Sunday 8 November 2009

What imagery is used in Act Three, scene one, during Hamlet's soliloquy in Shakespeare's Hamlet?

Images ()
express ideas primarily by using the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. 's , in
which he contemplates and rejects suicide as a solution to his troubles, is replete with
imagery.

visualizes his troubles--chiefly, what to do about avenging his
father's death--in physical terms, describing them as slings (meaning the rocks shot from a
sling shot) and arrows hitting him. If we think about the image, it's painful--who wants to be
shot with arrows or hit with stones? Hamlet, in other words, feels his mental anguish as
physical pain. He then visualizes his troubles as a "sea," meaning that they are large
and all encompassing, perhaps drowning him. 

In contrast to the pain of his
problems, Hamlet uses images of sleep to describe death. Like sleep, death is an escape from
pain, an oblivion. But then Hamlet realizes that death is different from sleep--it is not
oblivion, but a physical place, an "undiscovered country." Nobody returns from
this...


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