Literary Theme of False Front

It is often said that pretending to be someone or thing other than who you truly are can have disastrous consequences. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, main characters learn this important social lesson, as their attempts to deceive others about their true identities or mental states ultimately come back to haunt them. Indeed, both Shakespeare and Wilde use their plays to teach audiences an extremely important lesson, namely the dangers of presenting a false front to others. However, though both plays contain this moral, their approach to the social lesson do not necessarily follow the same course.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses the character of Hamlet himself to explore the dangers of presenting a false front. Devastated both by his father's suspicious death and his mother's subsequent marriage to Claudius, his father's brother, Hamlet decides to feign madness in order to prove that Claudius is in fact responsible for his father's death. However, by pretending to be insane, Hamlet inadvertently sets a course of events into motion that not only brings great misfortune upon himself, but those close to him as well. Indeed, one might argue that because he chose to feign madness, Hamlet is responsible, either directly or indirectly, for the deaths of Ophelia, Polonius, his mother Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself.

Wilde's characters impart the same moral to readers as Shakespeare's, but the situation de

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ng as well. When Jack suggests that Algernon's attempt at playing Ernest has been a failure, Algernon protests, and explains quite simply why he has decided to adopt the fictional persona: "I think it has been a great success. I'm in love with Cecily, and that is everything" (Wilde, 1990, p. 27). He plans to play Ernest in order to woo Cecily, and thus both he and Jack adopt false fronts with others merely to satisfy their own selfish desires. The plays' depictions of the theme do coincide in one regard, as both Shakespeare and Wilde suggest that in adopting a false front, their characters run the risk of blurring the lines between the truth and their lies. In Hamlet, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether Hamlet is feigning madness or has truly gone insane as the play progresses. His behavior becomes more and more erratic, and the reader begins to suspect that Hamlet's farce has in fact become reality. During the scene in which he murders Polonius, Hamlet flies into such a rage that it truly seems that he has descended into madness. His strange behavior with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern afterward further gives the impression of true madness. He appears to speak gibberish as he exclaims, "Ay, sir, tha

Category: Literature - L