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Hamlet By William Shakespeare 's Hamlet

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William Shakespeare 's, Hamlet, written in the seventeenth century and first performed in 1602, is still a complex and intriguing play that encompasses many Jungian archetypes in relation to the setting and characters. This play was approximately four centuries old before Shakespeare reworked it for the stage. Hamlet is based on events involving the death of the King of Denmark according to the Norse legends. This paper deals with a small portion of the entirety of the events in Hamlet. Scholars continue to examine and reexamine this play. This paper does not attempt to explain the complex levels of this play or the totality of the meaning but rather to present one idea among many. Examining the characters through the filters of Doctor Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, theories to explain the characters and their motivations is the goal of this analysis.
Carl Jung presented the idea that within our conscious mind we have a connection to all human beings through a shared consciousness. He further states that we are unaware of this shared consciousness but people feel bonded to characters because they can identify with them through a deeper level. Lisa Schade Eckert from How Does it Mean? States, According to Jung, the individual 's desire to know the self and reach into the depths of consciousness is the basis for all story telling as we instinctively try to understand this deeper nature through metaphor (1).
Archetypes refer to fictional type-roles to explain the actions of

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