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A link between the two.....

Ok, so this isn't really to do with English, but I feel that it's most appropriate to post it here.
In art, I am doing two sections, one on Maya Angelou's 'The Human Family' and one on Shakespeare's Hamlet. However, I need to find a way to link the two together, so that they can be related to one another somehow. My theme in art is 'Narrative' so I already have the link that both of them are people who express their thoughts through words.

Any other ideas would be GREATLY appreciated!
(edited 6 years ago)
Original post by Millie05
Ok, so this isn't really to do with English, but I feel that it's most appropriate to post it here.
In art, I am doing two sections, one on Maya Angelou's 'The Human Family' and one on Shakespeare's Hamlet. However, I need to find a way to link the two together, so that they can be related to one another somehow. My theme in art is 'Narrative' so I already have the link that both of them are people who express their thoughts through words.

Any other ideas would be GREATLY appreciated!


Well I suppose both The Human Family and Hamlet explore the complexity of the world and of the decisions people make. The Human Family is about the idea that, although the world is such a huge and diverse place and all sorts of things go on in it, in the end people are just people, while in Hamlet everything similarly comes full circle despite apparent complexity when everyone's decisions backfire. This idea of "coming full circle" could be a nice motif.
I hadn't read The Human Family before, but just had a quick look, and one link to Hamlet is that both of them play on the idea of uniqueness, but also universality:

In the poem, Angelou claims that there is not "one common man", but on the other hand, "We are more alike....than we are unalike". Meanwhile in Hamlet, there is the constant pull between the fiercely individual experience of Hamlet (in no other Shakespeare play is the audience so deeply involved with the inner state of a character) and the universality of the themes - revenge, suicide, death, regret, unlucky love, etc.

I'm not sure how you would necessarily portray this in art, but juxtaposition of close-up individual and panorama of all humanity could be quite powerful?

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