More Hamlet.

It is getting increasingly difficult to write academic blogs. The thought, the topic, it is just not there. Hamlet is discussed so frequently, that there is little left to analyze. Ophelia kills herself (or is drowned by someone, the answer is not quite clear), Hamlet is sent to England, where he is to be killed by the King. Oh, but wait, the plan changes. He is to be killed by Laertes, who is getting revenge on his fathers’ (Polonius) death, by stabbing him with a fencing sword with poison on it. That cannot be the only plan though, no, it has to become more complicated and full-proof than that. Once Hamlet begins to sweat and is parched, a servant (or whomever), is to give him a chalice with some sort of liquid, and in it, poison. Perhaps it cliché, or perhaps it be under some other word, but Shakespeare only allows the majority to be stabbed or poisoned. Lesser characters, like Ophelia, get more outstanding deaths. The main characters receive generic deaths. Julius Caesar is stabbed, Macbeth stabbed by MacDuff, Romeo poisoned himself, and Juliet stabbed herself; (SPOILER) Hamlet will be poisoned by Laertes’ rapier, and confess his death as he is dying, just like every main character, in every play written by him. Oh Shakespeare, so very random deaths your characters die – not really. If I am a character, make me an unimportant one. I would wish to die as Ophelia had, in a non-generic Shakespearean death.