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  • Essay / Analyzing William Shakespeare's Hamlet Through a Postcolonial Lens

    “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?” » (Hamilton). You and I, we both cry, we both bleed, and we both die. One of the critical lenses that most piqued my interest when reading William Shakepeare's Hamlet was the postcolonial lens, particularly due to the play's parallelization with Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. This lens is relevant to Hamlet because it highlights the abuse of political power, injustice, and conspiracy; as a result, these factors fuel Hamlet's desire for revenge without regard for justice in killing Claudius. In comparison, Hamilton is a commentary on America's past through the lens of America's present that uses a cast of African Americans and Latinos to tell its own story. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay Therefore, using Hamilton as a catalyst to explain Hamlet through a postcolonial lens, it allows me to understand how Hamlet's desires are influenced by his “like a slave” by a higher power. In other words, I view Hamlet's speech, actions, and words as an attempt to avenge his father's death as a result of the ethical dilemma unfolding in his head. In “Can We Talk About Race in Hamlet?” ", author Peter Erickson addresses the idea of ​​race in Hamlet and argues that "the greater capacity given to race in Jacobean culture does not mean that race was completely absent under Elizabeth...thus in keeping with her Elizabethan background , only touches obliquely and its racial discourse thus remains latent, implicit.” However, I argue that there is a way to visibly link Hamlet to race and I have discovered an interpretation of Hamlet that features an all-black cast similar to that seen in Hamilton, and so my own perspective on Hamlet has been cast in a new light. Peter Erickson asks two questions. “How do we define race for the purposes of this investigation? Is there a historically valid concept of race that can be applied to Hamlet? Erickson uses the essays of PEH Hair and Robin Law and David Richardson from Oxford History of the British Empire and uses their ideas and approaches in his essay on Hamlet, including British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. The two ethnic references that Erickson focuses on in his postcolonial analysis are Hamlet's parenthetical phrase "if the rest of my fortune becomes Turkish with me" and when Hamlet compares his real father to Claudius: "Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed yourself, / And lattes on this moor? ". Additionally, both quotes carry racial overtones; Hamlet's minor mention to Turk and Moor is symbolic of whiteness. In “Can We Talk About Race in Hamlet?” Erickson argues that "the association of whiteness and vulnerability is one of the underlying motifs dramatized in Hamlet." Whiteness is accessible as a lost and irrecoverable ideal. It is to this same ideal that Claudius actively participates. “At the heart of the first act’s climax is a horrific disfigurement of white identity that makes loss of stature a matter of skin condition.” On the other hand, the notion of white identity is further catapulted by Hamlet's hypothesis that his father's murderer is black: the robust Pyrrhus, the one whose sandy arms, black as objective, resembled the night, when he lay on the menacing horse, Hath now, that fearful, black complexion was smeared with more mournful heraldry. Moreover,.