Station Eleven Essay

When looking at Hamlet, one could say that William Shakespeare put the play together as a very cathartic tragedy. The emotional result of dealing with so many deaths brings on a plethora of emotions which are not usually felt in a typical play. Hamlet begins not with the normal prosperity and good fortune as do most tragedies, but with a more stifling and depressing sort of mood (Tekany 115). However, something else could be said about this play as well. The play centers on Hamlet and his existential characteristics, such as angst, isolation and his confrontations with nothingness. The exhibition of these characteristics proves Hamlet to be an existential character.

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play written in the early 1600’s that illustrates the life and eventual downfall of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark. This play is a tragedy that involves Hamlet going against his closest friends and family to reveal his uncle’s evil actions to the public, avenge his father’s murder at the same time. Naturally, in this tragedy, one of the most powerful underlying ideas is of waste. In a traditional Shakespearean tragedy, most characters die off near the denouement of the play. This is regardless of whether they are good hearted and innocent individuals, or whether they are evil. The more innocent the people that are negatively affected by the tragedy, the more the wastage is felt by the reader. This waste regards not only human lives, but also human qualities, ideas, relationships and even potential. Since everything is tied to one another in this play, the loss of these aspects in one point of the play will affect each and every other character in every scene that follows. In Hamlet, the feeling of waste is interpreted through the destruction of family life represented through Hamlet’s family, the loss of innocence in Ophelia and the destruction of love between Hamlet and Ophelia.

Above all, I wouldn’t be where I am today without theatre. Without the chance to perform throughout my life, I would be disconnected from the wide array of communities and histories that’s been imbedded in my daily routine. Unfortunately, it’s speculated that the theatre is a dying art form, because of the expanding popularities of movies (“Is”), but I think that it’ll remain a well renowned part of expressing imagination and interpreting history as years pass; it only takes cooperation with school faculty and young students that go above and beyond to change their

Throughout history, literature has been able to captivate and enchant audiences of all backgrounds. Words have an undeniable ability to sway a crowd’s emotions and truly affect them. William Shakespeare, one of the most revered writers of all time, had such skills. His plays are timeless pieces of art considered the foundations of the English literature. Shakespeare’s most dramatic and infamous tragedy, Hamlet, has earned its place as a cornerstone. In the play, Shakespeare poetically writes speeches that show the true colours of the characters, whether good or devious. The main antagonist, Claudius, shows his treachery to the Elizabethan audience, through his speech to his wife Gertrude. Claudius’ conversation with Gertrude in Act 4,

During the 19th century, theater adopted a realistic viewpoint by romanticism but also a rise in modern nationalism to give people a sense of belonging in a community or culture (Carlson 2014: 21). In the 20th century, realism in theater was challenged and plays were now easier to attend due to the improvements of communication and the ability to reach other areas of the world by travel (Carlson 2014: 23-24). Theater is another addition to the world of art that is continuously evolving and adapting to the world and cultures influencing its

In Shakespeare’s widely recognized play, Hamlet, he successfully gathers the audience’s attention by raising issues pertaining to them at the time and other thoughtful ideas, as per example in the soliloquy of Act IV, Scene IV. While the audience is captivated by Shakespeare’s poetic prowess, it is evident that his plays are enchanted with a deeper meaning than that which meets the eye. It

At the age of eight, my mother took me on a trip to New York City. On it, I saw the Lin Manuel-Miranda show In the Heights. Unlike my eight-year-old self, my mother loved performing arts, and she occasionally played CD’s from musicals in the car, which I groaned about. Given this, it is not hard to imagine I was less excited than the average person to see a broadway show; however, when my mother mentioned, “Chad from High School Musical is in it,” I perked up. As I walked into the theatre, my attitude improved again from the astonishingly vast house, filled with endless rows of red, velvet chairs leading towards an expansive stage trimmed with gold. Nevertheless, I still did not appreciate the opportunity to witness a Tony Award-winning musical, as I would in three hours. When the lights dimmed, the whole theatre fell silent, yet still buzzed with anticipation.

