Category: Communication

In the cold night, Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus keep watch. Meanwhile, from inside the castle they hear partying. Hamlet talks to Claudius about his constant merry-making, saying that it makes the Danish look corrupt. Hamlet links indulgence of desires to corruption then says “what looks like enjoyment only hides internal corruption”. The Ghost appears and beckons Hamlet to follow it. But Horatio and Marcellus try to hold him back: they think the ghost might be trying to trap him saying “Religion provides no answers what looks good could be evil”. Hamlet breaks free of them and follows after the Ghost. Marcellus then says “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and they both run after Hamlet.

As Laertes prepares to go to France, He warns his sister, Ophelia, about not falling for Hamlet, someone whose passions will differ over time and someone who is supposed to marry just to stay as King and to maintain the state. Laertes worries about Ophelia’s pride and honour as well as Hamlet worries about his mother’s.
Ophelia promises to obey, but sarcastically tells Laertes to listen to his own advice.
Polonius enters, tells his son for taking long, then immediately starts giving him fatherly advice about how to act: be sociable, to not lend or borrow money, to be true to your own self etc. Finally, he lets Laertes go. The Father and son talk reflects Claudius’s with Hamlet, except Polonius isn’t trying to hide a secret. Polonius asks Ophelia what Laertes was talking to her about and Ophelia answers saying “Hamlet”. After Polonius asks her to explain, she says that Hamlet has expressed his love for her. Polonius tells her that Hamlet is only pretending to love her only to sleep with her, and forbids her to talk to him. Ophelia again promises to obey.

The morning after Horatio and the guards see the ghost, King Claudius speaks to his courtiers, explaining his marriage to Gertrude, the dead king’s widow wife and the mother of Prince Hamlet. Claudius says that he misses his brother but has chosen to lessen Denmark’s mourning by his marriage with Gertrude. He mentions that Fortinbras has written to him, demanding the surrender of the lands that King Hamlet won from Fortinbras’s father.
His speech ended, Claudius turns to Laertes, the son of Polonius. Laertes expresses his desire to return to France, where he was staying before his return to Denmark for Claudius’s coronation. Polonius gives him permission, and Claudius grants Laertes his consent as well.

Turning to Prince Hamlet, Claudius asks why “the clouds still hang” upon him, as Hamlet still wears black mourning clothes. Gertrude urges him to take off his “nightly colour,” but he replies bitterly that his inner sorrow is so much that his appearance is just a poor reflection of it. Using fatherly advice, Claudius says that all fathers die, and all sons will lose their fathers. When a son loses a father, he is meant to mourn, but to mourn for too long is unmanly and inappropriate. Claudius tells Hamlet to think of him as a father, reminding Hamlet that he stands in line to succeed to the throne after Claudius’s death.

Claudius then says that he does not wish for Hamlet to return to school at Wittenberg (where he had been studying before his father’s death), as Hamlet wanted to do. Gertrude repeats her husband, showing a desire for Hamlet to stay close to her. Hamlet forcefully agrees to do that. Claudius says that he is very pleased by Hamlet’s decision to stay that he will celebrate with parties and cannon fire, an old tradition called “the king’s rouse.”

now alone, Hamlet expresses that he wishes he could die, that he could evaporate and cease to exist. He wishes that God had not made suicide a sin. Anguished, he mourns his father’s death and his mother’s fast marriage to his uncle. He remembers how much his parents loved each other, and the thought that now, not yet two months after his father’s death, his mother marries his uncle, angers him.

