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Hamlet Essay Cause and Effect

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Hamlet

Aristotle once wrote, “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honour”. William Shakespeare wrote the play, Hamlet, as a revenge tragedy to entertain the Elizabethan audience. In act IV scene IV, Hamlet questions his courage and lack of ability to make a decision to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet compares himself to a military leader who demonstrates great bravery while questioning what defines honour. Shakespeare strategically utilizes his characters flaw to create deception, greed and ultimate revenge within the play. Therefore, Hamlet’s final soliloquy causes the Elizabethan audience to connect to the emotions the play evokes while simultaneously engaging them. To begin with, Hamlet’s final soliloquy allows the audience to elicit feelings of empathy over the personal conflict and struggle Hamlet is facing over avenging his father’s death. Firstly, Hamlet is overcome with grief and sadness at the loss of his father and recent marriage of his mother, which causes him to question his inability to act out his revenge. Hamlet states, “How stand I then, that have a father killed, a mother stained, excitements of my reason and my blood, and let all sleep” (IV.IV.55-59). This conflict of conscience would cause the audience to sympathize with Hamlet as he mourns the unimaginable loss of his precious family and the realization that the world he knows will never be the same again. Additionally, Hamlet questions his competence as a man as he compares himself to a beast. Hamlet proclaims, “Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in as unused. Now, whether it be bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on th’ event- A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom

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