Hamlet and His Home Essay examples -- William Shakespeare Hamlet Essay

small town and His Home Hamlet begins at the open m outh of the Void. Barnardo and Francisco call out to each other and into darkness they stand atop a moderate platform that is naked to the open air and to the nighttime. Every characters entrance is mark by a series of interrogatives, as characters already on portray try to ascertain the identity of those who atomic number 18 newly arrived and yet unseen. wickedness isolates these men from each other as they stand on the spring of civilization, the place where the solid stones of Elsinore castle open up into the world of night and the supernatural. The nature of the spectre remains debatable Horatio has initially insisted that the guards delusions shake off conjured the tail (1.1.21), and, even accepting the reality of the apparition, Catholic teaching (ghosts are hard drink of the d.o.a. coming up from purgatory) and Protestant doctrine (all ghostly apparitions are demons in disguise) hold divergent opinions on the nature and source of phantoms (Garber 12/15). The men have gathered together on the guard platform, which has belong a kind of stage within a stage. They have sire to see a visitor who is a creature of hallucination, purgatory, or hell. This ghost is coming out of the open maw of night above and near the platform what is known clings to the battlements, and all else in existence hails from the empty, the unknown, the imagined, the demonic. When Barnardo reports to Marcellus, I have seen nothing (1.1.20), the word nothing takes on a number of meanings. He has not seen the apparition gazing out into the dark, he has barely seen anything at all. however seeing is still phrased in the positive, and so nothing becomes something to see. It is more than absence seizure emptiness itself exists as an ... ...st noteworthy moments deal with a nothing that is the absence of what is known as Hamlet asks what it would be not to be, the ultimate opaqueness of death is fearsome enough to m ake him go on living. It is overly much for the prince to stare Nothing in the face. Later, in the plays most famous tableau, Hamlet literally stares at an embodiment of Nothing as he holds Yoricks skull. The skulls eye sockets are without subjectivity, empty of their tenant organs and the mind that saw through them they contain, in a word, nothing. But from their hollows something maddeningly elusive stares back concurrently a presence and an absence, as haunting as Hamlets own dead father, and opaque as the darkness that envelopes Elsinore. Part of the plays power is in this solid nothing, a portal of slippage that relentlessly destabilizes what is known and what is knowable.