Our society is shaped in such a way that kids grow up
hearing about violence on a pretty regular basis, and there is always the
question of whether this de-sensitizes us from the reality of things. In this
same way, Hamlet is living in an extremely violent world. Those were times
where dying in battle was heroic, and murdering for revenge heroic.
As I listened to the podcast of the inmates acting Hamlet
and interpreting the characters and the plot of the play, one of them caught my
attention. Danny Waller, who played the ghost, talked about how interpreting
that character had somehow brought him closer to the man he had murdered.
"I took a man's life. And I felt he was talking to me through that. That
he wanted me to know what I put him through."
Hearing this made me think about a documentary we watched in
Macroeconomics class a couple of weeks ago, where they interviewed
"Popeye", Pablo Escobar's main hitman and right hand. This man
admitted to participating in the murder of over 250 people and stated that when
they killed Pablo Escobar, who he followed for years and for whom he even
killed his own girlfriend, he "did not cry because [his] soul is
dead." Does this de-sensitization reach the point of ridding us of
conscience? Of morals?
Can reading and performing Hamlet have that big an effect on
people who have already done so much wrong? Do these people really change? Is
there really anything to change or was it simply a one-time thing, a momentary
slip up that changed their lives? Do they really repent or is that part of them
that momentarily took over still looming somewhere in the back of their mind,
waiting to attack again?
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