Hamlet Paper - How Is Hamlet a Play About the Lack of Knowledge?

1. Basic response: first in your own words, how is Hamlet a play about the lack of knowledge?

In Hamlet, there are many plots and different characters have different purposes. The unknowing information blinds people’s eyes and misleading teases the fates, many tragedies and one revenge caused by that. The play shows the theme of lack of knowledge by revealing the changes happened on those roles.

1. Finding and developing examples. Your assignment for this paper is to analyze Hamlet and another work using a theme that's the opposite of knowledge. Knowledge has many meanings: truth, certainty, and understanding, to name a few. The idea of ignorance (not knowing) does too: falseness, lies, deception, mistakes, uncertainty, incomplete knowledge, mystery, misunderstanding, and more. Identify and explain three examples from the play that would be appropriate to discuss in this paper. Which of these anti-knowledge ideas does each example illustrate? How? 

1. False information happens in the play a lot of times, and it usually misleads characters towards the destination of their own life. Like Ophelia, she didn’t know that Hamlet was acting madly on purpose. The true and complex reason that Hamlet killed her father is unknown to her. Judging by appearance, she became mad and ended up her life.
2. The same theme is also contained in the scene where the queen drunk the wine that Claudius gave to Hamlet. She didn’t realize how vicious King Claudius was. She was misguided by his gallant behaviors, so she was drowned in his flattery and elaborate sweet words and ended up die in the plot that Claudius planed to kill her only son.
3. But think in other way, the misleading also can be considered as a good strategy. Hamlet pretended himself mad to protect himself from people’s suspicions; cover up his anxious; confuse the enemies to get the change of revenge; with the help of madness, he can let off steam.

3. Looking for a second work to compare Hamlet to. Identify and describe another work that you might use for this paper. If you have two or three ideas, list them all. Remember, the second work can be anything, really, as long as its content works with this theme. How does the work you chose treat a non-knowledge theme that Hamlet does too? 

The second work: Fargo (TV vision), Season 1.

The whole season mainly is about the change of a nobody and coward-Lester Nygaard. He was an insurance seller. After enlightened by the slippery killer-Lorne Malvo, he was readily assimilated. The ideas Lorne instill in his head are totally solecistic and run counter to the convention. The erosion of morality and ethics finally turns Lester to a different person. He disposed his wife’s body and her remains; resisted to the people who bullied him; opened a company; won the Beast Seller Award and married the most beautiful woman in his company. He turns his position from prey to predator. But in the end, he couldn’t escape the justice but paid for his sins.

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