Hamlet -- Realism and ImaginationDo realism and imagination coexist side by side and equally present in the Shakespearean drama Hamlet? Let's examine the evidence from the play, as well as literary critical opinion on this topic. In “Acts III and IV: Problems of Text and Direction,” Ruth Nevo explains how “all things are the opposite of what they seem” at a crucial moment in the play: In the prayer scene and in the closet scene his [Hamlet's] artifices are overthrown. Its mastery is hampered by the inherent capacity of human reason to draw hasty conclusions, to fail to distinguish appearance from being. He, of all people, is trapped in the deadly and deceptive labyrinth of appearances that is the phenomenal world. Perhaps never has the finitude of the spirit been better dramatized than in the scene of prayer and in the scene of the closet. Another motto of The Player King is wonderfully fulfilled in the web of ironies that constitutes the peripateia of the play: "Our thoughts are our own, their ends are not our own." » In the sequence of events that followed Hamlet's elation at the success of the Mousetrap and culminated in the death of Polonius, all things are the opposite of what they seem, and the action achieves the opposite of what was planned. Here, in the vicissitudes of the play, Hamlet's fatal error is played out, his fatal error of judgment, which constitutes the crisis of the action and is the direct precipitating cause of his own death, of seven other deaths and of Ophelia's madness. (52) According to the best literary critics, realism is fundamentally about “representing human life and experience” (Abrams 260). In the essay "An Explanation of Player's Speech", Harry Levin explains how the playwright manages to "imitate life" in his play:...... middle of paper ......are. Np: Princeton University Press, 1972. Pitt, Angela. “Women in Shakespeare’s Tragedies.” Readings on Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. From Shakespeare's Women. Np: np, 1981. Rosenberg, Marvin. “Laertes: an impulsive but serious young aristocrat.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.htmlWest, Rebecca. “A Court and a world infected by the disease of corruption.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.