ENG1400 essay. compare and contrast essay between 2 stories, the question attached below. NO EXTERNAL SOURCES please. CITATION FROM THE BOOKS IS NECESSARY. Attached below are the stories as well. PLAG

Act 4

In this act we see Hamlet sent away on a boat (to England, though he never arrives there), and we see the death of Ophelia.

Hamlet’s attitude changes dramatically in Act 4. We see him being very silly, and very nihilistic. Let’s keep in mind that he has just killed Polonius accidentally, so now Hamlet has real blood on his hands. Because he has killed Polonius, it is now harder for Hamlet to kill Claudius. He will either 1) be seen as a dangerous madman 2) as a dangerous politician. In either scenario things won’t end well for Hamlet. He’ll be sent away as a lunatic and prevented from ever taking the throne, or, more likely, he will be hanged himself for being a deadly usurper. These impossible situations combined with the moral guilt of having killed a man cause Hamlet to start to see human life and existence as utterly purposeless. He becomes a materialist, not in the sense that he is “materialistic” and likes fancy things, but that he comes to hold the position that the material world is all there is. That a human life, after all, is nothing more than a collection of molecules that have found it convenient to form a living body, temporarily. But that since all we are is matter, then we don’t really matter. In Act 4, Hamlet considers the possibility that humans have no souls. That when we die the only thing that happens is that our bodies decay, and become earth again. Hamlet does more than consider this possibility. In Act 4 he holds it as truth.

When captured and brought before Claudius, the king asks Hamlet where Polonius is. “At supper,” he responds. “At supper? Where?” says an exasperated Claudius.

No where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end. (4.3.18-25)

Here Hamlet outlines his materialistic view of humanity. We eat creatures. And then we get eaten. Kings and beggars are the same: both will be food for worms.

Hamlet is almost giddy at the thought that humanity has no inherent value. If we really are just dust, just a body, then what does it matter if it’s alive or dead? What does it matter if it’s a king or a beggar? What does it matter if it’s a right or wrong? If we are just dust, just molecules, then there is no right or wrong. If we’re just molecules, then we’re the same as a worm, or a potato, or a pile of dirt. And what kind of right or wrong can a pile of dirt do? There is a genuine freedom in adopting a fully material point of view towards life and death. It may be a nihilistic freedom, but it liberates one from the agony of morality and responsibility all the same.

In Act 4 we also see Ophelia die. Her death is caused in large part by the role she was encouraged to play as a young woman. If you remember, both her brother and her father kept repeating that she wasn’t smart enough or capable enough of handling adult sexual situations (see course notes part 1). Ophelia essentially gave her voice and her agency over to her father, to be controlled by him. Why? Because she is a good girl, and that is what good girls, do: they listen to their fathers. But Ophelia’s father told her that she doesn’t know who she is, and Ophelia’s brother told her that who she is someone whom she can’t control, and must fear. In Act 4 Ophelia’s father is dead, killed by her ex-boyfriend, whom, she believes, she drove insane by rejecting (worst. breakup. ever.). Without her father’s guiding voice, Ophelia is lost. Worse, she feels that it is her own inability to handle adult sexuality that has caused Hamlet to lose his mind, which has in turn caused him to kill her father, which has, in turn, caused her to have no person to guide her. Her madness is expressed in her inability to express herself. She communicates by singing snippets of songs, and in that way tries to express herself. She has no voice of her own, because her father told her that her voice was silly, naïve, and wrong.

Two of the songs Ophelia sings are about a young girl losing her virginity. We have a few options for interpretation here. The first is that Ophelia really did have sex with Hamlet, and that here she is admitting to it. The second is that Ophelia has internalized what Laertes has said about her: that she is somehow an always-already ruined virgin. If this is the case, then she needn’t have actually slept with Hamlet to believe herself to have lost her virginity, because as her brother told her, it was an inevitability from the start.

The act ends with Ophelia drowning – even her death is entirely passive, as if she just experiences it as something that happens to her. Her brother returns from France, and vows to take revenge on Hamlet for his father’s and sister’s deaths.

Act 5

Hamlet returns. This happens because he was attacked by pirates. Yes, that’s right. There is a pirate attack in the play. Hamlet returns to Elsinore castle to confront Claudius. He still doesn’t kill him outright because there is a lot to figure out regarding how he should kill the sitting king without getting hanged himself for the crime. In the end, it is Claudius and Laertes’s own treachery that causes Claudius to die. And Hamlet, and Laertes, and Gertrude.

