Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?
These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.
These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.
Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.
The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).
Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.
That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.
In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.
Chapter One How Hamlet Works
Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).
Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics
King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.
Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy
This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.
Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College
What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.
Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius
Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.
Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.
Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism
This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.
Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students
Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.
Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet
Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?
Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One
Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.
Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido
Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.
Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet
According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.
Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy
This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.
Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet
As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?
Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias
Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.
Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing
Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.
Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost
Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .
Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet
The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.
Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet
This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?
Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet
Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”
Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism
In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .
Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet
There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.
Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet
Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.
Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.
Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet
In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .
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Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. The story revolves around Hamlet’s quest for revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who murdered Hamlet’s father in order to take the throne. Hamlet is a tragedy, and as such, it raises questions about the nature of revenge and justice.
On the one hand, Hamlet is motivated by a desire for revenge. He wants to kill Claudius in order to avenge his father’s death. This desire for revenge is what drives Hamlet to commit murder himself. On the other hand, Hamlet also feels that it is his duty to bring Claudius to justice. He wants to make sure that Claudius pays for his crime, and he does not want anyone else to suffer because of Claudius’s actions.
Hamlet is torn between these two impulses, and he struggles to decide what is the right thing to do. In the end, Hamlet chooses revenge over justice, and he kills Claudius. However, this choice comes at a great cost. Hamlet dies in the process, and his death brings about the downfall of Denmark.
So, what can we learn from Hamlet? Perhaps Shakespeare is trying to tell us that revenge is not always the best course of action. Or maybe he is trying to say that while revenge may be satisfying, it ultimately leads to more pain and suffering. Either way, Hamlet provides us with a complex portrait of the human condition, and raises important questions about the nature of justice and revenge.
Hamlet’s aims fluctuate between revenge and justice throughout the play, with this interior debate determining how events unfold. Revenge motivates Hamlet as his initial aim in his quest for vindication of his father’s death. Later, Hamlet’s torn sensibility and concern for justice are revealed in Soliloquy. Hamlet’s ability to act against Claudius is hampered as a result of this internal conflict. Only when Hamlet faces his own procrastination does inaction cease.
Hamlet swings towards his newfound realization that in order for justice to be carried out, Claudius’ wrongs must be righted through Hamlet’s own death. In the end, Hamlet chooses justice over revenge and both he and Claudius die.
Revenge is Hamlet’s dominant motive throughout much of the play. From the very beginning of the play, Hamlet is marked by his desire to avenge his father’s murder. Hamlet is unable to act on this feeling, however, because he is uncertain of Claudius’ guilt. Hamlet delay’s his revenge until he has absolute certainty that Claudius killed his father which leads him into a downward spiral as he attempts to Hamlet’s delay in revenge is caused by his uncertainty of Claudius’ guilt.
Hamlet’s soliloquies reveal his Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings to the audience, providing insight that would otherwise be unavailable. In Hamlet’s second soliloquy, Hamlet bemoans his inaction, cursing himself as a “dull and muddy-mettled rascal” (II.ii.560). Hamlet recognizes his own faults and weakness, yet he is still unable to take action against Claudius. Hamlet is again torn between his desire for revenge and his uncertainty of Claudius’ guilt, caught in a limbo between the two emotions.
However, Hamlet’s inaction is not simply caused by his uncertainty of Claudius’ guilt. Hamlet is also motivated by a desire for justice. Hamlet does not want to kill Claudius without just cause, as that would make Hamlet no better than a murderer himself. Hamlet wants Claudius to be punished for his crimes, but he also wants Claudius to suffer the same type of pain and anguish that he has been feeling since his father’s death.
Hamlet’s soliloquies make it clear that he is struggling with this internal conflict. In Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy, he contemplates suicide as a way to escape the pain and suffering that he has been experiencing. Hamlet is not sure whether death is the answer, but he recognizes that death may be preferable to the life that he is currently living. Hamlet is still motivated by his desire for revenge, but he is also motivated by his sense of justice.
Hamlet does not fully realize it until later in the play, but his desire for revenge and justice are actually two sides of the same coin. Hamlet wants Claudius to be punished for his crimes, and he wants Claudius to suffer as much as he has suffered.
Hamlet’s ultimate goal is to see that justice is done. Hamlet finally realizes this near the end of the play, when he decides to take action against Claudius even though he knows that it will lead to his own death. Hamlet’s decision to kill Claudius is motivated by his desire for justice, not revenge. Hamlet knows that he will die in the process, but he also knows that it is the only way to ensure that Claudius is punished for his crimes. Hamlet’s final act is one of justice, not revenge.
