Hamlet Group

Question:

lacay
lacay
Student
High School - 12th Grade

Who is considered a soldier?

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Posted by lacay on Friday November 6, 2009 at 11:01 PM and tagged with hamlet.

Answers:


  1. jseligmann Teacher
    High School - 11th Grade

    eNotes Editor

    As the play begins, it is nighttime and very cold, and two named characters (Bernardo and Francisco) and two unnamed sentinels are on watch on a platform of the castle of Elsinore, Denmark. Francisco, who was just relieved by Bernardo exits after speaking only a few lines. We never see him again in the play.

    Strangely and ironically, the only other single soldier referred to in the play is Hamlet, who is not really a soldier. So we have Francisco on the first page of the play and dead Hamlet on the very last page, and the very last lines of the play, soldiers both.

    FORTINBRAS:

    Let four captains

    Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;

    For he was likely, had he been put on,

    To have proved most royal; and, for his passage,

    The soldiers' music and the rites of war

    Speak loudly for him.

    Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

    Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

    Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

    Fortinbras sees Hamlet as a soldier, for Hamlet fought valiantly against his own nature and for the soul of his suffering father.

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    Posted by jseligmann on Saturday November 7, 2009 at 5:50 PM