In Act 5 scene 1 Hamlet and Horatio come across a gravedigger as they make their way back to the castle. Unbeknownst to Hamlet, the grave being dug is for Ophelia.

The conversation between the gravedigger and Hamlet draws out some interesting themes. When Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull in his hands, he literally comes face to face the reality of material death. And he is revolted by it. “Pah!” he says, as he throws the skull to the ground. As he then talks to Horatio, Hamlet outlines the same cycle of redistributed matter as he discussed in Act 4, but here there is a difference in tone, in philosophy. In Act 4 Hamlet found the meaninglessness of life freeing: if everyone is nothing more than physical matter, then who cares what we do? But here Hamlet gives dignity to the decayed bones of the dead by describing what they might have done during life. That is, he finds meaning in the roles and the tasks of living itself. This is why he lists off jobs like courtier, lawyer, land-buyer, politician. For Hamlet life suddenly has meaning and purpose. How? How did this change come about?

We must trace Hamlet’s thought process throughout the text. In the first three acts Hamlet feels oppressed by Fate, by Fortune. By the tyranny of cause and effect. He rails against Fate/Fortune throughout the first three Acts. (see 2.2 225-235, 2.2.484-88, and especially 3.1.57-65). Hamlet gets the player king to say: “Our wills and fates do so contrary run / That our devices still are overthrown; / Our thoughts are ours, their ends none our own” (3.2.199-201). This means that no matter try to do, what our plans are, what we aim for, our Fate will come in and mess it all up horribly. And if that is the case, then why bother doing anything at all? After all, things will just get messed up because of one’s Fate anyway.

In Act 4, as we saw, Hamlet thinks that maybe life isn’t directed by the irrational forces of Fate, but simply governed by material reality.

In Act 5, something different enters the mix. “Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well / When our dear plots do pall; and that should teach us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.8-11); “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.166-7). What do these lines point to? In Act 5 Hamlet suddenly shifts his perspective to a belief in God. “Divinity” and “Providence” lead us there. For Hamlet, there is a difference between Fate/Fortune and Providence. Fate is the irrational workings of cause and effect. Things happen just because they happen. There is no meaning to Fate, and no purpose behind it. Purpose things will just happen to you. But Providence means there is a Will behind it, a plan. And for Hamlet the idea that there is a purpose to what is happening to him allows him to act decisively and without hesitation – at last.

This doesn’t mean that the play itself endorses what is essentially a theological view. It means that the character Hamlet, after taking the positions of a fatalist and then a material nihilist, finds that the only way he can act is when he believes there is a purpose for his life. Why act if Fate/Fortune control everything? Why act if you’re just a bunch of molecules, the same as a pile of dirt? But if there is an intelligent will behind the things that happen in this world, then one’s actions might be meaningful – even if tragic. Hamlet’s belief in “divinity” doesn’t mean that things go well. Quite the opposite! But it means that he believes he is part of a larger plan, and that that plan is purposeful, even if his role in it is to die quickly and painfully.

But the play as a whole ends not with Hamlet dying, but with Fortinbras entering the castle with his army. This is a more ambiguous ending. It could mean that all of Hamlet’s thinking and worrying are themselves meaningless: the person who really wins in the life is the one with the biggest army. But of course army generals and kings all die, too, and get swallowed up in the anonymity of death and history. What purpose do they play? Or it could mean that Hamlet was deluded at the end when he believed in purpose: after all, he is about to die tragically. Or it could mean that every person has a part to play in the great, great story of human history. So that even a young girl’s death, Ophelia’s, will determine the course of nations.

Unlike Oscar Wilde whose story says, basically, that even if there is meaning in the world, we will never know what that is (like never knowing the mind of rooster), Shakespeare’s character Hamlet seems to think that even though we might never know what the meaning in the world it, it is by a reasonable, intelligent power greater than us. It is this belief that allows Hamlet to finally accept his role as king and as avenging son. He isn’t playing a part for nobody, as Sir Simon does, but playing the part he was born to, because his birth has meaning.

The irony here is that Wilde’s short story is a comedy and Shakespeare’s a tragedy. Wilde seems to suggest that since meaning is unattainable, one may as well dress up in outrageous costume, play a bunch of roles, pour that glass of champagne, and enjoy this comically short life, since it doesn’t matter anyway. Shakespeare seems to suggest that life does matter tremendously, but that the part we are born to play is tragic, our relationships will be painful and our role in life is likely going to end before we ourselves are ready to exit the stage. For Wilde, Reality is a rooster. For Shakespeare, it is an intelligent, if unknowable, divinity.