Sample Hamlet Paper Intro.

Post date: Dec 04, 2015 4:7:30 PM

Here is a sample intro. It's not the only way to do it, but I don't think it's half bad. NOTE THAT I WAS NOT ABLE TO DOUBLE-SPACE THIS HERE, BUT IT SHOULD BE.

Mike Woodall

Mr. Woodall

Honors British Literature

9 April 2014

A Mommy’s Boy: Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex

The relationships between parents and children are often complicated and probably have been for as long as humans have had offspring. As children grow older, their reliance upon their parents changes, and their desire for independence often creates distance between them and their mothers and fathers. Sometimes, however, something goes wrong with this process of maturation, and a child’s development may be arrested. In William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, the reader or viewer encounters a man, supposedly thirty years old, who is faced with an almost unimaginable situation: His father has recently died, and his mother has wasted no time in remarrying—to his father’s brother. And then Hamlet receives the disturbing news, from his father’s ghost no less, that his stepdad/uncle is also his father’s murderer; Hamlet must not stand for this but should seek revenge. This revenge, however, takes many months and comes only when Hamlet himself is mortally wounded and dying. Scholars have speculated for centuries about the cause of Hamlet’s delay, but one theory, first proposed by the father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, is that Hamlet’s childhood emotional development failed to progress as it should have, and Hamlet is struggling with what Freud termed the Oedipus Complex.

The Oedipus Complex describes . . .