Essays on hamlet.
Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.
Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.
At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.
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is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One | ? | : Divine Providence and Social Determinism | |
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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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Kastan, David Scott, ed. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet . New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.
Khan, Amir. “My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarerly 66.1 (2015): 29-46.
Keener, Joe. “Evolving Hamlet: Brains, Behavior, and the Bard.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 14.2 (2012): 150-163
Kott, Jan. “Hamlet of the Mid-Century.” Shakespeare, Our Contemporary . Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964.
Lake, Peter. Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
Lerer, Seth. “Hamlet’s Boyhood.” Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England , ed. Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017):17-36.
Levy, Eric P. Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008.
Lewis, C.S. “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” (1942). Studies in Shakespeare , ed. Peter Alexander (1964): 201-18.
Loftis, Sonya Freeman; Allison Kellar; and Lisa Ulevich, ed. Shakespeare's Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion . New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.
Luke, Jillian. “What If the Play Were Called Ophelia ? Gender and Genre in Hamlet .” Cambridge Quarterly 49.1 (2020): 1-18.
Gates, Sarah. “Assembling the Ophelia Fragments: Gender, Genre, and Revenge in Hamlet.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34.2 (2008): 229-47.
Gottschalk, Paul. The Meanings of Hamlet: Modes of Literary Interpretation Since Bradley . Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Hunt, Marvin W. Looking for Hamlet . New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
Iyengar, Sujata. "Gertrude/Ophelia: Feminist Intermediality, Ekphrasis, and Tenderness in Hamlet," in Loomba, Rethinking Feminism In Early Modern Studies: Race, Gender, and Sexuality (2016), 165-84.
Iyengar, Sujata; Feracho, Lesley. “Hamlet (RSC, 2016) and Representations of Diasporic Blackness,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 99, no. 1 (2019): 147-60.
Johnson, Laurie. The Tain of Hamlet . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
Jolly, Margrethe. The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts . Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.
Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus . Garden City: Doubleday, 1949.
Keegan, Daniel L. “Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet's Dramatic Theory and Ours.” PMLA 133.1 (2018): 71-87.
Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Hamlet: Critical Essays . New York: Routledge, 2002.
Kiséry, András. Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Kottman, Paul A. “Why Think About Shakespearean Tragedy Today?” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy , ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 240-61.
Langis, Unhae. “Virtue, Justice and Moral Action in Shakespeare’s Hamlet .” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight , ed. Steve Brie and William T. Rossiter (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 53-74.
Lawrence, Sean. "'As a stranger, bid it welcome': Alterity and Ethics in Hamlet and the New Historicism," European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000): 155-69.
Lesser, Zachary. Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Levin, Harry. The Question of Hamlet . New York: Oxford UP, 1959.
Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Loftis, Sonya Freeman, and Lisa Ulevich. “Obsession/Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body , edited by Sujata Iyengar. Routledge, 2015, pp. 58-75.
Marino, James J. “Ophelia’s Desire.” ELH 84.4 (2017): 817-39.
Massai, Sonia, and Lucy Munro. Hamlet: The State of Play . London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
McGee, Arthur. The Elizabethan Hamlet . New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
Megna, Paul, Bríd Phillips, and R.S. White, ed. Hamlet and Emotion . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Menzer, Paul. The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008.
Mercer, Peter. Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987.
Oldham, Thomas A. “Unhouseled, Disappointed, Unaneled”: Catholicism, Transubstantiation, and Hamlet .” Ecumenica 8.1 (Spring 2015): 39-51.
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Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge . 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1971.
Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.
Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England , ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Ohio State University Press, 2013, pp. 73-87.
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These essay examples and topics on Hamlet were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.
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When you work on a piece of literature in a class, such as Hamlet, instructors often ask you to perform a literary analysis of the said work. Writing a Hamlet essay may seem like an uphill task. However, it is a lot easier than most students assume. When you are assigned a Hamlet essay, you should pick a topic that you find interesting.
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If you are looking to get an A grade in your Hamlet essay, you need to put it in work. The first step towards writing an excellent Hamlet essay is by understanding the novel. Therefore, before you write anything, make sure you have read and understood, and this should be done critically and improve understanding.
Choose the direction your essay will take. Note that the book has tons and themes. Working on them all together will do your paper more harm than good. You are, therefore, better of focusing on a specific theme.
Create an outline for your essay. If you don’t have a plan, your essay is likely to be all over the place. Create an outline to give your write up a structure. The outline should include a detailed introduction, body, and conclusion.