Doerries diminishes the theater and its patrons by stating “people attend the theater…to feel more intelligent than they actually are” (Freedlander). Doerries appears to be drawing on the audience’s lack of knowledge as a basis to form and direct a conversation using an abstract to accomplish his goal. This is demeaning to a culture that has an understanding of the issues. This article is inflammatory and insults the intellect of the

For instance, after our visit to the Ford’s Theater I came to realize the former division of theater by social strata is obsolete. During Shakespeare’s era theatre companies were awarded status and privilege based on patronage from wealthy landholders or the royal family. In contrast, today, we are not subject to theater because our socioeconomic status. Theater seats are no longer exclusively reserved for the bourgeois or monarchs. Access to intellectual performances is no longer off-limits. Time brings change; similar to the more accessible theater for subordinate social caste, change in the subjects and topics is only a natural consequence. In Rome, the well-regulated and pervasive castes of roman society showed obvious in the arts and most notably in theater. While, theater for the intellectual was reserved for those in the higher classes, the partitioning between the patricians and plebeians brought about different styles and

Tragedy, drama and love. Hamlet is, in our minds, a living testament on human experience and cruel irony. He is inscrutably human with his fatal flaw, a characteristic that will inevitably lead to his defeat. His flaw, is hesitation, as it leads to his and many others demise. But, along with this flaw, are many other basic elements of humanity. These include friendship and love, bitter insanity and untimely death. They are a constant companion to all who are included in and hear this story. Finally, hamlets legacy is what truly survives the tests of time. With his dying words, hamlets instructs his best friend to tell his story and let his fellow countrymen, enemies and mere common people to know of him. His story lives for ages and many; if not all human qualities are present.

“Theatre makes us think about power and the way our society works and it does this with a clear purpose, to make a change.”

Hamlet is filled with such so many feelings, from the play-within-a-play to the gossip about london; it's not a stretch at all to here the determination behind his voice(Hamlets voice). The speech's most renowned saying, is the passage that says, "for anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing. " Hamlet tries to reveal the primeval roots of theater as he understands them, to not only make a good play but to create a guilt test for those who are watching it, mainly targeting whose in the

Adequately explained and symbolic in Hamlet and modern society, grief and revenge play immense roles amidst a human’s state of mind when coping with calamities like these. Grief plays a large part in Shakespeare’s Hamlet script. Displayed in many different acts and scenes, audiences engulfed in this work begin to see how relatable his penmanship can be brought into their lives particularly in families. Jonathon Herman, a 35-year-old health care executive from New York was asked to disclose information about losing both of his parents of cancer before turning 13 years old. “I felt like I wasn’t a kid anymore because I was forced to grow up and provide for a lot of things on my own,” Herman states (Zaslow).

Almost all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be understood as a play about acting and the theater. For example, there is Hamlet’s pretense of madness, the “antic disposition” that he puts on to protect himself and prevent his antagonists from plucking out the heart of his mystery. When Hamlet enters his mother’s room, he holds up, side by side, the pictures of the two kings, Old Hamlet and Claudius, and proceeds to describe for her the true nature of the choice she has made, presenting truth by means of a show. Similarly, when he leaps into the open grave at Ophelia’s funeral, ranting in high heroic terms, he is acting out for Laertes, and perhaps for himself as well, the folly of excessive, melodramatic expressions of

From the cradle to the grave, we think of the lives we live and what will happen to us after we kick the bucket. We reject as well as accept the process of dying to varying degrees. Without a doubt, what actions we portray and convey exclaims our stories long after our time here on Earth. From the ink drips of the world’s bestselling author, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” (Shakespeare). Often times, a pure heart will rot in the grave and then their sins will be what remains to stain their images. I believe this is the case for the young Prince Hamlet, a tragic hero he was, it appears that many readers forget what Hamlet was trying to achieve. In conclusion, I believe that readers do not