Shakespearean characters

two women in the play, they are both close to the main character, Hamlet, who sees both in two completely different ways and therefore treats them differently too, one with cynical love and the other with a regretful hatred. In Hamlet, Hamlet pretends to be crazy because he is plotting against his murderer of an uncle, Claudius, who killed his natural father and married his mother. From the statement of old King Hamlet, about his brother Claudius poisoning him, Hamlet smolders inside thinking that maybe his mother was a part of a conspiracy with her new found husband and had something to do with the murder of the old king. Hamlet is obnoxious towards his mother with back talk and sarcastic remarks, and later…

and Hamlet would have been quite different, had the male characters not manipulated and enlisted the help of the various female characters that fill Shakespeare’s fictional world. For starters, the main premise of Othello details a plan developed by a disgruntled man by the name Iago. Iago is aggrieved after he feels he was wrongly snubbed for the position of lieutenant by Othello, the general of the Venetian army. Consequently, instead of doing the mature, and arguably sane, act of leaving…

until his death. Although he questioned everyone’s position and acts, even life, and death, he does not question his position in rapport to others. Hitherto, he responds with sarcasm and surprise at the fact that the gravedigger has an opinion. (5.1.129-134) Yet, in this scene, Hamlet is reaching one of his final stages of evolution before his death. By looking at Yorick’s skull, an existential angst disappears in Hamlet. This is his memento mori moment, through the solidification of death,…

fight Tybalt and wound up killing him. He didn’t necessarily comprehend what he has done when Benvolio came up to him and said, “Romeo, away, be gone!/ The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain.” (III.i.125-126) Romeo had not thought of how his actions would have consequences at that time. When people don’t know about consequences, they will tend to make irrational decisions. Because Romeo fought Tybalt based purely on emotions he did not know the consequences of his actions. Ignorance also causes…

of plot and characterization, the two powerful characters Macbeth and Lady Macbeth take fate into their hands to reach towards their goals which lead to a series of misfortunes and sins which turns them from an ambitious person into a monster. The play starts with the three witches quoting, ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air’. Apart from the use of a trochaic tetrameter in structure, it’s the alliteration and the reference to humours that add to these lines in…

It is common across many Shakespearean tragedies for at least one character to die; in Hamlet, five characters are murdered. These five (King Hamlet, Hamlet Jr., Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius) all die as a result of being poisoned by Claudius, directly or transitively. The repeated use of poison across Shakespeare's plays is not a coincidence, and when Shakespeare uses poison in Hamlet, he sets up a strong association of poison to the corruption in man. More specifically, Shakespeare uses the…

He then began to look at the play Venice Preserved. He provides a brief summary of the play and then goes on to say “Clearly the plot is constructed to exploit conflicting loyalties, rival claims”. At first the play seems like a model of ambivalence even containing on each side symmetrical betrayals. Rabkin proceeds to present many similarities in this work to Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth yet these allusions appear to be misleading. Venice Preserved is more significantly modelled on…

Macbeth by William Shakespeare is credited to be one of the greatest plays ever written. The play deserves such high praise because of its near perfect fit to the standards of Shakespearian tragedy. The play exhibits multiple characters of a tragedy, however the most obvious, and arguably most significant include the use of a tragic hero, hamartia, and catharsis. Undoubtedly, the most vital part of a Shakespearean tragedy is that the play contains a tragic hero. Previously, in Aristotelian…

anti-hero in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but would depict his anti-hero as two men connected by an unexplainable dependency on the other. Invading Shakespearian tragedy, Stoppard explored the lives of the two courtiers (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) from the play Hamlet and re-examined the story through their eyes as minor and relatively uninformed characters. Stoppard explored dramatic irony found in real life; focusing on the idea that our action, or inaction, will have a direct…

Annotated Bibliography Bloom, Harold. "Othello." New Haven, US: Yale University Press (2005): 259. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 Nov. 2016. The author, Bloom, firmly establishes the multiple occasions that racism is a major element in the play Othello. He describes the intended reason the character, "Othello", is a colored man, rather than similar color to the other characters. He clearly states his opinion on his belief that Shakespeare is perhaps a racist man. He proves his belief…