On a dark night outside a Castle in Denmark, a soldier called Bernardo comes to replace the other watchman Francisco. The men can’t see each other because of the dark. Bernardo hears something and asks, “Who’s there?” After both soldiers make sure that they are both watchmen, they relax. Tired, and cold from many hours of guarding, Francisco prepares to go home and sleep.
Not long after, Marcellus joins Bernardo who is another watchman, and Horatio, Prince Hamlet’s friend. Bernardo and Marcellus persuade Horatio to stand watch with them, because they think they’ve seen something. Quietly, they talk about what they have heard the past two nights, and that they want to show Horatio: the ghost of the recently killed King Hamlet, which they think has come to them during the night.
Horatio is unsure, but then the ghost quickly appears and vanishes. Horatio is scared and acknowledges that the ghost looks like the dead King of Denmark, and it even wears the armour King Hamlet wore when he fought against Norway, and that he had the same face he had when he fought against the Polish. Horatio says that the ghost is a warning of bad for Denmark, and that perhaps it is a military attack. He tells the story of King Hamlet’s conquer of lands that belonged to Norway, saying that Fortinbras, the young Prince of Norway, now wants to get back the lands they lost.

Then the ghost appears for a second time, and Horatio tries to speak to it. The ghost says nothing, but disappears again as the cock crows at the first hint of dawn. Horatio then suggests that they tell Prince Hamlet, the dead king’s son, about the ghost. He believes that even though the ghost did not speak to Horatio, it will not refuse to speak to its beloved son.

THEN

You look at the man at the sound desk but can only see an outline of his body. He waves his hands in the air simulating the actions of someone playing the guitar. You laugh at the awkward air guitar but realise that he’s telling you to play something. You take a deep breath and play the easiest riff you know, the thing you know off by heart. The man suddenly cuts your volume down and you look up towards the figure trying to make out what you did wrong, he speaks into your earpiece and tells you to play something else. Your palms begin to feel sticky and wet, you wipe them slowly down on your trousers. You grab the neck of your guitar, dig in your memory for something more complicated, take another deep breath and play. The sound of your guitar and the odd gallop-like delay fills the empty hall and bounces back to you. A feeling of satisfaction fills you. There were no mistakes, let’s just hope it goes that way on the night of the event. The man at the sound desk gives you a thumbs up and moves on the next instrument, the drums, all you can hear now is the awkward sound of a raw drum kit just randomly being hit off beat as if it were in another room. You begin to daydream and think of all the practices you had with the band. Your mind wonders like it was trying to distract you and you fight it off. you won that little battle, let’s hope that DOESN’T happen on the night. Finally it’s the bass guitar’s sound check, he plays a short bass riff and plays around with his pedals a bit then his sound check is over. The fastest, easiest of them all. You then remember when you used to play the bass and music life was so much easier. Again you fight off the distraction. The man then gestures the whole band to play as if he were a conductor. You look at your brother on the drums and your other brother on the bass and nod at them, the drummer then screams “1!, 2!, 3!, 4!” then you play the first song on the list, without any mistakes. You finish and then everyone looks at you, for a moment you think you’ve played something wrong but remember that you play the intro to the next song and all of a sudden, get a small lump in your throat and your eyes tear up. Everything around you seems to be getting hotter and hotter but you know it’s just you being nervous. The singer speaks into the microphone and says “come on man! you should’ve started by now!”. You get even hotter with all the pressure and attention on you. Gravity begins to feel like its stronger on you alone, you look up, breath out and start the next song.

NOW

Here you are again, on that same stage you once dreamed of being on but now were dreading. The same stage you pictured yourself on in front of thousands of people but now were too afraid to be on. The hall is dark and dimly lit. The video is playing on the big screen behind you. The music in the video is building up and you know that you are up soon, the video finishes and the crowd applaud. That’s your queue. The light focuses on the stage, the people continue to clap. The spotlight blinds your eyes. You can’t see anyone so you just look down at your pedal set-up to check if everything is in its correct position. The drummer begins and everyone else joins, clapping along to the bass drum. The first song begins a bit stiff but you get looser and looser by the end. You finish and now it’s your turn to start the next song. You close your eyes and play the guitar lead line just as you had remembered it and open your eyes to see the crowd all looking at you. That same small sudden heat from the sound check creeps back and urges through your brain, trying to take control over your body. You resist it but know it will come back again. Your fingers begin to shake. You cannot gain control of them. A trickle of sweat slides down the side of your face and you feel it go into your mouth. It tastes salty and you try to spit it out but remember that the attention of a thousand people are on you. A sudden pulse of heat races through your body at the thought of making a mistake in front of that number of people. The extreme heat resonates through your bones as if you were an instrument that something was playing. The only thing you can hear now is the music as if it were in another room, muted and muffled. There’s an annoying ring in your ear as if something had exploded right next to you. Everything seems to be fading away from you. You step out of your skin and take everything in as it is. You realise that you haven’t made any mistakes so far and you join your flesh back on stage. You fall back to earth and continue to play. You let your mind think of something else to distract the worry of making a mistake and it works. You’re playing everything smoothly. “You know that feeling that you get when you know you’re doing something right and then it all suddenly goes wrong?”. Well that happened. You make a mistake and the musicians all look at you with a face of discontent. Everything you felt in those last moments hit you like a wall. You just want to get this over with now but the songs just seem to get slower and slower as you move further down the list. The last song seems so far away.

