Health Care and Ethics Term Paper

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Shakespeare's Hamlet, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Saxo Grammaticus's The Historia Danica have so many points of resemblance that it is hard to comprehend that these three stories were written by three separate writers. The stories of Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy introduce to the audience a theme of revenge and hatred. The plots found in Hamlet are very much similar to The Historia Danica. Hence, Shakespeare's Hamlet contains an allegory and this suggests that Shakespeare was very well aware of the astronomical revolutions of his time and the time before him. All three novels enjoy the essence of dramatizing the triumph of the heroes of the plays towards the end.

In The Spanish Tragedy, the villain makes use of murder to fulfill his evil motives. He very much acknowledges that the "end justifies the means" (Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy). The villain successfully hides his evil from the world and deludes to be innocent, even though he is not. The two traits that Shakespeare seems to have taken from The Spanish Tragedy are ruthlessness and hypocrisy. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has attempted to assign the same ruthless and conniving nature in his coxcomb, fawning courtier named Osric. Both the villains of Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy seem to have the dissenter take the form of a Renaissance man, who is faced with the problem of avenging a crime. The dissenter in Hamlet is asked a question by Hamlet,

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 against a sea of troubles

And by doing so end them (William Shakespeare, The Hamlet).

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Similarly in The Spanish Tragedy, the old retaliator named Hieronimo, while holding a dagger and a noose says,

This way or that way? Soft and fair, not so:

For if I hang myself, let's know

Who will revenge Horatio's murder then? (Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy).

Shakespeare in Hamlet has followed the same tragedy of the villain from The Spanish Tragedy i.e. The prime dilemma of retaliating tragedy. In Hamlet the audience experiences that the characters of the novel either accepted what fate gave them or took the matters their own hands and actively ended them. Through the process of finding the solution to a problem, the malcontent was led to extreme circumstances and later became an avenger.

Shakespeare's villain greatly resembled the villain of The Spanish Tragedy in the sense that he knew that killing was wrong, but it was also wrong to go on living even if the killer was still alive. This carnality of not killing someone else often led to the fervor to kill oneself, to retreat from the previous dilemma. This, however, originated another problem i.e. people who killed themselves did not end up getting proper funerals, and therefore did go to heaven. Hieronimo and Osric both show this dilemma. Hence, the drama in both The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet is based upon the theme of seeking revenge. Shakespeare's Hamlet has adopted Kyd's style of construction of the play. There also exist similarities in the fabrication such as presence of….....

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