While Hamlet’s initial motivation is revenge, he eventually realizes that justice is more important. Hamlet’s journey from revenge to justice is a long and difficult one, but it is ultimately a successful one. Hamlet chooses to sacrifi ce himself in order to ensure that Claudius is punished for his crimes. In doing so, Hamlet ensures that justice is done. Hamlet’s story is a reminder that justice is more important than revenge.
Hamlet triumphs over his internal debate by combining opposed forces and justifying vengeance from the inside out. Hamlet’s will isn’t initially strong enough to act only on revenge. Even though Hamlet promised he would be “swift” and “sweep to my revenge,” he admits in the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy that he has been “unpregnant of my cause.” It is not until Hamlet grows weary of his own passivity that he begins to question Claudius’ culpability.
Hamlet’s procrastination is due to his conscience, which reminds Hamlet that murder is a sin. Hamlet must find a way to take revenge without becoming a sinner himself. Hamlet then decides that it is better to kill Claudius in public and suffer the consequences than to privately damning Claudius, who would go unpunished in the eyes of God.
Hamlet also justifies taking revenge as a form of justice as he believes that Claudius deserves to die for murdering Hamlet’s father and marrying Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet’s internal struggle between doing what is morally right and satisfying his thirst for revenge ultimately leads him to commit murder.
Revenge is often seen as an act that is motivated by anger and hatred. Hamlet is no different as he wants to revenge his father’s murder. However, Hamlet is also motivated by a sense of justice as he believes that Claudius deserves to be punished for his crimes. Hamlet’s inner struggle culminates in him committing murder, which can be seen as both an act of revenge and an act of justice.
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Table of Contents
Revenge is an action taken in return for an injury. In “The Tragedy of Hamlet”, Shakespeare deeply explores the theme of revenge. In the play, before the ghost reveals itself to those sentinels, Hamlet seems inactive. The knowledge of betrayal fills him with actions. The same goes for Laertes and Fortinbras.
These three characters are developed under their insuppressible urge for vengeance. Hamlet is a philosophical observer who in the beginning is crushed by the fact that after the death of his father, his mother is married to his uncle now but he is yet to be revengeful.
Only when the ghost reveals the betrayal which resulted in the death of Hamlet’s father and asks to “ revenge his foul and most unnatural murder ”, Hamlet gains a completely new way to channel his earlier disgust and mourning. In front of the ghost he swears that “ the time is out of joint ” but he “ was born to set it right! ”.
Hamlet shows us the moral thoughts and principles of existence which goes behind the choices he makes. Hamlet fights within. In him, revenge is first exercised in words. Inaction drains him. He cries out, “ what an a-ss am I!… prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, must like a wh-ore, unpack my heart with words and fall a-cursing like a very drab .”
Laertes is enraged by this news. Under Claudius’ provocation, he swears revenge which is doubled after knowing that Ophelia has drowned herself. His way to seek revenge is an active way when Hamlet’s revenge is first worked out in his thoughts.
Fortinbras since the beginning of the play is determined to get the lands back from the kingdom of Denmark. He wants to avenge what Hamlet’s father did when he was the king. In a cunning way, he gets his army closer to the capital.
Claudius manages to get Laertes and Hamlet in a fencing match but the fate worked differently and Gertrude is killed by mistake when she sips wine supposedly poisoned for Hamlet. Laertes dies in the fight but he amends with Hamlet right before dying.
Revengefulness can also have a consoling end. But it is Hamlet in whom revenge works out in an entirely different way. He can’t simply kill Claudius without questioning the morals of the time and place i.e. he didn’t kill Claudius when he saw him in a praying position. Revenge and its various implications is one of the prime thematic concerns of the whole play.
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Hamlet's revenge is delayed in three significant ways. First, he must establish Claudius' guilt, which he does in Act 3, Scene 2 by presenting the murder of his father in a play. When Claudius storms out during the performance, Hamlet becomes convinced of his guilt. Hamlet then considers his revenge at length, in contrast to the rash ...
