Sample analysis of Hamlet, Othello and Oedipus

analysis of hamlet

Not a word about his uncle! The thirst for blood, engendered by the sight of his uncle's blenching eyes and blanched face, is there, but he appears now to be at a loss to account for it. For whom is this itching dagger intended? He is going to his mother. But surely he does not intend to murder her? He is no Nero. These murderous impulses must be kept in leash. True, she deserves the worst he can find it in his heart to say to her; she may even deserve death, but it is not for him to exact it. Is Hamlet's brain incapable of entertaining two objects at the same time?

literary analysis of hamlet

Yet he is full, of blood-lust; so that he may prove dangerous when he reaches the bedroom should he lose self-control. And if he were to encounter his uncle on the way, he would doubtless recollect and then be in the right mood for the deed of vengeance. He does. He finds him alone, defenceless, with his back towards him kneeling in prayer. "Now could I drink hot blood" he had declared a few minutes earlier; here is the opportunity; he is never likely to have a better. Shakespeare planned the encounter with consummate art.

analysis of huckleberry finn

The first thematic unit ends with the smashing of the raft by a steamboat. This incident also ended the writing of Huckleberry Finn for almost seven years. Mark Twain had written thus far in the summer of 1876; he apparently had no further plan, and when the raft was smashed, he stopped the book. Two years after he had shelved Huckleberry Finn, he wrote the 1878 letter to Howells, explaining that he felt himself unable to write successful satire because to do so calls for "a calm, judicial good humor." His trip down the river in 1882 to get material for Life on the Mississippi naturally recalled the river story to his mind. He must have then arrived at the design which made the book a masterpiece.

analysis of islam and the Koran

The origin of another Muslem practice is attributed to the Koran, which does not, however, contain a single word which refers to it: that is, Khitan, meaning circumcision. Snouck Hurgronje remarks judiciously, "For a large number of non-Muslems and the uneducated masses of Islam, abstention from eating pork and circumcision have become the criteria of Islam." Circumcision, which at the moment is a custom which is passing away in certain Muslem countries, was practised in pagan Arabia, as we know from its ancient poetry, rites and traditions. Madhabs (rites) do not agree exactly about the way it must be performed. In Java and Sumatra, it implies only excision.

analysis of julius Caesar

Another element that complicates the pattern of contrasts between the two worlds is the fact that certain qualities, such as cruelty and deceit, are shown to belong to both. For instance, Caesar's cruel treatment of Alexas has its counterpart in Antony's treatment of Thyreus and his offer concerning Hipparchus. The whole last act is given over to the contest between Caesar's guile and Cleopatra's, each determined to outwit the other. 'Policy' and duplicity is used just as much by Cleopatra in the service of Love as by Caesar in the service of the State. The truth is that Cleopatra is less Caesar's complete opposite than is Antony. It is Caesar's sister, Octavia, who is her opposite in every way.

analysis of langston hughes poems

Langston Hughes gave this concept expression when he said: "We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." It is rather self-consciously put, but it is a sign that Negroes had begun to recognize that there lay little hope for Negro art in imitating the white man, and particularly in trying to make Negroes act and talk like white people. Since the "New Negro" movement, which is well described by Alain Locke in a book of that title published in 1928, Negro writers have tried not only to present their speech and people realistically, but also to explore Negro experience other than that which results from racial prejudice and conflict.

analysis of Odysseus

In the battle, the Greeks win. Then Ajax and Odysseus quarrel, and Agamemnon intervenes. The second act consists of the trial, with long speeches, and a fine monologue by Ajax, madly threatening his enemies after the verdict. The character of Ajax here is Sophoclean, and the contrast with the sympathetic Ulysses is well sustained. After that we come to Sophocles. A dumb show of the mad Ajax adds a comic effect of horseplay with the ram. The arrival of the Chorus is the signal for fresh novelties. Four sailors recite the Latin anapaests, but a singing chorus follows, introducing Diana and the Eumenides, that is, raging hellish women of night,' who shake their snaky locks when the Chorus pray for pity.

analysis of Oedipus

Such disrespect for locality is no doubt half wilful: in King Lear itself a modern sensibility is aware of inner connection between the play's rushing mental life and the quite extraordinary vagueness of physical setting; the dignity and relevance -- to make a more general point -- of a man's coming to death are affronted by particularity and the mere material circumstance, and we decline to believe that finding the place may be no less important than, and only formally separable from, the dying there. But in the Oedipus at Colonus it is so.

analysis of Othello

Unfortunately, the compositor of the Folio text was careless. Compositor B was solely responsible for Othello and was very likely answerable for a number of Folio readings which are plainly but inexplicably wrong in the same flighty way that many of his readings in Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet are wrong (such as the substitution of 'kisses' for 'sighes' at I. iii. 159). At the same time, even if the Folio reading is clearly erroneous and the quarto's provides what the sense requires, it does not follow that the latter should be accepted, since the Folio may merely have garbled a correction intended by the collator.

analysis of Ophelia

That Hamlet undergoes a sea-change between his departure in Act Four and his return at the beginning of Act Five is fairly generally agreed (and this balances the change that takes place between the Ghost's revelation to Hamlet at the end of Act One and Hamlet's reappearance in Act Two, by which time the crucial interview with Ophelia has taken place off-stage and is only described to us). A. C. Bradley finds 'that kind of religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence, because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to be the will of Providence.