Great tragedies of Shakespeare. Problems of the play "Hamlet"
Issues
The problem of moral choice
One of the most striking problems of the work is the problem of choice, which can be considered a reflection of the main conflict of the tragedy. For a thinking person, the problem of choice, especially when it comes to moral choice, is always difficult and responsible. Undoubtedly, the final result is determined by a number of reasons and, first of all, by the value system of each individual person. If a person is guided in his life by higher, noble impulses, he most likely will not decide to take an inhumane and criminal step, will not violate the well-known Christian commandments: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, etc. However, in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet we witness a slightly different process. Main character in a fit of revenge, he kills several people, his actions cause ambiguous feelings, but condemnation in this series comes last.
Having learned that his father fell at the hands of the villain Claudius, Hamlet faces the most difficult problem of choice. The famous monologue “To be or not to be?” embodies the spiritual doubts of a prince committing a difficult moral choice. Life or death? Strength or powerlessness? An unequal struggle or a shame of cowardice? Hamlet tries to resolve such complex questions.
Hamlet's famous soliloquy shows the destructive mental struggle between idealistic ideas and cruel reality. The insidious murder of his father, the indecent marriage of his mother, the betrayal of friends, the weakness and frivolity of his beloved, the meanness of the courtiers - all this fills the prince’s soul with immeasurable suffering. Hamlet understands that “Denmark is a prison” and “the age is shaken.” From now on, the main character is left alone with a sanctimonious world ruled by lust, cruelty and hatred.
Hamlet constantly feels a contradiction: his consciousness clearly says what he must do, but he lacks will and determination. On the other hand, it can be assumed that it is not the lack of will that leaves Hamlet without action for a long time. It is not without reason that the theme of death constantly arises in his discussions: it is in direct connection with the awareness of the frailty of existence.
Finally Hamlet makes a decision. He is truly close to madness, since the sight of evil, which triumphs and dominates, is unbearable. Hamlet takes responsibility for the world's evil, all the misunderstandings of life, for all the suffering of people. The main character acutely feels his loneliness and, realizing his powerlessness, still goes into battle and dies like a fighter.
Search for the meaning of life and death
The monologue “To be or not to be” demonstrates to us that a huge internal struggle is taking place in Hamlet’s soul. Everything that happens around him weighs so heavily on him that he would commit suicide if it were not considered a sin. The hero is concerned about the very mystery of death: what is it - a dream or a continuation of the same torments that earthly life is full of?
“That’s the difficulty;
What dreams will you have in your death sleep?
When we drop this mortal noise, -
This is what throws us off; that's the reason
That disasters are so long-lasting;
Who would bear the lashes and mockery of the century,
The oppression of the strong, the mockery of the proud,
The pain of despised love, the slowness of judges,
The arrogance of the authorities and insults,
Performed by uncomplaining merit,
If only he could give himself a reckoning
With a simple dagger? (5, p.44)
Fear of the unknown, of this country from which not a single traveler has returned, often forces people to return to reality and not think about the “unknown land from which there is no return.”
Unhappy love
The relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet forms an independent drama within great tragedy. Why can't people who love each other be happy? In Hamlet, the relationship between lovers is destroyed. Revenge turns out to be an obstacle to the unity of the prince and the girl he loves. Hamlet depicts the tragedy of giving up love. At the same time, their fathers play a fatal role for lovers. Ophelia's father orders her to break up with Hamlet, Hamlet breaks up with Ophelia in order to devote himself entirely to revenge for his father. Hamlet suffers because he is forced to hurt Ophelia and, suppressing pity, is merciless in his condemnation of women.
Ideological basis
"To be or not to be"
The amlet is filled with faith and love for people, life and the world in general. The prince is surrounded by loyal friends and the love of his parents. But all his ideas about the world dissipate like smoke when confronted with reality. Returning to Elsinore, Hamlet learns of the sudden death of his father and his mother's betrayal. In Hamlet’s soul, next to faith, a doubting thought arose. And both of these forces - faith and reason - wage a continuous struggle in him. Hamlet experiences deep pain, shocked by the death of his beloved father, who was in many ways an example for the prince. Hamlet becomes disillusioned with the world around him, the true meaning of life becomes unclear to him:
“How tiresome, dull and unnecessary
It seems to me that everything in the world!” (5, p. 11)
Hamlet hates Claudius, for whom there were no laws of kinship, who, together with his mother, betrayed the honor of his late brother and took possession of the crown. Hamlet is deeply disappointed in his mother, who was once his ideal woman. The meaning of life for Hamlet becomes revenge on his father’s murderer and restoration of justice. “But how should this matter be handled so as not to tarnish oneself.” Faced with the contradiction between dreams of life and life itself, Hamlet faces a difficult choice, “to be or not to be, to submit to the slings and arrows of furious fate, or, taking up arms on a sea of turmoil, to defeat them with confrontation, to die, to sleep.”
