Outline of my paper
Background of the play Summary of the play Characters index Main Works Cited Relevant Links Guiding questions

I. Starting point
In his essay " The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness." C.L. Barber mentions that in Hamlet, the confrontations between men and different generations causes tragic struggles to take over heritage and male identity by destroying paternal figure of authority. The younger generation attempts to destroy the power of the older generation so as to become them, but only to find self-destruction in the process (Barber 191). However, the father figure can refer to the institution power that Renaissance men tried to resist. Many critics like Kenneth S. Rothwell, find that Hamlet can be read as a reflection of the Reformation-the conflict between the Catholic and the Protestant at that time; the uncle Claudius can stand for the usurping pope or monarch (Rothwell 82).

II. Historical view
The rites of passage of traditional Christianity, Catholic or Anglican, are regularly structured to take people through threshold moments of losing or changing family ties by their need for total relationship to Christ and God. However, the shift from medieval ecclesiastical absolute truth to Renaissance secular authority shatters the traditional value system and causes an inward unfixity and the feeling of questioning the world in the state of mind.

1. Social change: From God-centered to man-centered
Hamlet mirrors the dislocation between powers and self that was an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation. The first rite in Hamlet is a burial that implies the death of the past, but the past is still influential. It was a movement from the God-centered discourse to the man-centered discourse that displays the outcome of humanism.

2. Self-refashioning
In his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblattt presents his idea that before the sixteenth century people had less autonomy in "self-refashioning" (2); instead, the institutions-like family, state and religion-manipulate and control one's own identity. The word " fashion" in Greenblatt's definition is a term for " the action or process of making" (2); that is, it is a way to reconstruct the identity and to shape the self. Greenblatt argues that social life and cultural elements were embedded in the process of self-refashioning therefore, while we are discussing the issue of self and family, it is important to notice that the influence of the outer world that is imposed on individual identity.
In Hamlet Shakespeare writes how a self attempts to divorce from the power. As Ophelia says, the " glass of fashion," (3.1.153) Prince Hamlet needs to refashion himself and to find his existence in this world.

3. The soliloquies show the conflict between power and self.
A. Many of Hamlet's soliloquies express the depth of his reflection and the intensity of his emotion. The soliloquies imply a kind of self-reflection on the relationship between self and the world in the Renaissance. Hamlet in the first soliloquy is an outraged man who attempts to free himself from the grip of his flesh. But the Absolute power, the God, still rules the universe and make Hamlet obey His strictures " The Everlasting had not fixed/ His canon 'ganist self-slaughter." (1.2.131-2)

B. His self-examination occurs again when he shifts from belief to doubt about the ghost's reliability.

4. Misogynistic thinking
Rothwell points out that Hamlet's apparent misogyny stem from Saint Paul's understanding of women. Paul believes that it is good for man not to touch a woman. " But if they cannot contain, let they marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." (Ⅰ Cor. 7:9).
Hamlet's denial of the flesh and aversion to the attractions of the opposite sex imply a view of self that is different from that of established ecclesiastical and temporal power. Fear of usurpation of spirit by feminine tricks underlines his loathing for Ophelia. However, he rejects Ophelia not only to serve God but also to refashion himself. By resisting the powerful invisible orbit of court society, he can locate a greater power within himself. And the soliloquies in the play disclose the inner turmoil and offer glimpses of Hamlet's anguish when he struggles to resolve self within the constraints of the power in the hegemony of Denmark.

III. The two worlds in Hamlet: Elsinnore vs. Wittenberg
Hamlet is as allegory for this historical movement. Hamlet himself becomes the people of England, torn between the powerful institutions and an emerging sense of self. Furthermore, Hamlet's eagerness and his insistence suggest Wittenberg's attraction to him. Wittenberg seems to possess some power, spiritual or intellectual, which is lost at Elsinnore where Hamlet's desire for serenity never be fulfilled. Wittenberg seems some kind of Eden, an unfallen world, and a forest of Arden, in contrast with the rottenness of Denmark.

IV. Constructions of self: Renaissance man vs. Reformation man
Hamlet's search for a motivation to act is also the search for power to replace powerlessness. It seems that there are two Hamlets throughout this play. The first of these personalities can be defined with the myth of the Renaissance man, a man who tries to reshape the world around him; the second, with the type of the reformer, is a person open to techniques for discovery of the inner self. Throughout the play Hamlet, who was already the "glass of fashion", has to locate a self in a new "mould of form" (3.1.153). A new self has to be refashioned out of an older self.

V. Constructions of family: Sibling Rivalry
In her book, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture, Catherine Belsey examines depictions of the first family story on the earth-- Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel -- was figured both as a consolation prize for exclusion from Paradise and a new breeding ground for sin (170). Following Lacan's explanation of infant rivalry as a source of self-identity, Belsey associates sibling rivalry between The King Hamlet and his brother Claudius with Eve's sin punished by mortality. In this sense, the benign kinship and a peaceful family relationship is doomed to be damaged by unkindness in violation of family. Figures of adult male authority in older generation are characteristically weak and vulnerable in the process. Active male-to-male rivalry and violence is typically between brothers, or brotherly friends or enemies within the same generation. It is interesting that Belsey asks a question in her article, "What does make us think of marriage as closure, or associate the parental relationship with the promise of security?" (173). The ship of Renaissance family seems never get calm under the high wind passed on the sea.