Hamlet -- Realism and imaginationRealism and imagination exist side by side and are equally present in the Shakespearean drama Hamlet? Let's examine the evidence from the work, along with literary critical opinion on this topic. In "Acts III and IV: Issues of Text and Staging" Ruth Nevo explains how "all things are opposite of what they seem" at a crucial moment in the story. the play: In the prayer scene and the wardrobe scene his [Hamlet's] tools are knocked over. His mastery is confounded by the inherent tendency of human reason to jump to conclusions, to fail to distinguish appearance from being. He, of all people, is trapped in the fatal and deceptive labyrinth of appearances that is the phenomenal world. Perhaps never has the finiteness of the mind been so dramatized as in the prayer scene and the wardrobe scene. Another motto of the Player King is wonderfully realized in the nexus of ironies that constitute the peripateia of the play: "Our thoughts are ours, their ends are not ours." In the sequence of events that follow Hamlet's elation at the success of the mousetrap and culminate in the death of Polonius, all things are the opposite of what they seem, and the action achieves the opposite of what was intended . Here, in the vicissitudes of the play, Hamlet's fatal error is represented, his fatal error of evaluation, which constitutes the crisis of the action, and is the directly precipitating cause of his own death, of seven other deaths and of madness. of Ophelia. (52) According to the best literary critics, realism is fundamentally “representing human life and experience” (Abrams 260). In the essay “An Explication of the Player's Speech” Harry Levin explains how the playwright achieves an “imitation of life” in his play:...... middle of paper......are. Np: Princeton University Press, 1972.Pitt, Angela. "Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies." Readings on tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Excerpted from Shakespeare's Women. Np: np, 1981.Rosenberg, Marvin. "Laertes: an impulsive but serious young aristocrat." Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from Hamlet's Masks. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1992.Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.htmlWest, Rebecca. “A Court and a world infected by the disease of corruption”. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.