Performative Utterance

"For much of the play Hamlet is able to speak but not do" – He knows what he wants to do but is stopped by his conscience and attempt to be surgical in killing only Claudius

The theory is centered on these main concepts

Lucutionary force the ability of a language to deliver a message, - the illocutionary force a mutual intelligibility and perlocutionary force that which is achieved by being said

Harold Bloom argues that the characters in Shakespeare's work develop through "self-overhearing"

The characters show their true selves to the audience unlike anything preceding it

This Performative Utterance is best displayed in the scene when Hamlet Senior, the ghost, converses with the young prince

When the person hell-bent on doing a thing does that it is classified as perlocutionary this is from the sheer utterance

Hamlet swore explicitly to remember his great father and implicitly to avenge his family’s pride by enacting his revenge on Claudius

Being too overdramatic can make the portrayal of the character seem unnatural or disingenuous to the viewers

The deluded Polonius thinks of himself to have mastered the “True Self” that Aristotle spoke of how all knowledge stems from self-knowledge

This character Polonius has the utterance and role that show mankind in his transition from the Dark Ages to Rebirth and towards Enlightenment

Hamlet is much more like a normal man today

Hamlet follows and judges himself much more than others this is pursuit of self-knowledge the Greeks spoke of

As a character Hamlet starts off as more faith and loyalty based and changes abruptly to action and consequence based