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.
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I think you are right in saying that Polonius' schemes had a disastrous effect on Ophelia. She was so dependent on her father that she did anything he requested of her, despite her own negative feelings on the matter. Then Polonius is killed, and she has no one left to tell her what to do; to give her direction.
ReplyDeleteInteresting take on Polonius' involvment to Ophelia's madness, I agree with Tessafay too with how she said once Polonius died Ophelia didn't really know what to do with herself since Polonius was always the one running her life.
ReplyDeletePolonius always forced his opinoins on Ophelia, so once he was not around, she had no more orders to follow. You think that Ophelia would be overjoyed to be free, but it was the other way around; she ends up killing herself
ReplyDeleteI agree with your take Ophelia's madness. She was so depedent opon the men in her life and they each let her down major way.
ReplyDeleteI liked your take on the theme for act 4. I overlooked the fact that executing a murder plan takes a huge amount of ambition...and stupidity.
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