To be - for Hamlet this means to think, believe in a person and act in accordance with one’s convictions and faith. But the deeper he knows people and life, the more clearly he sees triumphant evil and realizes that he is powerless to crush it with such a lonely struggle. Discord with the world is accompanied by internal discord. Hamlet's former faith in man, his former ideals are crushed, broken in a collision with reality, but he cannot completely renounce them, otherwise he would cease to be himself.
“The century has been shaken - and the worst thing is that I was born to restore it!”
As his father's son, Hamlet must avenge his family's honor by killing Claudius, who poisoned the king. The fratricide breeds evil around himself. Hamlet's trouble is that he does not want to be the continuer of evil - after all, in order to eradicate evil, Hamlet will have to use that same evil. It’s hard for him to take this path. The hero is torn apart by duality: the spirit of his father calls for revenge, but his inner voice stops the “action of evil.”
The tragedy for Hamlet lies not only in the fact that the world is terrible, but also in the fact that he must rush into the abyss of evil in order to fight it. He realizes that he himself is far from perfect, and, indeed, his behavior reveals that the evil that reigns in life to some extent stains him too. The tragic irony of life's circumstances leads Hamlet to the fact that he, acting as an avenger for his murdered father, also kills the father of Laertes and Ophelia, and the son of Polonius takes revenge on him.
In general, circumstances develop in such a way that Hamlet, carrying out revenge, finds himself forced to strike left and right. To him for whom there is nothing more valuable than life, you have to become the squire of death.
Hamlet, wearing the mask of a jester, enters into combat with a world filled with evil. The prince kills the courtier Polonius, who is watching him, reveals the betrayal of his university comrades, abandons Ophelia, who could not resist the evil influence, and is drawn into an intrigue against Hamlet.
“The century is shaken and worse than anything,
That I was born to restore it” (5, p.28)
The prince dreams not only of revenge for his murdered father. Hamlet's soul is stirred by thoughts about the need to fight the injustice of the world. The main character asks a rhetorical question: why exactly should he correct a world that is completely shaken? Does he have the right to do this? Evil lives within him, and he admits to himself that he is pompous, ambitious and vindictive. How can one overcome evil in such a situation? How to help a person defend the truth? Hamlet is forced to suffer under the weight of inhuman torment. It is then that he sets himself main question“to be or not to be?” The resolution of this question lies the essence of Hamlet's tragedy - the tragedy of a thinking man who came into a disorderly world too early, the first of people to see the amazing imperfection of the world.
Having decided to avenge their fathers, to respond with evil to evil, the noble sons took retribution, but what is the result - Ophelia went crazy and died tragically, her mother became an unwitting victim of a vile conspiracy, drinking the “poisoned cup”, Laertes, Hamlet and Claudius are dead.
"..Death!
Oh, what kind of underground feast are you preparing?
Arrogant that so many of the world's mighty
Slayed at once? (5, p. 94)
“Something is rotten in our Danish state”
Already at the beginning of the tragedy, Marcellus casually remarks: “Something is rotten in the Danish state,” and, as the action develops, we become more and more convinced that “rot” has really started in Denmark. Betrayal and meanness reign everywhere. Treason replaces fidelity, insidious crime replaces brotherly love. Revenge, intrigue and conspiracies, this is how the people of the Danish state live.
Hamlet talks about the corruption of morals. He notices the insincerity of people, flattery and sycophancy, degrading human dignity: “Here is my uncle - the King of Denmark, and those who made faces at him while my father was alive pay twenty, forty, fifty and a hundred ducats for his portrait in miniature. Damn it, there is something supernatural in this, if only philosophy could find out” (5, p. 32).
Hamlet sees that humanity is absent, and scoundrels triumph everywhere, corrupting everyone and everything around them, who “keep thought away from the tongue, and thoughtless thought from action.”
When Rosencrantz, in response to Hamlet’s question: “What news?” replies that there is no news, “except perhaps that the world has become honest,” the prince remarks: “So, it means that the day of judgment is near, but your news is wrong.”
"The world is a theater"
The figure of a jester and a clown on the one hand and the figure of a king on the other embody the idea of theatricality real life and express the hidden metaphor of “world-theater”. Hamlet's remark, permeated with theatrical terms in the context of the stage and the entire tragedy, appears as a vivid but elusive example of the hidden world-stage metaphor. The parallel drawn in the work between Hamlet and the First Actor makes it possible to identify the hidden metaphor “world-stage” at the level of the deep subtext of the tragedy and to trace how masterfully one reality in Shakespeare passes into another, forming parallel semantic series. “The play within the play” “the murder of Gonzago” is the paradigm of the structure of the entire “Hamlet” and the key to understanding the deep ideas hidden in the subtext of the tragedy (6, p. 63). “The Murder of Gonzago” is one big metaphor “the world is a stage”, realized in the form of a theatrical device “a scene on a stage”.
