The Closet Scene

There is no doubt that while reading Hamlet you can find a very close link to current society. In the following paragraphs I would like to advance a personal interpretation of the famous extract The Closet Scene. I will focus the  attention on Hamlet’s behaviour and the words used to convey the opinion of Hamlet regarding his mother's choice.

First of all, it is important to highlight that the extract I am going to analyse is not a dialogue but a monologue because Hamlet does not allow his mother to reply.

The monologue starts providing a parallelism between the figure of Hamlet’s father and his uncle. In order to describe his father, Hamlet refers to mythological figures while in the case of his uncle Hamlet uses words belonging to the field of natural elements as mildew’d and moor. In doing so, Hamlet is providing a contrast between his father and his uncle on the semantic field, highlight the greatest of his father and how awful his uncle was in comparison. Hamlet uses the parallelism to make his mother understand what type of man she has married.

 Hamlet is making a comparison between his father and his uncle while looking at their portrait to highlight to his mother the differences between them. The parallelism starts in the first line using look here and then uses look you now. Hamlet describes his uncle as a  mildew’d ear that is infecting the country. Using the word mildew’d ear, Hamlet remembered to his mother that Claudius, his uncle and her current husband, killed his father putting a venom on his ears. Moreover, in line 11 and 12 Hamlet uses an anaphora with the aim to reinforce his thesis: his uncle is infecting all the country. Hamlet carries on his reasoning criticizing his mother incestuous behaviour using the verb to blast. Next he makes a question to her but he does not allow her to answer: his argumentation is so assertive. The question is rhetorical and this is a way to say “can you see the difference?”. Obviously for Hamlet the answer is evident but for his mother not.

Next, Hamlet compares his father to a fair mountain. Probably, he refers to the mountain because they are looking to the sky where God is and alludes to something fertile. On the other hand, his uncle is described as a moor, referring to something sterile. These metaphors emphasize the contrast that comes always more clear. Hamlet can not make sense of his mother behaviour and for this reason he condemns her using a sexual marked language. The violent language derivates from the rage. Hamlet is jealous of his mother because he cares more about his husband than his son. Hamlet is a teenager and as such he needs to be appreciated and not to be overshadowed.

Analysing the tragedy, the intelligent reader can easily see that the language used is from the renaissance era but the content is medieval. Therefore, there is an evident coherence because in the Middle Ages all physical actions were condemned as a mistake and Hamlet condemned his mother of incestuous behaviour.

To conclude, it can be said that Hamlet provides an efficient argumentation to explain in an indirectly way his jealousy towards his mother. His argumentations are based on the contrast between the two portraits and the language used is diversified: for his father Hamlet refers to mythological figures instead for his uncle he does not use an high-level language because he is not worth it according to Hamlet.