Hamlet Siddhartha and Little Gidding Term Paper

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Shakespeare's Hamlet and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha meet the words Eliot's "Little Gidding"

One of T.S. Eliot's most famous poetic protagonists, that of J. Alfred Prufrock, may lament that he is not Prince Hamlet, only a fool like Yorick or Polonius of the tragedy that bears the prince's name. But a closer examination of Shakespeare's play highlights the fact that the noble Prince Hamlet, is not really so noble at all, but begins the play in a state of adolescent moodiness, mourning his dead father, even though in the words of his uncle Claudius "your father lost a father, and your father lost his." Hamlet begins the play, not a young anointed king-to-be but a man angered at the limited, fleshy nature of human existence as well as the dissatisfactory reconstruction of his own family.

Hamlet sees falseness wherever he goes. He sees his mother whom once followed like "Niobe, all tears" his father's funeral procession, now wed again, and to "mine uncle." ("Hamlet," Act I, Scene 2) Hamlet perceives not simply personal animosity in these acts and attitudes, but a reflection of a larger human social evil, namely the purposeless of existence, where a good king's memory can be easily erased and forgotten.

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Thus the intense dissatisfaction within Hamlet exists not only with the court and his family but also with the general nature of human life, a "stale promontory," Hamlet famously states to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Later, contemplating Yorick's skull in the graveyard before the suicide Ophelia's funeral, he realizes that even Caesar's existence, not only his father's ended in death and dust. It is this fact that spurs Siddhartha the Buddha to form his philosophy of "Let be," in Hamlet's words, or nonattachment to worldly achievement and success.

Eliot's Fourth Quatrain "Little Gidding." echoes these two adolescents' respective senses of anger with the nature of their personal lives and the meaningless of the larger human condition. There are, as often in Eliot's poetry, literal illusions to events in Shakespearean tragedy. "If you came at night, like a broken King," writes Eliot in "Little Gidding." But the thought of this supposed king is ultimately revealed only "a shell" or a "husk of meaning" much like how the seemingly unerring purpose of revenge in Hamlet does not come to drive the hero, as he increasingly becomes buffeted by events and his will is worn….....

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