Issues
The problem of moral choice
One of the most striking problems of the work is the problem of choice, which can be considered a reflection of the main conflict of the tragedy. For a thinking person, the problem of choice, especially when it comes to moral choice, is always difficult and responsible. Undoubtedly, the final result is determined by a number of reasons and, first of all, by the value system of each individual person. If a person is guided in his life by higher, noble impulses, he most likely will not decide to take an inhumane and criminal step, will not violate the well-known Christian commandments: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, etc. However, in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet we become witnesses to a slightly different process. The main character, in a fit of revenge, kills several people, his actions evoke ambiguous feelings, but condemnation comes last in this row.
Having learned that his father fell at the hands of the villain Claudius, Hamlet faces the most difficult problem of choice. The famous monologue “To be or not to be?” embodies the spiritual doubts of a prince making a difficult moral choice. Life or death? Strength or powerlessness? An unequal struggle or a shame of cowardice? Hamlet tries to resolve such complex questions.
Hamlet's famous soliloquy shows the destructive mental struggle between idealistic ideas and cruel reality. The insidious murder of his father, the indecent marriage of his mother, the betrayal of friends, the weakness and frivolity of his beloved, the meanness of the courtiers - all this fills the prince’s soul with immeasurable suffering. Hamlet understands that “Denmark is a prison” and “the age is shaken.” From now on, the main character is left alone with a sanctimonious world ruled by lust, cruelty and hatred.
Hamlet constantly feels a contradiction: his consciousness clearly says what he must do, but he lacks will and determination. On the other hand, it can be assumed that it is not the lack of will that leaves Hamlet without action for a long time. It is not without reason that the theme of death constantly arises in his discussions: it is in direct connection with the awareness of the frailty of existence.
Finally Hamlet makes a decision. He is truly close to madness, since the sight of evil, which triumphs and dominates, is unbearable. Hamlet takes responsibility for the world's evil, all the misunderstandings of life, for all the suffering of people. The main character acutely feels his loneliness and, realizing his powerlessness, still goes into battle and dies like a fighter.
Search for the meaning of life and death
The monologue “To be or not to be” demonstrates to us that a huge internal struggle is taking place in Hamlet’s soul. Everything that happens around him weighs so heavily on him that he would commit suicide if it were not considered a sin. The hero is concerned about the very mystery of death: what is it - a dream or a continuation of the same torments that earthly life is full of?
“That’s the difficulty;
What dreams will you have in your death sleep?
When we drop this mortal noise, -
This is what throws us off; that's the reason
That disasters are so long-lasting;
Who would bear the lashes and mockery of the century,
The oppression of the strong, the mockery of the proud,
The pain of despised love, the slowness of judges,
The arrogance of the authorities and insults,
Performed by uncomplaining merit,
If only he could give himself a reckoning
With a simple dagger? (5, p.44)
Fear of the unknown, of this country from which not a single traveler has returned, often forces people to return to reality and not think about the “unknown land from which there is no return.”
Unhappy love
The relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet forms an independent drama within the framework of a great tragedy. Why can't people who love each other be happy? In Hamlet, the relationship between lovers is destroyed. Revenge turns out to be an obstacle to the unity of the prince and the girl he loves. Hamlet depicts the tragedy of giving up love. At the same time, their fathers play a fatal role for lovers. Ophelia's father orders her to break up with Hamlet, Hamlet breaks up with Ophelia in order to devote himself entirely to revenge for his father. Hamlet suffers because he is forced to hurt Ophelia and, suppressing pity, is merciless in his condemnation of women.
Analysis of the poem " Bronze Horseman"
One of the main issues of creativity of A.S. Pushkin was the question of the relationship between the individual and the state, as well as the ensuing problem " little man"It is known that it was Pushkin who seriously developed this problem...
Analysis of William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"
The basis of the problematics of “Romeo and Juliet” is the question of the fate of young people, inspired by the affirmation of new high Renaissance ideals and boldly entered into the struggle for the protection of free human feelings...
Analysis of the novel by U. Eco "The Name of the Rose"
The events in the novel lead us to believe that this is a detective story. The author, with suspicious persistence, offers just such an interpretation. Lotman Yu. writes that “even then...
The main genre features of the Russian story of the 40s.
Now let's move on to the literary issues of the movement. Direction is, first of all, the creative unity of writers. A direction at an embryonic stage can exist spontaneously, without a clearly realized and formulated program...
