Can someone give me feedback on a Hamlet essay & give me some ideas on what to write?
Hey! So I've written the intro & first body paragraph but i'm not sure how to go about from there onwards.
Would love to get some feedback and ideas :)
Here's the prompt : Many scholars believe that Hamlet's tragic flaw is that he fails to act on instinct. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this idea? Or do you think this might be an oversimplification of something much more complex?
What I have so far:
“O, I die, Horatio! The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit” (Shakespeare 5.2.353-354). Many would argue that Hamlet’s tragic flaw is that he fails to act on instinct leading to his death; Although I do believe that Hamlet fails to act on his natural instinct, I disagree with many scholars that this is inherently a flaw. I believe that it is godsent. Hamlet’s mind is too twisted, and his train of thought is so convoluted that he has to juxtapose his strong morals with his desire to kill his uncle. In the play, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the main character, Hamlet, is revisited by his dead father, in a form of a ghost. His father tells him to take revenge on the new king, Claudius, who he claimed to have murdered him. He is determined to avenge the murder of his father by killing his uncle, but sees killing as a sin so, he needs to confirm Claudius’ guilt through elaborate and ambitious plans before he can take his life -- which ultimately delayed his plans. Throughout the play, Hamlet fights a battle between his heart and mind. It is evident that Hamlet does fail to act on his instincts because he juxtaposes his morality with his desire for revenge, causing him to procrastinate on his actions.
Hamlet wages an inner war between his heart and his mind. He wants to obey his father’s wish by taking revenge on Claudius, but sees murder as a sin. “Killing is not so much a nullifying act as a re-play, a repetition of an impossible ending-a function of iterability. It is this awareness on the part of Hamlet that has resulted in the procrastination of the act of revenge.” (Gana). Hamlet’s instincts inspires rage where his thought was to kill the man who murdered his father. Yet within his thought process he realizes a truth found in a common modern English expression, “an eye for an eye, makes the whole world blind.” Gana states that “killing is not so much a nullifying act than a replay […]”. It is insinuated that this will beget a cycle of killing. Killing will not settle the score -- there will just be another round of anger and frustration that gives rise to more deaths. These thoughts on murder as a form of vengeance, linger in his mind and eventually leads him to procrastinate on his plans. “If to die is to pass to the "undiscover'd country, from whose bourn [boundary] / No traveller returns," then, it must not have escaped Hamlet's "mind's eye" that the ghost, this being that is not one, this nothing, is so far the only traveller who keeps returning” (Gana). When you are met with death you are beyond mortal grasp; there is no possibility that one can come back to the world of the living once they have gone past humanity. This is something that Hamlet knows and so, for Hamlet to know this and simultaneously believe that his father is speaking to him beyond the veil of death is contrary to belief or common sense. Hamlet must have realized this contradiction exists and could have caused his procrastination because for all he knew, this ghost can be just a figment of his imagination. That’s why he needed a sign of affirmation to prove that he is not just killing an innocent man and that Claudius is indeed the man that murdered his father. In order to unveil his father’s killer, Hamlet plots against Claudius by presenting a play which resembled the acts he suspects Claudius to have done upon his father. Without further ado, Hamlet uncovered the truth and was affirmed that the ghost’s words were true.
