What are three examples of characters not being what they seem in act one of Hamlet?

Characters who are not what they seem:
1. Claudius Act 1, Scene 2: Claudius is asking Hamlet to stay at home for a time and to not go back to school in Wittenberg. In lines 110–117, Claudius says to Hamlet,

And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son
Do I impart toward you. For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire.
And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

He claims that he wants Hamlet to be home because he loves him and wants him to be the first member of his court. Remember that Hamlet's biological father is dead. Claudius (his uncle) married Hamlet's mom about a month after Hamlet's father's death, so Claudius is now technically Hamlet's step-father. Claudius is only pretending to truly care for Hamlet and only pretending to want to work closely with him. In actuality, he is nervous about Hamlet's connection to the throne and wants to keep him close so that he can control him, preventing any conflict over who truly deserves the throne. So he is not as he seems; his true motivations are hidden.
2. Hamlet Act 1, scene 2: Hamlet obeys his mother and Claudius by agreeing to stay home instead of going back to school. In front of them, he appears agreeable and sincere about this decision. Even though he has been open about his deep sadness over his father's death and his disapproval of his mother's remarriage, Hamlet has not been completely honest about his feelings. He expresses his frustrations and true feelings in a soliloquy when he says,

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this.

Here he even goes as far as to wish that suicide was not a sin; he is deeply depressed. In other words, Hamlet is not as he seems because he is hiding the extent of his true emotions from his mother and from Claudius.
3. Ophelia, Act 1, Scene 3: In this scene, Laertes, Ophelia's brother, and Polonius, her father, both warn Ophelia about Hamlet. They claim that he is not truly interested in her and is only using her. They urge her not to see him again and not to think about him. Ophelia answers her father's requests with "I shall obey, my Lord."
She agrees to follow her father's dictates, coming across as mild and malleable. Later in the play, she goes along with her father and Claudius's plot to trick Hamlet, again allowing her father to make decisions for her. However, after Ophelia's madness and then suicide, the audience realizes that Ophelia may have suffered as a result of the controlling men in her life. In Act 4, she sings,

By Gis and by Saint Charity, Alack and fie for shame,Young men will do 't, if they come to 't; By Cock, they are to blame. Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed.'So would I 'a done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed.

In this part of the play, Ophelia has gone mad. Here she is singing about the hypocrisy of men. So while in Act 1 she may seem to be content to submit to the wishes of the men in her life, by the play's conclusion, we realize that the men around her have caused her irreparable harm. Her relationships, too, have not been all they seemed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How does Bilbo show leadership and courage in The Hobbit?

Bilbo’s increase in confidence and courage is the defining aspect of his character arc. At the beginning of the novel, he is shut away content in his Hobbit hole, happy to remain separate and coddled from the rest of the world. In the movie, Bilbo chooses to join the dwarves on their quest out of a sense for adventure. In the book, however, Bilbo wants nothing to do with them and only joins because he had been duped into signing a contract. Despite being on the adventure somewhat against his will, Bilbo still proves himself time and again, saving the dwarves from the spiders, the trolls, and a number of other dangers they encounter along the way. Bilbo’s character arc has even been cited as a sort of Christian metaphor for the growth of the soul, though how much Tolkien intended on this front is up for debate. From a thematic standpoint, the ring of invisibility also plays into Bilbo’s brand of bravery. If Hobbits are the overlooked creatures of Middle Earth, then it is noteworthy that...
Read more

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the fair.” What does she mean? How does the final section of the essay portray how she came to this understanding, her feelings about it, and the consequences of it?

In this classic essay, Didion describes moving to New York City from her native Sacramento at the age of twenty-one, and, as she freely admits, a somewhat naive twenty-one, her mind, "programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York," with the typical feeling, at that age, that, "nothing like this...has ever happened to anyone before." Intending to stay for only six months, she falls in love with the city. As she says, "I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again." This initial love led her to prolong her residency, since, "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month." But as the next years roll past, and the "new faces" she encounters...
Read more

Why does the poet say "all the men and women merely players"?

It's one of the most famous lines in literature: All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players . . . This famous saying comes from Shakespeare's play As You Like It, and it's spoken by Jacques. What he's saying here is that simply going about our daily lives is a type of performance. Just like actors on a stage, we all have roles to perform: Daughter. Student. Sister. Captain of the soccer team. The fact that Shakespeare writes that men and women are merely players suggests that the roles are preordained and that a person's choice in being a mother, for example, or a doctor or starting point guard for the Brooklyn Nets is out of their hands. What roles a person performs over the course of their lifetime is up to fate. The notion that "all the world's a stage" has entered pop culture, but within the context of the play, this idea does not sit well with Jacques. He's a pessimist, and the idea that everything is up to fate makes...
Read more