Problematics and poetics of the lyrical-philosophical story by I.A. Bunin "Mitya's love"
Bunin hero love genre When analyzing the problems of this story, we relied on the works of A. Volkov, O. V. Slivitskaya. The problems of the story are closely intertwined with the images of the main characters...
Problematics and poetics of B. Pasternak’s cycle of poems “When it clears up” (impressionistic tendencies)
Time concept. "...I want to understand<…>, how Proust found lost time...” “I chose the world of slums as my home...” Peculiarities of the cycle’s poetics: Metaphor. Elements of impressionistic technique...
Problems of John Steinbeck's novel "The Edge of Rot"
1. The transition to industrial husbandry, capitalism (on a larger scale than capitalist agricultural democracy transforms the free landowner into a faceless and wordless appendage of the machine. On the one hand - Jodie...
The role of the epigraph in Graham Greene's novel "The Comedians"
green artistic comedians epigraph In “The Comedians” (1966), the writer mercilessly criticizes reactionary regimes, including the one established in Haiti with the help of the United States...
Novel by J. D. Selinger "Above the Break in Life"
Holden does not understand the fading of his handsome reader, he notices about the abyss that appeared before the young man: “The abyss in which you fly is a thirsty gap, even unsafe. Those who fall into it never reach the bottom. falling, falling endlessly . This is with people...
Comparative analysis"Pinocchio" by C. Collodi and "The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino" by A.N. Tolstoy
For the first time, the fairy tale of the Italian writer C. Collodi "The Adventures of Pinocchio. The Story of a Puppet", which was published in 1883, was translated into Russian in 1906 and published in the magazine "Sincere Word"...
The theme of the people in the novel "War and Peace"
A huge number of articles and books have been written about the novel “War and Peace”. But the main problems were and remain: composition and genre, “folk thought”, historical truth in the novel and the main images...
The theme of crime and punishment in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son
Dickens's novel was originally intended to be a "tragedy of pride." Pride is an important, although not the only quality of the bourgeois businessman Dombey...
Shakespeare's tragedy "Hamlet"
The problem of moral choice One of the most striking problems of the work is the problem of choice, which can be considered a reflection of the main conflict of the tragedy. For a thinking person, the problem of choice...
Traditions of the dystopian genre in Western literature
Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 is a thematically expanded version of the story "The Fireman", published in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1951, and presents us with a whole range of problems that, according to the author...
Artistic Features dystopia by E. Zamyatin "We"
The two main problems that are raised in this work are the impact of technological development on humanity, as well as the problem of “totalitarianism”. The remaining problems are already a product, a consequence of these two. Let's consider...
In the history of art and literature, no play is more popular than the popularity of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. For more than 300 years, this tragedy has been played on the stages of theaters all over the world. People of different cultures look in it for answers to questions that trouble them. The secret of this tragedy lies in the philosophical depth and humanistic inspiration of this work, in the skill of Shakespeare the playwright, who embodied universal human problems into artistic grievances.
The image of Hamlet is central to Shakespeare's tragedy. Already at the beginning of the play it is determined
The main goal of this hero is revenge for the murder of his father. According to medieval ideas, this is his duty, but Hamlet is a man of modern times, he is a humanist, and cruel revenge is contrary to his nature. To make a decision, he needs to carefully weigh whether Claudius's death will change anything in the world. Around him he sees only treason and deceit. He is disappointed even in his love and remains lonely.
His thoughts about the purpose of man take on a tragic coloring (scene in the cemetery). Man is a very weak creature to resist evil, Hamlet believes. The events of the tragedy seem to confirm these reasonings of the hero: Ophelia dies innocently, and evil remains unpunished. Hamlet cannot come to terms with this, but he also does not find the strength to resist. If he becomes a murderer, he will go over to the side of evil and thereby strengthen it.
Shakespeare gives Hamlet several opportunities to kill Claudius: Hamlet sees the king praying alone and is given the opportunity. But the hero does not take a decisive step. In prayer, Claudius atones for his sins; death at such a moment was perceived by Shakespeare's contemporaries as forgiveness of sins, and the person's soul was believed to fly to heaven. To kill Claudius at such a moment meant to forgive the harm done to him. This is precisely what Hamlet cannot do. Before our eyes, the hero is going through a difficult struggle between a sense of duty and his own beliefs, this struggle leads to a sad conclusion: the whole world is a prison, where there is no place for human virtues, where every person is doomed to loneliness.
Hamlet's monologues reveal internal struggle, which the hero leads with him. He constantly reproaches himself for inactivity, trying to understand whether he is capable of any action at all. He even thinks about suicide, but even here, thinking about whether the same problems await him in the other world stops him (“To be or not to be?”). Duty commands him to “be” and act. Shakespeare shows the consistent development of Hamlet's character. At the end of the tragedy, the king's killer is punished, but this happened as a result of a coincidence, and not from the will of the hero.
