Hamlet

Set against the shifting cultural/ontological parameters of the Elizabethan Era, Shakespeare's Hamlet manipulates Kydian Revenge tragedy in an attempt to rationalise the philosophical and theological uncertainties of the playwright's changing/evolving world.

This conflict resonates through the dramatic representation of the eponymous figure's struggle to reconcile with/navigate  .......... and...... (put main words of question here)

, .finding resolution in the final act, allowing Shakespeare to advocate his own philosophical response to the inconstancy of the human experience.

Emerging from the Renaissance Humanists' response to the moral and ethical absolutes of the Medieval Christian world, Shakespeare's Hamlet reflects a contemporary theological and philosophical search for moral clarity in the [shifting ontological paradigm] of the Elizabethan world of the 15th and 16th C, through his dramatization of the central protagonist's struggle /to reconcile the moral absolutes of Christian orthodoxy with a powerful impulse for personal punitive retribution/with the moral ambiguities of his contemporary world.

 This conflict  between faith and autonomous/individual will is foregrounded in Hamlet's 'Too too solid flesh' soliloquy, where the relational dialectic between orthodox Christian [moral] convention of the 'Everlasting… canon' and his own desire for 'self-slaughter' foreshadows the eponym's central dilemma of a personal impulse for revenge/retribution restrained by the convention of Christian dogma/doctrine. Accentuated by  the ongoing  biblical allusions to the Holy sacrament, Nicene Creed  and Judgement day , the 'purging of the soul' and 'salvation'  and sin that permeate the text,  this disharmony/ tension   between hamlets  filial obligation and a   world ordered by divine providence  embodies  the philosophical and theological tension that shapes the dramatic  burden of the play, precipitating a protracted philosophical inquiry into the ontological and existential parameters of Hamlet's contemporary world.  Shakespeare situates this search in a world of indiscriminate failure ennui establishes the christian court as a metonym for duplicity, dishonestly and moral putrefaction …through an ongoing motif of moral decay, where sycophancy and artifice metaphorically “skin and film” the “rank corruption” of the Danish court that “infects unseen”. and to be “honest is to be one man in ten thousand”. Set against the eponyms search for moral truth, Shakespeare's manipulation of an  this unweeded garden of human iniquity littered with “things rank and gross in nature’ , where words of pretence 'rise up' but 'thoughts remain below', and the inky cloak of affection film the ulcer place and as corruption infest sunseens, exacerbate the inadequacies of / traditionally Christian treatment of sin  , challenge audiences perception of universal morality  and efficacy of moral absolutes in the increasingly secular world of late Renaissance England.

Reflecting the ongoing tension between the epistemological and ontological parameters of the contemporary world, Hamlet engages in a protracted process of philosophical inquiry in an attempt to rationalize the cognitive and moral uncertainties of the Elizabethan era. Hamlet’s disillusionment with the duplicity and artifice of the Danish Court precipitates a metaphysical inquiry into the futility of human endeavor, where he juxtaposes the assertion and denial will in his “to be or not to be” soliloquy. Challenging orthodox Christian representations of death, Hamlet manufactures an extended topographical metaphor, comparing the ambiguities of the afterlife to an “undiscovered country”, suggesting it this uncertainty of the shadow world that suffocates great action, reducing the native hue of resolution to the detritus of existential anxiety. Imbued with anxiety and stasis, Hamlet’s metaphorical allegory of human resolution “sickled over the pale cast of thought”,. emulates the deep anxieties felt in an era of religious and philosophical disorientation evoking the inscrutable and enigmatic world in which humans had to orient themselves for the first time.  Left unresolved, this uncertainty is part of an ongoing pattern of questioning that is woven into the fabric of the play. From the play’s opening scene through to Hamlet’s protracted examination of the world, asking “Am I a coward?”, “Are you honest?”, or “What is this quintessence of dust?”, these questions, Reflect a contemporary shift in hierarchical notions of salvation and virtue, emulating  contextual  societal and cultural tensions and a questioning of dominant Christian, religious dogma that had underpinned medieval society.  Culminating in Hamlet’s confrontation with Opheli, asking “What should fellows such as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” this curious groping and tapping of thoughts captures what  C.S Lewis describes as, the ‘essential conflict of the play and the element of Hamlet’s predicament, arguing it is this search for clarity and moral absolutes amidst the shifting existential and theological parameters of a changing world that defines the protagonist’s passage through the play.