ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos

Shakespeare's Hamlet 10 Hamlet's Revenge 92 Views


Share It!


Description:

Why does Hamlet take so long to serve revenge on his uncle Claudius? This is so obvious...because revenge is a dish best served cold . Duh.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

Shakespear's Hamlet A'la shmoop This has been

00:16

the subject of lots of critical discussion Some people think

00:19

of it as a symptom of his in maturity So

00:22

some people think of this play as as a description [Hamlet as a baby]

00:25

of what happens when you're too much in your head

00:26

as a lot of young people are right So you

00:28

go through adolescence you withdraw into yourself andi you end

00:32

up kind of thinking about things so much that you [Hamlet thinking of things]

00:34

become unable to actually act in the outside world Another

00:38

thing that people point out is just that his information

00:41

is itself in quite right Thiss ghost comes to him [Ghost appears beside Hamlet]

00:45

but that's even then right It's not it's not the

00:48

case that like ghosts were reliable than any more than

00:51

they are now Right Like if you go sort of

00:53

company they would be pretty compelled by it because i've

00:56

never seen it goes before But i would also be

00:57

like um like logic tells me this is probably not [Woman talking to ghost]

01:02

riel Keep in mind this is also you know they're

01:05

living in this christian worlds like ghosts are kind of

01:08

a pagan have a megan residents that's not to be

01:11

trusted So right So from the outside Hamlet is like

01:15

um if that is my dad like why is he

01:18

trying to manipulate me into doing this And how do [Hamlet questioning the ghost]

01:20

i know it's really my dad what team And so

01:23

the information he's working on is always incomplete and that's

01:26

why he devises the mouse trap play try to catch

01:30

claudius in the act but even that that's another example

01:32

of really circumstantial evidence right he's basing it again off

01:36

of a fiction So at every point he's trying to [Claudisu pours drink over Hamlet sleeping]

01:39

make decisions based on incomplete information based on fictions and reflections and ghosts not the thing itself... [Question appears]

Up Next

A Tale of Two Cities Summary
75855 Views

Meet Charles Darnay, the nobleman who spends more time on trial and in prison than attending balls and drinking expensive wine. Don't feel too bad...

Related Videos

Beowulf
113087 Views

Written in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf is an epic poem that reflects the early medieval warri...

Brave New World
79220 Views

Brave New World is supposed be an exciting book about a negative utopia and the corrupt powers of authority. So where’s the big car chase? What's...

Dracula
27346 Views

What is Dracula really about? Just Count Dracula? Or is there more to it than vampires? This video addresses some major ideas in Bram Stoker’s cl...

Dracula: Father of the Modern Vampire
17555 Views

There are plenty of famous vampires that send chills up our spines, but Dracula was and still is the king of them all. No one else can touch him. N...