Option 1. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, the title character hesitates to avenge the murder of his father (also named Hamlet), even though he is outraged by the murder. What considerations make him hesitant, and what developments fortify his resolve to kill King Claudius and get his revenge? Yet still he delays, while his father’s afterlife is a form of temporary but prolonged torture for reasons that are explained in Dante’s Divine Comedy, published 300 years earlier than Hamlet.
Why does he delay, even as Claudius actively plots in Acts Four and Five to have him assassinated? Why, also, does he repeatedly contemplate suicide, especially in his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy near the start of Act Three in Scene One (1753-54)? Be sure to discuss Dante’s work as well as Hamlet in your answer.
Option 2. In Hamlet, the young adult prince Hamlet feels honor-bound to avenge the murder of his father by his uncle, King Claudius, who promptly marries Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude, sister-in-law to Claudius – a marriage that would have been considered incestuous during the Renaissance.
Famously, about 300 years after Shakespeare’s theatre troupe first performed the play, the early psychologist Sigmund Freud used it as an example of his theory describing a male child’s psychosexual and social development, the Oedipus complex, in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):
Using the above hyperlinked bookmark as a source of Freud’s comments and our text of the original play Oedipus Rex by the fifth-century BCE Athenian playwright Sophocles, compare the events, characters, and motivations in Hamlet to those in Sophocles’ play. Are the two plays really identical, somewhat comparable, or clearly very different? Why or why not – what similarities or differences in the plots make you think so? And in each play, what roles do free will and fate play?
Choose only one of the above topic options to write about: Option 1 or Option 2.
Sample Solution