Book Review On Hamlet Essay, Research Paper
Book Review
People like to put things into categories. Movie critics do so with films:
slasher,buddy,western, war, and more. You can do the same with books: science fiction,
gothic romance and so on. Shakespeare’s plays also have categories: tragedies, comedies,
and histories. But these terms don’t mean exactly what you may think they mean.
Shakespeare’s most famous plays are his tragedies, such as Hamlet. These plays
follow the standard rules for tragedies: The hero has a basic human failure that brings
about his downfall and death, but before he dies, he learns an important lesson about his
failure and how it destroyed his life (and usually the lives of those he loved). Shakespeare
didn’t write these plays to deliver a moral message, butthat doesn’t stop us from learning
from his plays. He fills his plays with ordinary people, and we can see ourselves in their
situations. When the heroes face their tragic ends, we can learn from their mistakes
and ordinary problems, and we can see ourselves with the same problems. At the same
time, we can watch a play that is fun and entertaining, full of action, intrigue, and
excitement.
Hamlet, for example, is clearly an honest, decent person who is wrongly cheated out
of the throne of Denmark by his conniving uncle, Claudius. We root for Hamlet, cheer his
triumphs, and pity his failures. The protagonist is not always a hero, though. Sometimes he is
his own worst enemy. Coriolanus, for example, is too proud. He is a great Roman general
the best, and he knows it. His arrogance and conceit affect all around him and drive away
those who would be his friends. In the end, you almost cheer when they conspire against him
and he gets his due. In other words, Shakespeare felt free to break the rules whenever he felt
like it. After all, his audience didn’t care whether the plays followed the rules, and
Shakespeare wrote to make his audience happy, not writers and authors