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1. In what way do Hamlet’s seven discourses unearth his real character?
2. Discuss in great detail Gertrude’s relationship with Hamlet.
3. Do you think Hamlet loved Ophelia? If he did not? Do you think he was affected by her death, or he was simply driven by divorce?
4. Hamlet is based deeply on a plot of revenge. In what way can the characters serve as a comedy?
5. Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serve a purpose are can they just as easily be omitted?
6. Was Hamlet justified in wanting revenge?
7. What is the extent of Hamlet’s relationship with his ghost?
8. What was the purpose of including the murder of Gonzago in the plot?
9. Is conflict essential in Hamlet?
10. How does Shakespeare represent female characters in his play?
11. Did Ophelia make the right decision in going to the nunnery despite all the doubts surrounding her move?
12. Was Polonius wrong for judging Ophelia?
13. It was Hamlet’s need for revenge that drove him mad. Explain how true or false this is by providing evidence from the play.
14. Was Hamlet truly mad or simply driven by his thirst for revenge?
15. How are women portrayed in Hamlet? Is this portrayal correct or baseless?
16. Using your society as a point of reference, are females in Hamlet just generally deceptive?
17. Hamlet takes time to exert his revenge. What do you think this reveals about his character?
18. His need for revenge brought on Hamlet’s madness. True or false?
19. His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. Expound on this statement giving your examples.
20. Claudius’ and Laertes’ partnership was founded on their mutual hate for Hamlet. Compare and contrast Claudius and Laertes.
21. Is Laertes’s mission for revenge justified?
22. Discuss Hamlet’s feelings for his mother.
23. What does Hamlet consider to be a betrayal? Give examples.
24. Why does Hamlet have issues with Gertrude and Claudius’s marriage?
25. Is Hamlet brilliant, calculative, or plain cowardly? Provide answers and justify them with reasons.
26. How does Hamlet perceive love?
27. Do Hamlet and Ophelia love each other?
28. Does Hamlet’s thirst for revenge impact his relationship with Ophelia? Discuss their relationship by providing relevant examples.
29. Highlight and discuss in great detail the theme of conflict in Hamlet.
30. What role does imagery play in setting the overall mood of the play?
31. Tragedy and revenge are featured heavily in Hamlet. Discuss.
32. Discuss the theme of death in Hamlet.
33. Discuss how dark humor was utilized in Hamlet.
34. How essential is Denmark to the plot?
35. Claudius has been compared frequently to Macbeth. In what ways are the two characters similar or different?
36. Compare and contrast Horatio and Hamlet.
37. Is Fortinbras necessary to the overall plot?
38. Do you agree or disagree with Goethe’s conclusions about Hamlet?
39. Discuss the theme of deception in Hamlet.
40. What is the significance of Ophelia’s flowers to the plot?
41. There are two sides to Claudius’ character. Discuss them.
42. Most human beings are like Hamlet, driven by revenge, and rejected love. How true or untrue is this statement?
43. Claudius and Gertrude blame the terrible state of the Kingdom that Hamlet finds himself in. True or false?
44. Did the dramatic death of Polonius have any effect or role in the play?
45. Discuss Hamlet’s relationship with other characters in the play.
46. Is hamlet’s behavior acceptable?
47. Hamlet’s decisions were driven by fate. Do you agree with this statement?
48. Discuss the aspect of parents and their children, careful consideration of Polonius and his children, and Hamlet and his parents.
49. What does Hamlet have to say about political power and its use or misuse?
50. Hamlet grows up in the course of the play. Is this true or false?
51. It is still possible to sympathize with Hamlet despite his many downfalls. Discuss.
52. Why does Hamlet postpone carrying out the ghost’s instructions? Would you regard him as a hero or coward?
53. How does Shakespeare present madness in the play?
54. What do you consider to be the function of Hamlet many soliloquies in the play?
Explore some of the best and well researched topics for your Beowulf essay .
1. pick a hamlet topic you find interesting.
If you already have a topic in mind but are not quite sure about it, you can alternatively find an exciting way to approach it. For example, instead of writing about the role of women in Hamlet, find a particular female character to center your thesis; if you can find an undervalued character, the better it will be for your essay.
If you are struggling to find a topic, ask yourself these questions:
Formulate a prompt that is in the form of a question
If you still have no clue what you want to explore in your essay, try going back to your notes and textbook to formulate a question that you can then attempt to answer in your essay.
If you have waited until the very last minute to work on your essay, as most students do, your best bet for getting the work done in time is to pick a basic topic and run with it.
