Sunday, 23 January 2011

who for art thou claudius?

So, what are my impressions of claudius so far? NOT GOOD. He starts off with an excuse for his behaviour, 'though' which shows he's done something wrong and he goes on to say 'with remembrance of ourselves' which shows he's selfish as he's like 'ohh but let's not forget about ourselves even though my brother's just DIED'. We can tell already he isn't a good character as he talks about 'mirth in funeral', being happy at a funeral? That's just wrong. And he talks about eyes in a very odd way, ' an auspicious and a dropping eye' not only does this make him sound worryingly disfigured, it also symbolises one eye being happy and one eye being sad, which is evidently not a good thing, and your eyes going in opposite directions cannot be comfortable, can it? Claudius manipulates people with his words, with his long speech blabbing on for ages, with the underlying meaning that he actually doesn't care about his brothers death and he just proves he's self-interested by marrying his only recently dead brothers wife, who does that? Claudius is SO patronising it is unreal, 'that father lost his...filial obligation for some term', he's like, 'mate, everyone loses their dad, get over it', which is VERY patronising. But wait, it gets worse, he then starts to tell Hamlet his grief is 'unmanly', saying Hamlet is behaving like a woman for being sad that his father died. He says his mourning is 'incorrect to heaven' and 'a fault to heaven', he's saying Hamlet's grief is against God's will. This is ironic as he has just killed his brother so actually HE has gone against God's will, hypocrite. He then does something beautiful and kind, he says, oh Hamlet don't worry that your father has died, for I WILL BE YOUR NEW FATHER. Yeah, don't think Hamlet's going to like that. So basically Claudius is a hypocritical, patronising, generic villain who I dislike very much.

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