of Polonius, and act 5 obviously ends with the murder of pretty much everyone in the play. To me this act focuses on the deception aspect of the play. You have all these characters engaging in acts of deceit. Hamlet deceives the king of England and has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed in his place, Claudius and Laertes plot the murder of Hamlet.

My character analysis this week is Ophelia, I thought it would be appropriate being that this is the act where her madness takes over and she ends her life. I think her madness was a combination of a number of different factors. The first being the obvious one, that Hamlet and her at some point had somewhat of a relationship and now that he is acting mad it is pushing her over the edge. The second one being that her father was murder, by Hamlet. But I also think before her fathers demise, he played a big part in her madness. He used her to dig for information on Hamlet, which I think had a damaging effect on her.

The theme that I chose for this act is ambition. When I look at Hamlet finally committing to revenge and Claudius deciding that he and Laertes need to kill him, I look at these as very ambitious moves. Killing a king is a very ambitious task, a stupid one, but ambitious none the less because the likely hood is that your plan isn’t going to work out well for you in the end. The same goes for plotting the murder of your wifes son.

DRJ#3 Hamlet, Act 3

Of all the Acts, I think I like this one the most, there is just so many exciting things going on. By way using a play to depict the murder of king by his brother, Hamlet is finally able to get the proof he needs that Claudius did in fact murder the king. Hamlet also kills Polonius while he is ranting and raving it his mother, forgetting that the ghost told him to “leave her to heaven” (1609).

For my character analysis I decided to do Hamlet, he is the main protagonist of the story and the father of the murdered king. Hamlet is fiercely loyal to his father, so much so that throughout the play he obsesses over avenging his fathers death. It is his actions while trying attain revenge that eventually lead to his demise. So passionately does Hamlet want vengeance for his father that he even turns on his mother at one point, which prompts the return of the ghost of his father to remind Hamlet that her fate should be left to heaven.

My theme I chose was guilt. I chose this because it is the only time in the play that comes to mind where Claudius expresses some kind of guilt. Shortly after the play depicting the kings murder, when the king is alone he begins to talk about how his “offence is rank” and that it “smells to heaven”. Although it really was only a small portion of the act, I think it was important because it shows that Claudius is not a wholly vial monster incapable of all feeling.

DRJ#2 Hamlet, Act 2

I really like Act 2. It is this act that Hamlet puts his plan into motion and comes up with the idea for the play. In particular, I enjoy how crazy Hamlet acts around some of the other characters in the story, hes off his rocker. Its kind of hard to relate this act to real life, although when I was in Junior High we had a renaissance day and Hamlet was the play that we did. This part of the play stuck in my mind, for whatever reason I always remembered the scene where Hamlet is talking with the players about putting on the play.

For my character analysis I decided to do Polonius, the father of Laertes and Ophelia. I would describe Polonius as an instigator. Shortly after Laertes leaves for France, Polonius warns Ophelia that she should stay away from Hamlet, which she does. Polonius thinks that Ophelias rejection is the reason for Hamlets madness, even though Hamlet is just acting. It is also Polonius that conspires with the king to use Ophelia to spy on Hamlet.

For the theme of Act 2 I chose madness. I think the act that because Hamlet acts so mad, it adds a really intriguing part of the play. He could have just as easily gone through with the play anyway, but by acting insane he keeps his mother, step-father, and Polonius guessing as to what is going on.