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Shakespeare's Hamlet As A Pilgrimage Of The Soul, Joyce Ahn

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study proposes a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a pilgrimage of the soul. There has been a consistent strain in Shakespeare scholarship which seeks to understand Hamlet and its peculiarly universal appeal in terms of its evocation of the human condition. Some examples of such commentary: Hamlet abounds in the disease imagery and is suffused with a mysterious sense of doom; it is the only play in Shakespeare with an explicit reference to Christmas; it evokes the medieval cycle plays which enacted the entire salvation history from the Creation of the world to the Last Judgment; and the play …