Hamlet:

Patterns of Imagery I

Imagery is defined as language that appeals vividly to the senses, particularly

sight. Language that paints an evocative picture using images. Often, this language is

linked to an idea, and in this way becomes figurative or symbolic. An example would be

how all the vivid language depicting blood and bloodiness that is used in Macbeth is

linked to the idea of guilt and how murder cannot be forgotten or forgiven or "washed"

away": the murderer will pay for it, by way of both inside torment and revengers'

retribution. Also, in literary studies we are interested in how writers set up image

patterns: not one or two but many uses of similar images that help structure the work

and develop an important idea within it.

a) The pattern of disease imagery in Hamlet.

Important to Hamlet is the idea that Denmark was once a healthy state but is now

sick, corrupted state, like a browning apple with a worm in it. Guardsman Marcellus sets

the tone early in the play by stating "something is rotten in the state of Denmark". The

reason for this is that its court has been infected with various forms of sinfulness and

destructive behaviour, starting off with the new king's murderous, fratricidal treachery

and his lust, along with the queen's sexual disloyalty. Later, adding to the corruptive

decay is Hamlet's wildness, rashness and ruinous inability to act, Laertes' too-easily-

manipulated thirst for quick satisfaction in revenge and Rosencrantz and Guildenstem's

duplicitous betrayal of their boyhood friend. By the end the court is so diseased and

rotten that all the deaths at the end almost seem like a bloodletting, the method doctors

used at the time to try to rid a body of disease (let the tainted blood flow out of it).

Also, in Hamlet's eyes the world and the people in it (especially women) have

gone from seeming healthy and pure to sick and corrupted. In his eyes, the world has

fallen, like a garden blasted with blight. This is reflected in his many uses of disease

imagery. But Shakespeare puts images of sickness and corruption into the mouths of

other characters to, finally driving home with vivid overall effect the idea that here is a

fallen court whose core is being eaten away, as if by a worm or a pestilence, by the sinful,

destructive, corrupt, fallen behaviour of the play's main characters, especially Claudius.

Here's a list of lines in the play where disease imagery occurs:

I, ii, 130-l36: Hamlet says his body and the world are contaminated.

I,

iii,

38-42: Laertes says spring flowers (young women) are especially in danger of

getting infected (by sexual "stain").

I, iv, 23-36: Hamlet says that men who are in all other ways good can be corrupted by

one vicious defect that undoes them.

I, iv, 90: Marcellus states "something is rotten in the state of Denmark"

I, v, 64-73: the Ghost describes the poison's effect as a wickedly vivid kind ofleprosy.

II, ii, 181-185: Hamlet gruesomely links mother's bodies with dead, putrefying dogs and

the children that are bred from them with maggots.