Renaissance And Hamlet Research Paper

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Imagine every fact that you know about the world with absolute certainty was proven to be false. One day, you found out that the earth was not the shape you have been told your entire life or maybe the earth doesn’t rotate in the same direction that you thought it did. You would be completely disoriented. This is exactly how the poets and writers felt after the Renaissance revolution. Many truths that they once knew for sure were destroyed by the science and culture of the Renaissance. They once believed that the earth was flat until Columbus proved to the world otherwise. Everybody once thought that the sun revolved around the Earth until Copernicus provided scientific evidence that disregarded that. This left the people of the Renaissance …show more content…
While the metaphysical poets embraced the rational and physical, characters like Hamlet portray the disorientation that the scientific revolution caused during this time. At the beginning of the play, Prince Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father who tells him that he was murdered by Hamlet’s Uncle, Claudius. Claudius had since seized the throne. After being visited by this ghost, Prince Hamlet is adamant that he is going to get revenge for his father. He says he is going to “wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past that youth and observations copied there, and thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain”(Shakespeare, Act 1 Scene 5). He wants to erase everything in his mind so the only thing he can focus on is getting revenge. However, when he does this he begins to show his instability and confusion. Prince Hamlet’s “native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” (Shakespeare, Act 3 Scene 1) He overthinks the situation so much that he disorients and confuses himself. He no longer knows what to do. The famous “To Be or Not to Be” speech in the play portrays exactly that. In this speech, Hamlet questions whether he should exist anymore or whether he should end his life. He is very unsure of himself and what he should do and goes back and forth between these two extremes because he is so disoriented. He symbolizes the early Renaissance man here because everything he thought he knew about himself gets put into question, the same way that everything an early- Renaissance man knew about the world is proved to be false. In this speech, Hamlet also mentions “the undiscovered country” which refers to the unknown after life. (Shakespeare, Act 3 Scene 1) This goes hand in hand with the medieval beliefs that one either goes to heaven or
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