| This study reinterprets the character of Hamlet in the context of linguistic trickery. The perspectives employed by Hamlet are, in fact, primarily linguistic in origin. By using the theory of containment and subversion, the study discusses the linguistic elements in Hamlet to examine the trickster motif in the play, and suggests ways in which linguistic trickery contributes both to the development of character and the subversion of narrative. The study discusses how rhetorical perspective as a disjunctive device relates Hamlet's character to the text in order to subvert and destabilize it. This pattern not only reflects upon the contents of the play, but also upon the reader's act of viewing or reading it. There is a sense that the reader too is implicated in the issues of language and the instability of the text that the tragedy itself dramatizes, and in which Hamlet's problem becomes the reader's problem too. |