Hamlet is regarded as one of Shakespeare’s best works, but it is also one of the most challenging and complex. The good news is that you are not exactly expected to come up with new concepts because it has been in existence for so long. The chances are that someone has already written something on the topic that you want to explore. Therefore, to make things less complicated, try playing around multiple aspects to create a good topic for a Hamlet essay.
Do not make the mistake of submitting an unpolished Hamlet essay paper. Proofread your work and run it through a plagiarism checker .
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Welcome to the Hamlet study guide! Here you’ll see essential information about the play and learn what other articles you can read about it. Besides, through Hamlet by William Shakespeare , a reader can learn about the events that occurred during the period when the play was written. That’s why our writers prepared its historical context that you can find below. We’ve also explored the movie adaptations of the play.
Short summary.
A short summary of the play with illustrative pictures and thorough analysis.
The major and minor characters in Hamlet described and analyzed.
Doubt and death, revenge and corruption — all the vital themes of the play explained.
Critical symbolism of Hamlet, from Yorick’s skull to Ophelia’s flowers, analyzed.
The play’s genre and literary devices explored in detail.
Hamlet’s, Claudius’, Horatio’s, and others’ memorable quotes explored and explained.
107 original Hamlet topics to write an essay or research paper on.
Numerous essay samples on Hamlet to use as examples.
Why William Shakespeare was an influential writer, how he became a playwright, and what you may need to know about his writing style.
All the pressing questions about Hamlet are answered on the page.
Hamlet is one of the most popular of Shakspeare’s works. It is a play – a tragedy in five acts, to be more precise.
The full name of the play is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
The author of Hamlet is William Shakspeare, an English playwright and poet.
There is no precise date. The play was written sometime between 1599 and 1602.
The tragedy was first published in 1603 (the First Quatro). The Second Quarto was printed in 1604, and the First Folio was printed in 1623.
There are three different versions of Hamlet: Q1 (the first quarto, 1603), Q2 (the second quarto, 1604), and F1 (the first folio, 1623). The majority of modern editions include only the passages from Q2 and F1. The first quatro is shorter, and it has a much more dramatic plot.
There is a considerable number of editions, including Folger Library, Bantam Press, Oxford University Press, etc. The most popular ones are the Pelican Edition (edited by A.R. Braunmuller), and the Arden Edition (edited by Harold Jenkins), and the Norton Critical Edition (edited by Cyrus Hoy).
Full Title: | |
---|---|
Author: | Shakespeare, William |
Type Of Work: | Play |
Language: | English |
Where does Hamlet take place? | The royal court in Elsinore, Denmark |
When does Hamlet take place? | Around 14th-15th centuries |
How many acts are in Hamlet? | There are five acts in . |
Genre: | Revenge Tragedy |
Main Themes: | Doubt, revenge, appearance vs. reality, death & mortality, corruption |
Hamlet’s time period intersects with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who held the throne between 1558 and 1603. The approximate year of Hamlet’s first performance on a scene is 1602. Therefore, the play represents the late years of Elizabeth’s rule in England. According to historical scholars, this period was very uncertain since the Queen had no ancestors. She might have named an heir to end tension in the country. However, she refused to do so.
The author of Hamlet, William Shakespeare, describes an uncertain royal succession in Denmark. In the play, the Queen finds a new husband soon after the King’s death. Prince Hamlet is very frustrated about it. He is offended by his mother’s decision to get married soon after his mother’s death. The unstable situation in Denmark reflects the political anxiety in England and creates vivid Hamlet’s allusions to the Elizabethan era.
Another example of the cultural and historical significance of Hamlet can be discovered through the lens of religion. The readers can assume that the King is Catholic. He died without blessing and being in purgatory, which indicates Catholic traditions. Prince, in contrast, studies at the Protestant university in Wittenburg. The environment where he spends his university years sets up Hamlet’s background and his Protestant worldview.
Therefore, the readers observe a religious conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. William Shakspeare makes this confrontation even more evident by introducing the Ghost. This figure is somewhat controversial. From the Catholic perspective, the Ghost is the soul of a recently departed person who has an unfinished business. However, Protestants believe that ghosts are the evil spirits that took over the recently deceased. Hence, the Ghost symbolizes the tension between two religious flows described in the play.