This was once your biggest dream but now your worst nightmare.

Jem realises, in the novel, the amount of segregation and racism in Maycomb County, he says that there are 4 kinda of folk, the ordinary like us, the neighbours, the Cunninghams, the Ewels and the black people.

After the trial he cries and this shows that he understands what is happening and how wrong the white people are. As he speaks to Scout we can see that he is maturing and has grown an understanding of the world and society around him and due to his father, Atticus, he is also able to know what is right and stand up for it.
In the novel we see this when he says “it’s not right”. This short quotation indicates his maturity and how much he’s grown.

Harper Lee satirises the white community by juxtaposing the black and white communities’ reactions. The black community reacted to Atticus’ actions in helping Tom Robinson and standing for what is right by giving him food and showering him with gifts and Atticus’ reaction reflects the type d person he is, he says ” I’m very grateful but tell them they must never do this again, times are too hard” he is a very humble man that knows what is good and what is bad. The White community however react in a very negative way, by gossiping about why Jem and Scout were in the “coloured balcony”, you can see the contast in the attitude the white and black community have towards each other.
After the trial, Jem and Scout both cry after Tom Robinson was fiund guilty, they cried because the truth was so obvious and present yet the White community still chose to convict Tom Robinson of a crime he had not committed and they cried because the people were so blind and didn’t see their mistakes.
When Jem and Scout are seen by Miss Maudie, she offers them a slice of cake and without saying anything she showed to the Finch Family that nothing had changed after the trial and the case, and she shows her kindness with this small act and Harper Lee shows that not all of the White community was the same, and that Articus wasn’t the only mockingbird.

I have to chosen to explain why ATTICUS is a mockingbird in the book.
Although Atticus displays several of the attributes of the mockingbird, he is peaceful and tries to only present goodness in a sinful world however he is not innocent. Unlike the simple minded characteristics of the book’s other human mockingbirds (Boo, Tom and the children), Atticus sees the evil in the world and fully understands its implications, and he seeks to fight against it and protect his own children from it. When Atticus tells Jem that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, he is trying to explain the nature of some people in the world at the time and even now, Atticus is not necessarily the one being compared to as a mockingbird. Harper Lee was trying to make us, the readers, know there were certain characters that were to be compared to the mockingbird.

I think that Harper Lee places her moral position within the book in several characters, what I mean is that there’s a bit of her in every character in the book. I personally don’t think that there is a single book out there without a bit of the author’s personal experience or without their moral position or thoughts placed somewhere within the book.
Harper Lee’s younger moral position, her moral thoughts as a child, is placed in the character Scout, her teenage moral thoughts are within Jem and her adult moral position is placed in Atticus.
This family believes in the common christian values and it is shown when we find out what situation Atticus is in, he chooses to stand up for the black man who was accused of raping a white girl and he knows himself that he won’t win but he does it for moral reasons, he felt as though if he didn’t do it, he wouldn’t be able to face his children and be able to discipline them. During the time that this book was written, there was still a strong look against black people and Harper Lee writes her point of view through Scout, a little girl who is developing her character and growing up in these times, just like Harper Lee. I think that Harper Lee shows her view about these time in America but doesn’t infiltrate her audience’s views on it at the same time. Harper Lee’s moral position is in all of the characters in the book.