I’m doing a project and I can’t think of any instances in which "pride" is depicted. Any help is appreciated!
Hamlet’s father is proud. He compared himself to a "radiant angel."
GHOST (5,58,62)
But virtue, as it never will be moved,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage.
When Hamlet was possessed by his father’s spirit, he was proud:
HAMLET (3,1,134-135)
. . . . I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious
Fortinbras Sr was proud:
HORATIO (1,1,93-97(
. . . . Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear’d to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat
Fortinbras Jr was proud:
HAMLET (4,4,49-58)
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.
http://www.thyorisons.com/#Nutshell – Hamlet in a Nutshell
The title says it all: "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." Because he is Prince of Denmark he is not free to carve for himself. He is subject to the voice of Denmark – and that voice was sent from Hell to speak of horrors.
Hamlet, like all the other major characters, is untrue to himself. When he is himself, he is like Horatio, a student from Wittenberg. But as he said, "Horatio, or I do forget myself." He does forget himself. He erases himself and his humanist education (all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there) from his own brain and there in the book and volume of his brain he writes his father’s commandment (the voice of Denmark, sent from Hell to speak of horrors, to breathe contagion, unfolding the secrets of his prison-house that he was forbid to tell to mortal ears). Hamlet is from himself taken away.
When he is not "from himself taken away," Hamlet is a rational humanist scholar from Wittenberg. But Hamlet erases that side of himself from the book and volume of his brain and replaces it with the commandment of his warlike father. Thereafter all of Hamlet’s soliloquies are really debates between the warring sides of his divided soul. Hamlet is a valiant soldier of the spirit, fighting a desperate internal battle to defend the sovereignty of his soul.
In the "my thoughts be bloody" soliloquy:
Hamlet the scholar says,
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
But Prince Hamlet, the soldier-son of a warlike king scoffs at "thinking too precisely on the event" and concludes:
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
A gravedigger was hired on the very day that Hamlet emerged from his mother’s womb, which was the same day his father put old Fortinbras into the womb of earth (his grave), thus acquiring land "that was and is the question of these wars" and which was Hamlet’s inheritance, figuratively a graveyard, not big enough to cover the dead from the impending war over that same land.
BERNARDO (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 121-124)
I think it be no other but e’en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
that was and is the question of these wars.
That is Hamlet’s dilemma – whether "TO BE OR NOT TO BE," like the Ghost, "so like the king THAT was and IS THE QUESTION of these wars."
Also please see
http://www.thyorisons.com/#Irony – God-like Reason Unused
http://www.thyorisons.com/#Terms_Compulsatory – Terms Compulsatory
For more on the false "pride" and "honor" of princes and kings, please listen to
"When Princes Meet," written and sung by Tom Paxton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8HSqVBVSY0
thank you!