Let’s compare a religious situation in the play and 16th century England. In the time William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet , a Reformation occurred in the country. Protestants broke away from the Catholic Church as a result of the religious revolution. The transition between Catholicism and Protestantism greatly influenced Shakespeare’s perception of the world. Thus, Hamlet became the product of the Reformation. Witnessing the events that occurred in England, Shakespeare masterfully depicted them in his play. He emphasized religious tensions between the Catholic and Protestant branches.
In addition, the concepts of the late Renaissance play a crucial role in the history of Hamlet’s creation. In England, the period was viewed as a flow that promotes skeptical humanism. In other words, there was an opinion that there are limits on human knowledge. Hence, Shakespeare incorporates multiple themes while developing the character of Hamlet. The readers see a young man affected by different circumstances, like religious tensions and the unstable political situation in the country. These factors provoke Hamlet’s constant anxiety about the difference between appearance and reality. If we shift from the play to the actual 16th century England, we can notice that the same issues occurred there.
Shakespeare skillfully depicted Elizabethan culture in Hamlet . Learning about the play, the readers can discover both a fascinating plot and the socio-political situation in England of the time.
Stories, where the main hero is not the smartest decisive, are as old as the world. While working on Hamlet , Shakespeare got inspiration from various literary works. Which ones? Below are listed some of them.
The basis of the plot was taken from the legend mentioned by Savo Grammaticus in his book Historia Danica ( History of the Danes ). This story tells about two brothers whom the king of the Danes entrusts to rule the country Jutland. One of the brothers marries the king’s daughter. In the marriage of the latter, Amleth is born. As the second brother decides to rule alone, he kills his relative and marries his wife. Meanwhile, Amleth pretends to be mad to avoid death. He is preparing a revenge plan to get revenge on his uncle. In the final light, Amleth heirs the throne as a full-fledged king of Jutland.
If shortly, Belleforest did not invent a new tragic story. He translated Saxos’ version, albeit almost doubling its length. This translation into French was published in 1570 in Histoires Tragiques . Interestingly, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1600, eight years earlier than the world saw the English translation of Histories .
The notion that Shakespeare relied heavily on the now-lost play Ur-Hamlet , allegedly written by Thomas Kyd, has gained widespread support. The crumb of knowledge about this work also includes information that it was a tragedy, and Hamlet was among the characters.
Kyd became the author of the play, which gave a new innovative impetus to drama development. The Spanish Tragedy as a revenge tragedy was the first of its kind in English literature. Many of the elements inherent in Kyd’s play can be found in Shakespeare’s works as well. However, it is worth noting that Kyd became such an iconic figure at the end of the Elizabethan era that plenty of writers referenced him.
Talking about the works that produced less influence directly on Hamlet but influenced the tragedies of the Elizabethan and Jacobian eras in general, Seneca’s tragedies became one of the distinguished. All of them highlighted the thirst for revenge, blood, mysticism, and inciting madness. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is also ranked among the Senecan tragedies.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is undoubtedly one of the most distinguished plays marked by more than 50 filmed versions. We’ve briefly discussed some of the most successful movie adaptations below.
This early Laurence Olivier’s adaptation became one of the most scandalous compared to the consecutive movies. Hamlet film 1948 has caused a violent reaction depicting scenes of a 40-year-old Hamlet and a 29-year-old actress that performs Gertrude, his mother. The then society was shocked by Olivier’s exercise of Freudian psychoanalytic theories. Gertrude is shown as an object of her son’s affection. Hamlet represents the enigmatic hobgoblins of a complicated human psycho, saying soliloquies on the edge of sanity. 1948 adaptation is also known for that Lawrence, besides directing the movie, played both Hamlet and the ghost. This decision hints at Prince’s madness but never gives clear answers to his mental health condition.
Another well-known adaptation of Hamlet is the 1969 version produced by the USSR film director Grigori Kozintsev. Unlike Olivier’s film, Kozintsev pictures the main character as more earthy and monumental. Hamlet movie 1969 is staffed with much more political collisions than its British ancestor with a focus on psychological disruption. Numerous scenes and even some soliloquies were either cut out or significantly shortened. Kozintsev decided that much of the film play would take place outdoors. This sets the movie apart from other predominantly studio-based adaptations. It is also noteworthy that Russian was not the first language for the majority of the Hamlet cast. Kozintsev took this step to enrich the film with the traditions of different nationalities.
