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What Does King Claudius Represent

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In the visual representation of King Claudius from William Shakespeare’s renowned play Hamlet, eight objects, images or origami, are displayed with conclusive representation of Claudius’s character. Starting off with a purple snake that stemmed from a drawing of its body, the serpent serves as a symbol of Claudius’s deviousness. Without even questioning such analogy, William Shakespeare himself had directly attributed Claudius as the emblematic “serpent that did sting … [Hamlet’s] father’s life” and took over Denmark (Shakespeare, I.v.39). In biblical illustrations of the paradise, a snake had convinced Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden apple out of malice and caused them to be banished down to Earth, and Claudius, too, had killed the previous …show more content…

As Claudius had performed in such a dichotomous conduct, he’d actively inveighed against the very principle of Christianity, and the his subsequent decision to keep those rewards only contributed to his blasphemous character. Despite all of his defective nature, Claudius could visibly fortify his positions as he was socially adept and maneuvered as a wonderful administrator. Within a month of Claudius’s ascendance to throne, he’d consolidated his own political power, won the favor of Danish citizens, extirpated Fortinbras’s force of revolution, and even “ma[de] [him] vow … to [not] give assay of arms” against Claudius, (Shakespeare, II.ii.70-71). With such sagacity and astuteness in his reign, Claudius proved that his intelligence could definitely facilitate his behaviors, to such a degree that one might even say that he could compete with death itself in a battle of wits. This is precisely why such scenery of competition with death was included in the visual (“MMW Seventh

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