“Have more than you show, speak more than you know”, a quote from King Lear, written by the great man himself William Shakespeare, explaining how you may have lots but show little and you may not know a lot of things, but put forth that you do. Such as in Hamlet, the entire play is themed around dramatic irony and how you show more but the characters know less. This affects everyone in the play, and directly coincides with the madness of Hamlet. From Act 5 Scene 2 the quote “Let four captains/Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,/For he was likely, had he been put on,/To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage,/The soldiers music and the rite of war/ Speak loudly for him./Take up the bodies.
Such a sight at this/Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. /Go, bid the soldiers shoot” has a direct impact on the context of the whole play. It examines how Hamlet has changed to a “soldier”, how the plot changes and how the conflict of the play is challenged. All together these things and the quote both contribute to the theme of the play, which is madness, and the complexity of action. “To thine own self be true” is what we are taught yet it seems like hamlet wants the exact opposite. In the beginning of the play, Hamlet is seen as mad, and as we know in the beginning he exclaims to “put an antic disposition on” meaning he was going to act strangely, and by strangely he was meaning more mad than normal.
And somewhere in the play he seemed to actually turn mad, this goes along with all of the theories saying that Hamlet is mentally ill, to pretend to be mad and have been through what Hamlet has, with his father’s death and then being told by the ghost of his father to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther” meaning t. .inst the theme, it is a very subtle, easy quote to say, there is no hard words, or complexity involved. Almost to say that finally the complexity of the life of Hamlet is over. Hamlet changes dramatically throughout the entire play from a mad man to a soldier, from having the ambition to kill Claudius to actually doing it and of course having his madness affect the complexity of everything he does. All these things intertwined and greatly influenced by “Let four captains/Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,/For he was likely, had he been put on,/To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage,/The soldiers music and the rite of war/ Speak loudly for him.
/Take up the bodies. Such a sight at this/Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. /Go, bid the soldiers shoot”. Sometimes it’s not what you say that affects someone; it’s your actions that stick in a mind.
