translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065 - 3514
(2008) Year I, Issue 1
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru and Floriana Popescu (First volume)
Proceedings of the Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
9 – 11 October 2008 “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, ROMANIA
pp. 29 - 37
IMAGERY OF DEATH IN HAMLET
Raluca Galiţa
University of Bacău, Romania
Hamlet was written at about the midpoint of Shakespeare’s
playwriting career. The essential donné of Hamlet’s story came to
Shakespeare from Saxo through Belleforest: a king who is murdered by his
brother is to be avenged by his son. The theme of revenge is thus central to
the play and it is linked to the imagery of death, which is dominant.
The word image encompasses any kind of simile; by using it, a poet or
prose writer illustrates, illuminates and embellishes his thought.
(Spurgeon, 1952: 34) It may be a description or an idea which arouses
emotions and associations in the reader’s mind, thus transmitting
something of the depth and richness of the way the writer views what he
tells in the text.
The images Shakespeare uses are so rich and vivid that, in the human
world of his plays, they form a second world. Shakespeare’s choice of an
image or simile at a given moment in a play is determined more by the
dramatic issues arising out of that moment than by his individual
sympathies.
In Hamlet, the image of death is introduced from the very beginning,
in Act I, once the old king Hamlet’s Ghost appears. In the plot, this
appearance serves no rational purpose, since the murder of king Hamlet
was unwitnessed. In Saxo’s story, the murder of the king was public.
Hamlet witnessed it and feigned madness to avoid being killed as a
possible avenger of his father. As the murder was committed in the open,
there was no need for a ghost to give an account of it. Later on, the ghost
was introduced in the plot and its role was to inform Hamlet about the
secret murder. Hamlet did not witness the murder, so there was no need to
feign madness. Yet Shakespeare preserves both motifs: the ghost and
madness. They intensify the idea and image of death.
It is not only the Ghost’s presence, but also his words that suggest the
idea of death, as the dead king tells his son how he was killed:
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
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