Hamlet Essay: Re-Do

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, is based on a young man named Hamlet who seeks to avenge his father’s death. Throughout the play, his use of per formative utterance influences the way he behaves toward other characters, and Hamlet eventually transforms from a man of words to a man of action. As a result of self-overhearing, it changed the way I behaved similar to Hamlet.

For Hamlet nothing is simple, everything raises questions. His dilemma is not about what decisions he should take but rather whether he will be able to make any decisions at all. According to some interpretations, Hamlet makes no decisions and instead projects the image of an indecisive, inactive and passive individual, a romantic incapable of action who is sniveling and pathetic; he is nothing but a compulsive talker taking pleasure in his own words. Hamlet astonishes us with soliloquies of unequalled beauty, his emotions are of stunning force, but he does not evolve beyond them. This is why T.S. Eliot regarded Hamlet as a failure and said that it presented a character 'dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it exceeds the events that occur'. Why so much emotion and so little action?

Throughout Hamlet, it clearly showed how he was more of a speaker than a doer. We read and even memorized one of his speeches (“To be or not to be”) of him talking to himself pondering on what he should do. He “talked the talk” but didn’t necessarily “walk the walk” until the very end of the play when he finally completed his task in avenging his uncle. In his spoken words, he was definite, but in his actions he displayed uncertainty and weakness. And in succeeding his long-term duty, I think Hamlet revealed that he was capable of doing something he didn’t believe he could do. I can relate to Hamlet in this speech because i occasionally will talk to myself when I am studying or even driving just because I seem to get bored and I begin to ponder my actions.

Overall, per formative utterance plays a key role in Hamlet in that it results in self-overhearing. Throughout his soliloquies, mental actions and thoughts, his constant strategy's to himself only enabled him to precede his tasks mentally on what he wanted to do without physically taking action.