The Winds of Change_ Entry 1_ Week 6

People change all the time. It can happen in the blink of an eye, or can take place over the course of several years. People never remain the same- it is impossible. They just can’t.

Throughout Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, the characters struggle to deal with the death of a loved one by simply ignoring the incident and moving on with their life. Hamlet, however, seems unable to do so. He claims that his mother married too quickly, his uncle was too happy in fulfilling the role of the new king, and the kingdom of Denmark seemed to swiftly replace its brief time of mourning with that of drunken parties celebrating the nuptials of his Uncle Claudius and his mother Gertrude.

The Queen had changed her dark veil of grief to a white veil of happiness in order to feel loved again. Claudius quickly took on the role of King and father to Hamlet so as to feel as if he was a powerful and significant being. Hamlet allowed his feeling of grief over his father’s death to take over every part of his being and morph him into a person whose only goal was to get revenge. The people of Denmark took up drinking so as to drink away the sorrows and bitter truths of the world around them.

What an individual chooses to allow can be the destruction or the savior of their inner immortal being. The foolish acts of men are the consequence of mindless thoughts that often lead to deadly outcomes, even if their “virtues… be they as pure as grace”. The sin may be little, but the result of that sin can be horrific. “The stamp of one defect” is all that it takes to change the course of history… at least according to Shakespeare that is all that it takes.