Oct. 9th Blog 8: Hamlet

Hamlet was not as bad as I thought it was going to be when I first seen we had to read it. I guess everyone has that way about them, they see a book and they judge it before they have even read it. We hear the opinions of others and automatically think the book is no good or maybe its the other way around. Either way it goes, I judged Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, to be a play I would not like no matter what, although sometimes I didn't understand what was going on, I could understand most of what I really needed to know for the play.

I could and still can sometimes relate to Ophelia. She is basically a pawn in a big man’s world. She has to do whatever she is told and I can understand not wanting to disappoint your family and do something they said was not what you should do. She is a woman and has no voice but what others tell her to do. In Act 1, scene 3, Polonius is telling Ophelia to never speak to Hamlet again and she says she will obey but then Polonius has her to help him and the king to spy on Hamlet. We talked about this in class and I found it interesting because we can all relate to her. What I mean is that when we are young, we have to listen to our parents and we try so hard not to disappoint them no matter the cost.

In Act 1, scene 2, lines 74-75, “...all that lives must dies, / Passing through nature to eternity.” I found these two lines to be very powerful to me. I might be wrong but when I read them, especially line 75, I felt like it is saying that we all are here on Earth and we pass through nature, all these seasons, to eternity. We all weather through these seasons, storms, sickness to get to what we see at the end, eternity. Now whether eternity is in heaven or hell depends on how you came through during those bad and good times but we all must die. Every living thing around us will die and there will be nothing left once we are all gone because nature will take over.

Although I still do not particularly like how Hamlet ended, I can see why it did in a way. Hamlet killed Polonius so he was going to have to pay for that sin and die one way or another. As with the other characters, the Queen, Gertrude, is killed because of her sin and King Claudius also. Laertes, he had to die because he would not have made a good king, I do not believe. He listened to what others told him and was determined to kill Hamlet before finding out the details to his fathers death. So yes, I did enjoy learning about Hamlet even though I did judge the book before having read it; I do take back the judgement and say it is interesting and I still do not quite understand it completely but that’s okay.