Savannah Miller

Honors English 12
Date: 4/11/14
Hamlet In a Nut Shell
Hamlet is a very complex character with all kinds of different emotions. He is dealing with
the grief of his father dying and his mothers quick recovery by marrying her husbands brother.
Hamlet is like any other human that has strengths and weaknesses. Although things that
happen to him arent on the typical everyday events, he is still a person with emotions and
feelings. Hamlet experiences different emotions that are caused by many events in the play,
these emotions highlight his strengths and weaknesses as a person.
Hamlet is overwhelmed with feelings and emotions. He is feeling depressed because of
his fathers death. The experience of losing someone whom one is close to is more than words
can explain. People usually go through different stages of grieving for a loved one and Hamlet
undergoes sadness. For example, Hamlet explains his pain by saying, "O, that this too solid
flesh would melt. Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd. His
canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!" This quote shows the heartbreak and depression
that he is facing because of his fathers death. He is suicidal at this moment when he says,
"That this too solid flesh would melt." Hamlet feels like giving up because of all his conflicting
emotions caused by a tragedy. There is another time when he contemplates living or dying in
the Soliloquy "To be or not to be," which translated is to live or not to live. He is thinking of this
because he doesn't know whether to take the easy way out by killing himself or to deal with all
these emotions of events and live. Though all the mixed feelings, he decides to live and do what
he has to do to avenge his fathers death. His strength is the ability to feel love his father and
mother, and expresses his emotions although it's hard to share. Although his weakness showed
when he contemplated living or dying because it portrays his lack of belief in himself. Sadness is
something that everyone goes through because we are humans and we have emotions that are
triggered with negative events in life.
Then there's anger, the emotion that triggers us with negative feelings and events. The
thing that triggered Hamlet was the fact that his mother married his uncle soon after his father
died. In act one scene two, the queen has told her son to stay with them and not go to
Wittenberg. He says he shall obey her and then they leave with Hamlet left alone. He says
"Frailty thy name is women". This translated means that he implying women are weak. He
cannot believe that she would move on that fast because it seemed she was in deep love with
her husband before he passed. I mean who wouldn't be angry and confused if that happened to
someone? It would be hard after you spent most of your life seeing your mother and father
married and then leads to your own uncle marrying your mother right after your fathers death.
His strength in this situation is that he is aware and affected by this. Although Hamlet still has
the fault in assuming that all women are weak when he only experienced it with his
mother. This leads to how he treats Ophelia in the play. When they are having an encounter
and she obeys her father Polonius by giving Hamlet back his things. Then he says, Get thee to
a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners "He blew up at her by calling her a whore
and this was because he doesn't like Polonius. He believes that she is betraying him by obeying
her father all the time. After this it creates even more hatred towards women.
Everyone goes through confusion at one point in time. Hamlet undergoes confusion when
he speaks with the ghost of his father. He doesn't know whether its a good ghost or an evil
ghost trying to tempt his soul by telling him to murder his uncle. Although it may not happen to
many of us but if that happened to me, it would be very hard to distinguish and make a
judgment. Also revisiting the idea that his mother remarried so soon after her husbands death is
pretty confusing. Usually people wouldn't move on so quickly after a loved ones death so he is
confused on why his mother did. His strength this time would be that he acted naturally when
seeing something that is quite shocking. I don't see a weakness in this event. Confusion is a
natural emotion that is caused by not being aware and knowing the answer to certain things.
All of these feelings and emotions tie back to the fact that Hamlet is a complex character
that many people have analyzed. People have not covered everything that describes his
personality and define all of his emotions and reasoning behind them. He is a character that is
pretty difficult to summarize in a sentence. These emotions cause his strengths and weakness
to define who he is.