David Garrick in Hamlet, I, 4
Book signing and Hamlet Au's interview with Julian...
HamletShakespeare's "Hamlet" is a play that has been performed, produced, and read for over four hundred years. One reason this work is so popular is that Shakespeare relates his ideas using primitive and universal human emotions such as love, avarice, and revenge. The main plot is a bloody vengeance through Hamlet's plight and anguish. Intertwined throughout are subplots of betrayal and deception. Hamlet is an idealist who separates himself from the corrupt and insincere society of Demark. The meaning of sincere love is one of the major dilemmas that Hamlet encounters in this play because Hamlet believes that true love lasts forever. Hamlet experiences betrayals of love from two women close to him: Gertrude, his mother and Ophelia, his girlfriend. As a result of this chaos of love, Hamlet's revenge for the murder of his father is extricably bound to and complicated by his relationships with Gertrude and Ophelia.
The hasty marriage of his mother to Claudius, his uncle destroys Hamlet's belief in lasting, unconditional love. Hamlet is disappointed and exasperated at Gertrude's frivolous love for his uncle and infuriated that Claudius could so easily ascend to his father's throne through murder. Hamlet cannot endure the broken and seemingly forgotten love between his parents and subsequently loses all faith in women. He believes the Queen has forsaken his parents love and abandoned his father far to quickly. In an attempt to rationalize the marriage of his mother to Claudius Hamlet compares his father to his uncle and concludes that the reason for the rapid marriage was because of his mother's sexual desires. The following soliloquy demonstrates his comparison between his father and his uncle, and his ideas about Gertrude:
Let me not think on't; frailty, thy name is woman!
A little month, or ere those...