Welcoming Unresolved
Ambiguity
in the English Language?
To avoid dishonour as a Crown Prince and heir to the Danish Crown, Prince Hamlet must adopt a stance of “armed
struggle” directed against “the troubles” created by the new regime’s accession through outrageously unconstitutional
and treasonous means. In terms of these massive “troubles,” so momentous and extensive as to be comparable to an
entire ocean, only a revolutionary stance of radical opposition and insurrectionary action will be sufficient to “end them.”
Only such political action will be sufficient to restore constitutional legitimacy to the recently corrupted and now “rotten”
state of Denmark.
Given his indecisive personality, Prince Hamlet’s alternative option is to simply accept that he must suffer from the
‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ arising from:
1/. His cowardly refusal to immediately honour this solemn oath to his dead father.
2/. To take political responsibility befitting his status as Crown Prince of Denmark who has been cheated out of his
birthright by the murderous action of his uncle, Claudius, and his mother, Queen Gertrude.
1b/. An Existentialist Alternative Interpretation
What we will now do is to contrast two incompatible interpretations of this verse.
1a. A Securitised Interpretation of Hamlet’s Rebellious “Call to
Arms”
For us, relative to our concerns for security-related issues,
this statement relates primarily to Prince Hamlet’s indecision and
equivocation in the face of the oath he made to the ghost of his
father, the former King, to overthrow the covertly treasonous King
Claudius who reportedly murdered his elder brother, Hamlet’s
father. This involved pledging– through an act of political assassination and regicide – to re-assert his status as “the one true
sovereign” head of the Danish state. For the Prince, his
long-planned regicide will require him to overcome and remedy a
whole “sea of woes” that have arisen following Claudius’ act of
regicide and hasty marriage to Queen Gertrude, his mother.
It is common in English language and literature courses for teachers to be asked by students for a rule or principle
to finally resolve, in a definitive once and for all manner, two rival and incompatible interpretations of a specific idiom or
work of literature for example.
Extract One: Hamlet
Let’s take a famous verse from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an illustration, namely, a famous popular soliloquy from
this play, to help illustrate our argument here:
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question: / Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune / Or to take arms and arrows against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing end them./ To die to
sleep / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is air to.
'Tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished. To die--to sleep. / To sleep--perchance to dream, ay there's the rub!”1
35 Tower D Tutor - 毛力成 卷來卷去多沒意思,不如做點喜歡的事情!