Hamlet Close Reading- Rose

Shakespeare as a writer has affected many different people. He teaches about loss and anger throughout his plays. As a play Hamlet is a prime example of how he mixes anger into the grieving of losing someone close to you. In the passage, Act 1 Scene 2 Lines 147-164, Hamlet displays the sense of neglect he feels after his fathers death. He starts off by calling out in exasperation and frustration in the opening quote “Heaven and earth”. This shows you right away that he is confused about what to feel. He continues this part of the speech with “Must I remember...by what it fed on” which indicates that he is seeing his mother lose independence and become reliant on his uncle. This creates a dilemma in which Hamlet no longer has his mother to depend on because she is no longer independent or strong. The next part “Let me... name is women” proves that his mother's lack of dependence gives him a negative view of women. He is calling women weak because of the weakness his mother has displayed. He no longer has a prime example of what a strong woman looks life. Hamlet only goes on to further point out the neglect and disappointment he is feeling from his mother. He does this in the lines “A little month... married with my uncle”. This is the point of the speech where he really goes into depth on his feelings of the remarriage between his uncle and mother. He says that his mother mourned less than a beast would with it’s mate. He goes as far as to say that when his mother was mourning with visible tears at his father’s funeral it was fake and that she hadn’t even waited for the shoes to break in before she remarried. Hamlet is thoroughly displaying his disappointment at this point. He is in despair with the outcome of remarriage. He is hit with the strange reality that he is the only one still grieving over the death of his father, the king of Denmark. This leads him to feel neglected because he is grieving and no one is with him. He continues stating his disappointment with the next lines “My father’s brother... incestuous sheets”. In this part he uses the imagery of his lack of similarity to hercules to draw attention to how he is feeling about how distanced he feels from his uncle. Claudius may have been his father’s brother but holds no fatherly affection in the eyes of hamlet. His final end to the speech with the lines “It is not... hold my tongue” show further signs of neglect. He has no one to tell his disagreements to. He can not tell his mother for she is dependent on his uncle whose is the one that stole her independence. She has torn the bond between her and hamlet by forgetting his father so quickly. He is left to store these feelings, his disappointment and confusion, inside himself. This is enough to drive anyone mad through neglect.