It is not by chance that Hamlet pretends to be crazy: only a very strong person can understand what Hamlet understood and not go mad.
The power of this character is not in the actions he takes, but in what he feels and makes his readers feel. Why a person cannot achieve happiness and harmony, what is the meaning of human life, is it possible to overcome evil - these are just the main philosophical problems that Shakespeare raises in his tragedy. He does not give a definitive answer to them; it is probably impossible. But his faith in man, in her ability to do good and resist evil, is the path to answering them.
Independent work No. 13
Topic: Shakespeare "Hamlet"
Balzac "Gobseck"
Flaubert "Salammbô"
Assignment: Analysis of works.
Hamlet" - philosophical tragedy
Hamlet is a philosophical tragedy. Not in the sense that the play contains a system of views on the world expressed in dramatic form. Shakespeare created not a treatise giving a theoretical exposition of his worldview, but work of art. It is not without reason that he ironically portrays Polonius teaching his son how to behave. It is not for nothing that Ophelia laughs at her brother, who reads morals to her, but is far from following them. We would hardly be mistaken in supposing that Shakespeare recognized the futility of moralizing. The purpose of art is not to teach, but, as Hamlet says, “to hold up, as it were, a mirror before nature: to show virtue its own features, arrogance its own appearance, and to every age and class its likeness and imprint.” To portray people as they are - this is how Shakespeare understood the task of art. And to accomplish this task, Shakespeare actively bought discounts using coupons. What he doesn't say, we can add: artistic image should be such that the reader and viewer himself is able to give a moral assessment to each character. This is exactly how those we see in tragedy are created. But Shakespeare is not limited to two colors - black and white. As we have seen, none of the main characters not simple. Each of them is complex in its own way, has not one, but several features, which is why they are perceived not as diagrams, but as living characters.
That no direct lesson can be derived from tragedy is best demonstrated by the difference of opinion about its meaning. The picture of life created by Shakespeare, being perceived as a “likeness and imprint” of reality, encourages everyone who thinks about the tragedy to evaluate people and events in the same way as they are evaluated in life. However, unlike reality, in the picture created by the playwright, everything is enlarged. In life, you can’t immediately find out what a person is like. In the drama, his words and actions quickly make the audience aware of this character. The opinions of others about this character also help.
Shakespeare's worldview is dissolved in the images and situations of his plays. With his tragedies, he sought to arouse the attention of the audience, bring them face to face with the most terrible phenomena of life, disturb the complacent, and respond to the sentiments of those who, like him, experienced anxiety and pain due to the imperfections of life.
The purpose of tragedy is not to frighten, but to provoke the activity of thought, to make one think about the contradictions and troubles of life, and Shakespeare achieves this goal. Achieves primarily thanks to the image of the hero. By posing questions to himself, he encourages us to think about them and look for answers. But Hamlet not only questions life, he expresses many thoughts about it. His speeches are full of sayings, and what is remarkable is that they contain the thoughts of many generations. Research has shown that almost every saying has a long tradition behind it. Shakespeare did not read Plato, Aristotle, or medieval thinkers; their ideas came to him through various books that treated philosophical problems. It has been established that Shakespeare not only carefully read the “Essays” of the French thinker Michel Montaigne, but even borrowed something from them. Let us turn once again to the monologue “To be or not to be.” Let us remember how Hamlet compares death and sleep.
Analysis of Balzac's story "Gobsek"
Another feature of Balzac’s narrative can rather be attributed to the shortcomings of his manner: Balzac feels so at home in his creations that he without hesitation invades the world of the characters, attributing to his heroes observations, conclusions, speeches, etc. that are not characteristic of them. In the story “Gobsek” Balzac every now and then “gets used to” the characters and sees, evaluates, speaks for them or even instead of them.
This is partly due to the writer’s desire for an objective portrayal of people and events, when the author does not take the side of anyone, but simply illuminates what is happening, but mainly this is Balzac’s irrepressible desire to express his point of view, to convey it to the reader, despite minor conventions like that that the heroes cannot speak or think like that due to their upbringing, education, social role, breadth of outlook and other factors.
First of all, this applies to Gobsek, the most interesting, bright and close character to Balzac; It is not without reason that in one of the episodes of his story about him, Derville suddenly calls this mysterious and ruff old man “my Gobsek.” The old moneylender, describing his visits to Anastasi de Resto and Fanny Malvo, suddenly switches to the style of a gallant poet, a connoisseur female beauty and the joys that can be derived from this gift of nature knowledgeable people: “The artist would have given a lot to spend at least a few minutes in the bedroom of my debtor this morning. The folds of the curtains by the bed breathed with voluptuous bliss, the folded sheet on a blue silk down jacket, the rumpled pillow, sharply white against this azure background with its lace frills, seemed to still retain a vague imprint of wondrous forms that teased the imagination.”