William Shakespeare's play Hamlet is often regarded as one of the greatest tragedies in English literature. The central theme of revenge is intricately woven throughout the plot, captivating audiences for centuries. This essay delves into the various aspects of revenge in Hamlet, exploring its motivations, consequences, and moral implications.By examining the actions of the characters and ...
The process of revenge involves confirming the ghost's claims about Claudius's guilt and staging the "Mousetrap play" to expose the truth. Hamlet's revenge is ultimately carried out through a series of events, including the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius. Through these actions, Hamlet successfully avenges his father's ...
The theme of revenge in Hamlet is a complex and enduring one. It drives the actions of various characters, serving as a catalyst for tragedy. However, the play also warns against the destructive nature of revenge and raises thought-provoking questions about justice and morality. Hamlet's internal struggle with revenge serves as a poignant ...
In the play, Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Revenge is the overarching theme of the play. It shows what revenge can do to a person. Hamlet views revenge as a good deed: something that he must complete to avenge his dad. Revenge is binary, meaning it isn't only the act of revenge, there are many layers to it for example, who it hurts or who it ...
In Hamlet, the codes of conduct are largely defined by religion and an aristocratic code that demands honor—and revenge if honor has been soiled. As the play unfolds and Hamlet (in keeping with his country's spoken and unspoken) rules) seeks revenge for his father's murder, he begins to realize just how complicated vengeance, justice, and ...
Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare's treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions.Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a ...
Laertes is willing to do whatever it takes to gain his revenge on his father's murder, even "cut his throat i' th' church" (IV.7), meaning that unlike Hamlet, Laertes is more than willing to damn ...
Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there's a method in their madness, and become suicidal.
Role of Women in Twelfth Night and Hamlet by Shakespeare. Genre: Research Paper. Words: 2527. Focused on: Women in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Characters mentioned: Ophelia, Gertrude, Hamlet, Claudius, Laertes, Polonius. William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
In his essay "Hamlet's Guilt and Revenge," literary critic Maurice Charney argues that Hamlet's hesitancy to act on his desire for revenge stems from a deep sense of guilt over the moral implications of his actions. Charney suggests that Hamlet's internal conflict reflects a broader philosophical tension between justice and morality ...
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. The story revolves around Hamlet's quest for revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who murdered Hamlet's father in order to take the throne. Hamlet is a tragedy, and as such, it raises questions about the nature of revenge and justice. On the one hand, Hamlet is motivated by a desire for ...
Hamlet Essay Topics on Revenge. Clio has taught education courses at the college level and has a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction. Revenge is one of the most important themes in Shakespeare's ...
Revenge is an action taken in return for an injury. In "The Tragedy of Hamlet", Shakespeare deeply explores the theme of revenge. In the play, before the ghost reveals itself to those sentinels, Hamlet seems inactive. The knowledge of betrayal fills him with actions. The same goes for Laertes and Fortinbras.
How Revenge Lead To Tragedy In Hamlet English Literature Essay. In the play Hamlet, the main theme is revenge turn the whole story into tragedy. Whoever involves to the revenge plan has end up death. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, wants revenge on his uncle, who killed Hamlet's father and took over the crown and married the Queen, Hamlet's ...
The major theme of the play is a tragedy as the quest for revenge resulted in numerous deaths of innocent people. The writer focused on the problems of prince Hamlet who is portrayed as an elegant instead of the evil deeds of his uncle, king of Denmark. In the beginning of the play, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to him and tells him ...
Published: Mar 18, 2021. Plato defined justice as "the preservation of what is right". In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the dilemma of justice, especially in connection with retribution, takes center stage. The play's characters see justice as a balance that must be preserved, and they utilize vengeance to preserve it.
Hamlet is famous for problematizing and interiorizing the revenge play, which was normally an audience-pleasing, fast paced, violent, and bloody genre similar to an action film today. Typically ...
One of the most prominent symbols of revenge in Hamlet is the ghost of King Hamlet. Appearing to his son, Prince Hamlet, the ghost sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately leads to the downfall of the characters involved. The ghost represents the vengeful spirit seeking justice for his murder, a symbol of the sins of the past haunting ...
Revenge In Hamlet Essay. Shakespeare "Hamlet is a poem illustrating a prince seeking revenge over his father tragic death. Hamlet the prince is left clueless who killed his father's until some night watcher gave him some news about a ghost that looked like his dead father. Hamlet decides to go see the ghost for himself and is shocked what ...