Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Harold Pinter one of the most prominent and influential British playwright of the second half of the 20th century. His plays are distinguished from all other by their sense of suspense, mystification and ambiguity. Pinter has a specific technique to explore and elicit the mystery of human relationships. Pinter plays are characteristic of minimal plots and limited characters but the dialogues filled with powerful tension. He uses pauses, three dots and silence in his plays. They are the very…

Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, explores the effects of deception and trickery. Shakespeare’s characters are unaware the world they see is an illusion. Shakespeare sets the stage for a comedic adventure through Illyria starring conspiracy and intrigue. Niccolò Machiavelli, on the other hand, is attempting to shed light on how politics works in the world through The Prince. Machiavelli presents disturbing truths about the behavior of humanity, thus earning himself sinister notoriety.…

Queen Gertrude’s conversations with other characters throughout William Shakespeare’s Hamlet establish her as a complaisant and passive character. This is mainly demonstrated through the fact that the only time she speaks in the first two acts of the play is when she speaks either directly to Hamlet or to Claudius about how unnecessary it is to mourn King Hamlet’s death. In Act I scene II, she reprimands Hamlet for how upset he is about his father’s death when it is natural that “all that lives…

The narrative of Hamlet tells the story of a son seeking revenge for the murder of his father, the king of Denmark. Hamlet’s uncle poisoned the king, so he could control the kingdom, he betrayed Hamlet’s father just as Hamlet’s father betrayed the father of Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince. Several themes can be traced throughout the play. Two prominent themes include the constant reinforcing of male dominance, and the question of reality vs. unreality. Women are powerless within the play…

In what ways does Bohannan’s attempt to tell the story of Hamlet to the Tiv illustrate the concept of naïve realism? The story of Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s greatest and when Mrs. Bohannan attempts telling the story to the Tiv, she alters the story so that it doesn’t overly alter the language barrier between them. She attempts to make the story of Hamlet understandable to the Tiv, by doing this the Tiv give her another understanding of Hamlet that she hadn’t previously thought about.…

After this, Hamlet begins to demonstrate the traits of a schizophrenic, as he “talks beyond restraint except for periods of mute depression” in his never-ending soliloquies and monologues, and is “most often in a state of suspicion” (Aldus 5). Guildenstern even claims that when interrogating Hamlet, he was “niggard of question, but of our demands most free in his reply” (Shakespeare 3.1.1696-1697). The height of this suspicion is seen when Hamlet hastily kills Polonius, mistaking him for his…

Throughout Shakespeare's play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare uses imagery to paint out images in your mind. He uses the language to express what is happening in the play because they are very minimalistic. Since they have limited resources and props they are forced to show what happens through words. This play spotlights various examples of imagery to help the audience understand this historical tragedy. He uses words to show all of the crazy things Casca sees during the day, to show…

It is common across many Shakespearean tragedies for at least one character to die; in Hamlet, five characters are murdered. These five (King Hamlet, Hamlet Jr., Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius) all die as a result of being poisoned by Claudius, directly or transitively. The repeated use of poison across Shakespeare's plays is not a coincidence, and when Shakespeare uses poison in Hamlet, he sets up a strong association of poison to the corruption in man. More specifically, Shakespeare uses the…

Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1 is a character that flip flops from being funny to serious throughout the play. At the intro of the play he is goofing around with Falstaff and planning a fake heist with Poins. Their plan is simple, they will pretend to not show to a robbery with Falstaff and three others, but then rob them after they had just robed their victims. This is a perfect example of how Hal is portrayed as a comic character is some parts of the play. However, immediately after he makes…

the death. Her incapability to realize where she is and what is happening to her shows how she isn’t in the right state of mind making her mad. Hamlet did not express that same incapability to realize his situation and state of mind. When asking Guildenstern to “play upon this pipe” (Shakespeare, 159) and how “it is as easy as lying”, it shows how he knew what was going on with the Kings plans. Him being able to mess around with the spies and not be at fault shows how he can be calculating when…