In no less unexpected language, he expresses his impressions of meeting Fanny Malvo: she seems to him “a fairy of loneliness”, she emanates “something good, truly virtuous.” Balzac's moneylender admits: “It was as if I had entered an atmosphere of sincerity, spiritual purity, and it even became easier for me to breathe.” These experiences, not to mention the fact that they are discussed with a stranger, are not at all consistent with the appearance of a suspicious and unsociable moneylender who considers gold the only object worthy of attention.
A continuation of the narrator’s speech appears to be the already cited words of Gobsek, which are not entirely appropriate in the mouth of the character (he, like an image advertising specialist, comments on the impression he evokes): “Well, what do you think now... don’t burning pleasures lurk behind this cold, frozen mask , which so often surprised you with its immobility?
Count de Born, interrupting Derville’s story, gives a concise and biting portrait of the social dandy Maxime de Tray, executed in the spirit of Balzac’s “codes” and “physiology”: Count Maxim “is either a scoundrel, or nobility itself, more stained with dirt than stained with blood.” In the scene with diamonds, he is echoed in the same expressions by Gobsek, who told Maxim: “To shed your blood, you must have it, my dear, but in your veins instead of blood there is dirt.”
Such a coincidence most looks like deliberate negligence, dictated by the author’s desire to maintain the unity of the reader’s impression of the persons and events depicted. Consistently expressing his point of view, Balzac, as we see, was ready to make some sacrifices in the field of psychological authenticity and credibility. But he won in another way: even such a relatively small story as “Gobsek” is full of excellent observations and pictures from nature, which occupy not the least place in the history of morals that Balzac wrote. Formally, these apt generalizations belong to different characters, but they are so similar to each other that they give reason to conclude that the structure of Balzac’s narrative is monological. The voices of the characters are only a convention for the author, who completely subjugates the entire image in the work.
Let us briefly recall the most significant observations of this kind. This is the already mentioned description of the Countess de Resto’s room, which turns into a portrait of the owner of this luxurious boudoir. The various signs of the material world, which Balzac so subtly noticed and understood, help him penetrate into spiritual world their heroes, justify and consolidate conclusions general about their personality and fate: “Flowers, diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a belt and other accessories of a ball gown were scattered throughout the room. It smelled like some kind of subtle perfume. There was beauty in everything, devoid of harmony, luxury and disorder. And already the poverty that threatened this woman or her lover, lurking behind all this luxury, raised its head and showed them its sharp teeth. The countess’s tired face matched her entire bedchamber, dotted with signs of the past celebration.”
In the same way, the interior of Gobsek’s room helps to better understand the features of psychology central character story, we remember the neatness of the room, similar to a monk’s cell and the monastery of an old maid, a fireplace in which brands were slightly smoldering, never flaring up, etc.
Eternal problems in Shakespeare's tragedy "Hamlet"
Shakespeare is an artist of the late Renaissance, a tragic time when the high ideals of the Renaissance, especially the ideal of Man as a free, beautiful and harmonious individual, collided with the reality of cruel existence. In one of the pinnacle works of the English playwright - the tragedy "Hamlet" - problems are raised that will always worry: good and evil, life and death, human strength and weakness, the origins of moral choice, destiny and free will.
The fight between good and evil
The struggle between good and evil is one of the main problems of the tragedy. Fate placed the heaviest burden on Hamlet’s shoulders: “The age is shaken, and the worst thing is that I was born to restore it.” To “restore” a shattered century is a mission that only a titan can do, as, in fact, the way man was conceived by the artists of the Renaissance. We meet Hamlet at the moment when the drama of existence is revealed to him - a man who grew up in understanding and love, a student at the University of Wittenberg. The first real pain is the death of his father, whom Hamlet idolized, in whom he honored the ideal of Man (“He was a man, a man in everything”). However, the contradiction that broke the harmony in Hamlet’s soul is the “vile haste” of his mother, who became Claudius’ wife a month after her husband’s death. In Hamlet’s mind, the love of his mother for his father, which he remembered and in which he grew up, and such a quick replacement with Claudius do not fit together. This hurts Hamlet so much that the thought of suicide slips into his mind (“Or if the Eternal One had not prohibited suicide”). Hamlet's first monologue in the play is a cry of pain, misunderstanding, he is torn by contradiction: he loves his mother, but cannot forgive her for her “vile haste.”
