Thursday, December 9, 2010

In Hamlet's "look here upon this picture" speech, how does Shakespeare use language to characterize Hamlet's relationship with his mother? I need help...

This is
probably the main scene in that caused Freud, allegedly, to have first
considered naming the "Oedipus Complex" afterinstead.

Hamlet pours
out his rage against his mother ostensibly over her having chosen to marry his uncle . His point
initially seems to be that Claudius is so far below Hamlet's father in appearance thatmust have
been insane to be attracted to him. Yet Hamlet's speech is itself an instance of
"protesting too much," to use his own mother's words in a different context. Not only
does he go on and on, but his language is exaggerated and inflated beyond all
expectations:

Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove
himself,

An eye like Mars to threaten and command,

A
station like the herald Mercury

Thus in three lines
Hamlet likens his father not to one or even two or three but four mythological figures.
Claudius, by contrast, is a "mildewed ear," a "moor" (in comparison with the
"fair mountain" Hamlet's father was). Hamlet then launches into insulting his mother
by saying that at her age, she can no longer feel actual love because


The heyday in the blood is tame.


After she attempts a response he gets to the point of what is really inflaming him
most:

Nay, but to live

In the rank
sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stewed in corruption, honeying and making
love

Over the nasty sty

Much of the
wording makes one think of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Thefocuses
upon the unsavory physical detail with which Hamlet conceptualizes his mother's love
life.

The enormous gulf Hamlet sees between his father's qualities as a man
and his uncle's is what he uses to rationalize this condemnation of his mother. But nothing else
in the play objectively supports Hamlet's view. We might ask if at this point Hamlet is still
engaging in his ruse to make people think him insane. If not, the frenzied
quality of his tirade would prove that he has genuinely gone over the line into psychosis. His
resentment of his mother as a sexually active woman is, arguably, what has provoked this. Even
afterhas appeared to warn him, Hamlet continues his criticism of his mother and her intimacy
with Claudius:

Good nightbut go not to my uncle's
bed.

Assume a virtue if you have it not.


The explicitness of this scene is shocking in its way. Yet the extremity of emotion and
the inflated language are the essence of Shakespeare. Whether or not these lines are evidence of
Hamlet's unbalanced mind, they are overwhelming as sheer poetry.

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