Hamlet, by Willian Shakespeare

      The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness – from overwhelming grief to seething rage – and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.

 

INFLUENCE OF THE BOOK

 

Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature. As such, it reverberates through the writing of later centuries. Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play.

 

In the 1920s, James Joyce managed "a more upbeat version" of Hamlet—stripped of obsession and revenge—in Ulysses, though its main parallels are with Homer's Odyssey. In the 1990s, two women novelists were explicitly influenced by Hamlet. In Angela Carter's Wise Children, To be or not to be is reworked as a song and dance routine, and Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince has Oedipal themes and murder intertwined with a love affair between a Hamlet-obsessed writer, Bradley Pearson, and the daughter of his rival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crime and punishment

Crime and Punishment  is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is the first great novel of his "mature" period of writing.

 

 

 

 

The book focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a worthless vermin. He also commits this murder to test his own hypothesis that some people are naturally capable of such things, and even have the right to do them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov justifies his actions by connecting himself mentally with Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.

 

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BOOK

 

Raskolnikov's dreams have a symbolic meaning, which suggests a psychological view. The dream of the mare being whipped has been suggested as the fullest single expression of the whole novel, symbolizing gratification and punishment, contemptible motives and contemptible society, depicting the nihilistic destruction of an unfit mare, the gratification therein, and Rodion's disgust and horror, as an example of his conflicted character.

 

Also, the place where the novel takes place has a special symbolism: Saint Petersburg. The above opening sentence of the novel has a symbolic function: Russian critic Vadim K. Kozhinov argues that the reference to the "exceptionally hot evening" establishes not only the suffocating atmosphere of Saint Petersburg in midsummer but also "the infernal ambience of the crime itself". Dostoyevsky was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life and imagery drawn from the city.

 

 

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

 

 

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow. He was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died suddenly in 1837, when he was 15, and around the same time he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute.

 

In the following years, Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and, later, A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages and have sold around 15 million copies. Dostoyevsky influenced a multitude of writers, from Anton Chekhov and James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre.

 

 

 

 

 

CALIGULA By Albert Camus

Caligula is a play written by Albert Camus, begun in 1938 (the date of the first manuscript being 1939) and published for the first time in May 1944 by Éditions Gallimard. Its plot revolves around the historical figure of Caligula, a Roman Emperor famed for his cruelty and seemingly insane behavior.

Caligula, a relatively kind prince at the beginning, but later on he is told about the death of Drusilla, his sister and his mistress, and he realises that "men die and they are not happy." Therefore, obsessed by the quest for the Absolute and poisoned by contempt and horror, he tries to exercise, through murder and systematic perversion of all values, a freedom which he discovers in the end is no good. He rejects friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes the word of those around him, he forces them to logic, he levels all around him by force of his refusal and by the rage of destruction which drives his passion for life.

But if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, true to his logic, makes arrangements to arm those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors. Unfaithful to man, loyal to himself, Caligula consents to die for having understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free in opposition to other men.

The play was later the subject of numerous revisions. It was part of what the author called the "Cycle of the Absurd", with the novel The Stranger (1942) and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). A number of critics have reported the piece to be existentialist; however, Camus always denied belonging to this philosophy.

There is also a film based in this play. It was directed directed by Tinto Brass and starring by Malcolm McDowell, here is the trailer:

The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” 

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

 The Picture of Dorian Gray is verily Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece – a book that deals with so many things, and in such subtle yet intricate detail and with such a force, that one is left wondering about the integrity of one’s opinion after having read the entire novel. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.”Dealing with things in ever-double shades, of both a subjective and objective viewpoint, and through both art and faith, Wilde’s work has a jostling affect on the reader. He constructs a typical modern man’s life which is based upon a mode of existence vested entirely in subjective experiences and divorced of anything otherwise. A hedonism that is both very dark yet very attractive, very pleasant and enticing – a religion of faithlessness  that removes all limits, save those of one’s mortality, and even they are pushed the farthest with the fictitious character of Dorian Gray whose exuberant youth never withers. 

What adds the tinge of deliciousness to the pages are Lord Henry’s dialogues, him being undoubtedly one of the wittiest characters I have read of and who utters most of the sentences which are then to become eternal ‘golden quotes’ of Wilde, to be quoted and re-quoted in fiction magazines and essays. Being a hedonist who wouldn’t accept even the very brand, Henry is a befitting example of one who consumes himself entirely in pleasure, even when restrained and somewhat refined. He refuses to belong to any faction, of any nature whatsoever, and lives life at the whim – ‘living in the moment’ to quote the popular cliché.

Wilde quite beautifully depicts the dullness of the persistence, even of the most exquisite pleasures, and through that, provides the best argument against hedonism itself – but he seems more inclined to give the ruling in the hedonist’s favor, conceding with the proper sentence that life would be but worthless without such joys, such wonders, such passionate undertakings and sinful indulgences as had been committed by Dorian Gray. In a way, he expounds both the argument and the counter-argument side-by-side until each is consumed by the other and their product, Gray, is consumed by their contest.

Around 20 movies and plays have been made based on this indispensable classic. 

If you have enjoyed and understood this piece of literature, you won´t lose your time reading other literary pieces of work by Oscar Wilde, as The Phantom Of Canterville.