However, the most terrible discoveries about the disharmony of the world awaited Hamlet in the words of the Ghost. His mother's marriage, his uncle's hypocrisy and treachery seem even more vile and terrible to him. Hamlet sees that the man who committed fratricide enjoys life as if he had done nothing wrong. This was a terrible discovery for Hamlet, which shook all his ideas about life: he sees that the foundations of a harmonious world order are crumbling, signs of decay are visible in everything, especially in the way people have changed. For them, vice is no longer a vice, and virtue is no longer a virtue:
You can live with a smile
And be a scoundrel with a smile.
Honesty and honor have disappeared from the world.
Claudius becomes the embodiment of evil in the play. Already in the first words of Claudius there is hypocrisy, duplicity, selfishness: under the guise of grief and sadness - contentment with the achieved goal. By calling King Hamlet Sr., whom he destroyed, “beloved brother,” Claudius hides the poisonous and blinding envy of his brother that originally lived in his soul; addressing Hamlet as “a son close to his heart,” “first of his kind,” “our son and dignitary,” Claudius hates him as the closest reminder of the price that had to be paid for the throne and the queen.
Claudius is aware of his guilt, his terrible sin, which is why Hamlet managed to lure him into his “mousetrap”, to see the king’s fear and confusion during the play. Claudius is afraid of God's judgment, fear has settled in his soul forever, he tries to soften his mental turmoil with prayer, but only pure words can rise to heaven: “Words without thought will not reach heaven.” However, according to the laws of treachery and human baseness, instead of repentance and cleansing of conscience, Claudius chooses a different path - the path of getting rid of Hamlet. Evil grows like a snowball, giving rise to new evil: Claudius tries to get rid of the gravity of one murder through another. The evil against which Hamlet rebels turns out to be so complex, offensive, and aggressive. However, Claudius is not a soulless machine of evil, but still a man who is not alien to human feelings - passion for Gertrude, a feeling of fear and sin. But precisely because he is a man, he is responsible for everything he has done, and therefore he pays for his moral choice - with an unexpected death, not purified by prayer.
The problem of moral choice. Destiny and free will. The price of human life.
The image of the main character is also associated with such important problems as moral choice, destiny and human free will, and the price of human life. One of the questions that arises when reading the play is why Hamlet hesitates with retribution. The answer can be found by comparing the three heroes of the play in a situation of revenge: Fortinbras, Laertes and Hamlet. Fortinbras initially refuses to avenge his father, since the Norwegian was defeated in a fair fight. Laertes, having learned about the death of Polonius, unlike Hamlet, “flies on the wings of revenge” blindly, ahead, without thinking. Rushing into Claudius with the exclamation “You vile king, return my father to me!”, he immediately becomes a toy in the hands of the smart and cunning king. It was not difficult for Claudius to direct Laertes’ anger at Hamlet; Laertes willingly agrees to become a “tool” in the hands of the king and only a moment before his death he begins to see clearly, understands everything and manages to say to Hamlet: “The king... the king is guilty.” Thus, determination, not bound by the “fetters” of doubts and reflections, not knowing the eternal “to be or not to be,” leads to disaster, death, and multiplies evil. Unlike Laertes, Hamlet does not want to serve blind revenge, but the Truth. This is his Mission, his cross, his chosenness.
Hamlet's doubts are not an indicator of his weakness; on the contrary, he knows how to be brave and decisive like few others. Already in the first act, Hamlet reveals a strong will, courage, determination: he is warned to follow the Ghost - he is unstoppable in his impulse to find out the truth. "Hands off!" - he says to those trying to stop him. Hamlet is a Thinker, an Analyst, he has a special activity - the activity of Thought. Hamlet's three monologues in the play are his touch on the eternal problems of existence: good and evil, destiny and free will, the price of human life and the purpose of man. Perhaps the most famous monologue not only of Shakespeare’s play, but of all world drama – “To be or not to be?” Revolt against evil or come to terms with it, go through the entire thorny path in the name of truth or retreat, deciding that it is impossible to achieve it? “To die, to fall asleep,” Hamlet does not even have the right to die, because death would be too simple a solution, it would become a refusal to choose.
What is nobler in spirit - to submit
To the slings and arrows of furious fate
Or, taking up arms in a sea of turmoil,
Defeat them with confrontation?
The eternal problem is a person in the face of a choice, global, colossal, on which both his life and the life of the world depend - this is the moral and philosophical sound of the monologue. Only titanium can make such a choice. Just to realize this choice, to face your fate - this alone requires superhuman strength and courage. The faith of Shakespeare, the artist of the Renaissance, was already reflected in the fact that he saw such powers in man.
A meeting with Fortinbras's army marching to Poland makes Hamlet think about the price of human life, about the goal and means:
Death is about to consume twenty thousand,
What for the sake of whim and absurd glory
They go to the grave, like to bed, to fight
For a place where everyone can’t turn around,
There is not even a place to bury the dead.
On one side of the scale is the life and death of thousands, on the other is “whim” and “nonsense glory.” For Hamlet the humanist, this is unacceptable: not all means are good for achieving the goal, human life is not comparable to a piece of land, the price of this life should not be negligible.
Hamlet’s meeting with the gravediggers also makes him think about the price of human life, about life and death. Does a person disappear without a trace? What remains after it? Is death, which equalizes and reconciles everyone, really the turning of a person to dust? Hamlet does not want to agree that man completely dissolves into nothingness; he rebels against the very law of nature: “My bones hurt at such a thought.” However, the very fact that Yorick, whose skull he now holds in his hands with such sadness, comes to life in Hamlet’s memory, says that a person is not erased into dust, that the invisible aura of his presence is felt on earth.
In these monologues, Hamlet reveals himself as a philosopher and poet. “A poet is the structure of the soul,” says Marina Tsvetaeva. This “structure of the soul” is palpable in Hamlet: who, if not the poet, could say that he sees his father “in the eyes of his soul,” who could so acutely perceive the destruction of harmony, consonance of his soul and the world.
Hamlet is a tragic hero: he makes a conscious choice to fight evil, realizing that this unequal duel can end in death. Hamlet like true hero Renaissance, rebels against world disharmony in defense of harmony, but in this confrontation he finds himself alone. It would seem that outwardly Hamlet is not alone: his mother loves him, the people favor him, an army is always ready to rise up behind him, but we have the right to talk about the special internal loneliness of the Shakespearean hero - the loneliness of the First. Hamlet has gone farther than others in comprehending evil, something that is closed to others has been revealed to him, there is no person next to him gifted with the same spiritual strength, even Horatio, Hamlet’s true friend, has no right to be with him at the decisive moments of his life.
Even Hamlet’s apparent madness emphasizes his loneliness in confrontation with the world of evil: madness is a mask that helps him tell the truth in a world of lies: “Denmark is a prison”, “If you take everyone according to their deserts, then who will escape the whip?”, “Be honest” with the way this world is, it means to be a man drawn from tens of thousands.” Madness is an opportunity to temporarily stop being the Hamlet that Claudius fears and hates; it is the only opportunity to survive in a mad world.
In the fight against evil, Hamlet dies, as almost all the heroes of the tragedy die, except for Horatio and Fortinbras. Fortinbras is decisive and noble, he really deserves to take the Danish throne, but he cannot be a complete replacement for Hamlet: the man is irreplaceable. Hamlet managed a lot: he called evil evil, threw off the mask of hypocrisy, exposing the deceit of Claudius, he avenged his father’s death. However, the ending of the play is tragic, and the appearance of Fortinbras does not relieve the tragic tension. In a fatal duel with evil, Hamlet dies - and this is Shakespeare’s tragic recognition of the complexity and diversity of evil, which cannot be defeated by one person, even if that person is Hamlet.
After Hamlet’s departure, there remains a void that cannot be filled by anything or anyone: the world has become poorer for Hamlet, the Thinker, the Poet, the Man has left the world. However, the tragedy of the finale still does not oppress with oppressive hopelessness; in Shakespeare’s tragedy there is a light of faith in man, in his greatness, his capabilities, there is an enlightened sadness in recognition of the dramatic nature of man’s fate in the world, there is hope.
The problem of the tragic fate of love in a world not intended for love.
Many in the play have their own tragedy - Ophelia has the tragedy of love in a world of calculation and deception. The true reason for Ophelia's madness and death is the death of harmony, a collision with such tragedies that crushed her mind: Hamlet's “madness,” which Ophelia perceives as her own pain and the collapse of hopes for happiness and love, the death of her father. Her songs are a reflection of disharmony in the soul, which has lost joy and light: she sings about death, deception, and the treachery of her loved one. Ophelia's death itself is meek, covered in sadness and a peculiar sorrowful charm: she, without realizing her end, becomes part of the water (and water is a symbol of purification). Ophelia, as she lived, dies pure, her inner nobility, ability to love, spiritual subtlety are not destroyed by the treachery of the world - and this is her unique victory over evil. Ophelia's fate is the irredeemable guilt of a world in which beauty and purity could not survive.
The loss of Ophelia is such a pain for Hamlet that he, without thinking, without fear of being recognized, rushes into her grave in order to spend another moment with the one he loved and whom his “shaken age” took from him.
The eternal theme of love even more reflects the tragedy of Hamlet’s fate: there was no person left next to him whose love could reconcile with the imperfections of the world. There were too many obstacles in the way of this love: the death of fathers, the intrigues of the court, the orders of elders, but most importantly - time itself, which was not intended for love.