Hamlet 1990 movie tries to popularize an already famous piece of literature even more. To achieve this, the director, Franko Zefirelli, has cut a lot of original scenes. He has also added a previously non-existent episode of Hamlet’s father awakening. The film strengthens Prince, giving him a heroic flavor. The cast of Hamlet 1990 can boast of many decent and well-recognized actors. It stars Mel Gibson as Hamlet, Glenn Close as Gertrude, and Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia. This list can be prolonged with many other decent and award-winning actors that play in Zefirelli’s version. 1990 Hamlet was noticed with several prestigious nominations by the Academy and BAFTA film awards.
The 1996 adaptation is considered by many the best and the most accurate Hamlet movie. Kenneth Branagh, film director and lead actor, essentially brought the theatrical production to the full movie. This is practically the only version where almost all the source material has been preserved. For this reason, it is the 1996 version that people think is best for students and everyone who wants to get acquainted with Shakespeare’s masterpiece without reading it directly. Thanks to the long timing, Branagh manages to convey the whole range of problems and circumstances that accompany the characters. Hamlet 1996 movie cast includes famous actors – Branagh himself, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, and the legend Julie Christie as Gertrude. The film has been nominated in a variety of prestigious categories, including BAFTA and the Oscars.
Hamlet 2000 presents a more contemporary version of the famous tragedy. The movie is indeed based on a Shakespearean plot but takes the events into the realities of the modern-day. Instead of castles and the royal family of Denmark, the viewer sees New York and the Denmark Corporation. Instead of ghosts – recordings of security cameras and so on. This is an ode to the twists and turns of human relations and vice in a new fresh way. The 2000 adaptation proves that Shakespeare’s works are imperishable and, when the setting changed, can capture the viewer no worse than any thriller.
Ophelia movie 2018 is the most modern film adaptation of Lisa Klein’s novel of the same name. It is worth noting that the book takes inspiration from Hamlet and tells the well-known story from Ophelia’s perspective. The film shows her as a much more independent and freedom-loving woman. If in the play she appears to the reader as a grief-stricken lady, in the film, she is involved in the intrigues of the palace. This movie is worth watching to take a fresh look at the characters traditionally viewed as supporting. Ophelia 2018 demonstrates the transition of a woman’s vision from a sufferer to a fighter for her better life.
Hamlet himself best tells off the differences that his character encounters in adaptations throughout time. In Olivier’s version, the main character exemplifies almost a madmen desperately seeking to figure out his inner feelings. Per contra, Hamlet 1990 depicts the protagonist as practically a hero who experiences a cruel betrayal of his family. In Ophelia , Hamlet acts as a supporting character.
Thanks for reading! Now you can proceed to other articles about Hamlet ’s plot, characters, themes, and more.
IvyPanda. (2024, May 21). Hamlet Study Guide: Key Facts & Historical Context of Hamlet. https://ivypanda.com/lit/hamlet-study-guide/
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Selecting powerful argumentative essay topics on hamlet: 15 examples.
Hamlet being produced in the Renaissance period was made out of the tragic moments that incurred in the period in History. Shakespeare had been known to create a tragic kind of plays. He focuses on revenge, humanity, social issues and deaths. Hamlet is a story of betrayal, wrong accusation, revenge, and love.
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Want to know more about the Hamlet theme? This page discusses a number of the major Hamlet themes that are evident in the play.
When Shakespeare arrived in London and began his acting career he made many friends among the theatre community. Before long he tried his hand at working on plays with the play writers who welcomed anyone who could help them fulfill the voracious hunger for plays. His talent was soon recognised and he became a regular member of their fraternity.
One of the writers he worked with was Thomas Kyd , who was responsible for scores of plays, although only one has survived to be regularly performed in the 21st century – The Spanish Tragedy . Kyd and Shakespeare became friends, and it is thought that working with Kyd, first on an earlier play, Ur-Hamlet , one of Shakespeare’s earliest forays into playwriting, and then The Spanish Tragedy, formed a very significant part of Shakespeare’s apprenticeship.
The Spanish Tragedy was very popular. It caught the late Elizabethan taste for violence informed by revenge, a model that became full-blown in the Jacobean theatre, subsequently known as the genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy.’
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a revenge tragedy but, being by the mature Shakespeare, it is very much more than that. Nevertheless, the play hangs on the skeleton of the then fashionable revenge story – in this case, a young man told by his late father’s ghost that he has been murdered by his brother and so, according to convention, the young man has the obligation to seek and achieve revenge. There is no doubt that in that sense, Hamlet is the simple story of a man avenging his father’s death. It is in the telling of that story, though, that Shakespeare made this play what is so often described as the most famous play ever written.
Hamlet is a play about so many things that they can’t be reckoned. Those things that the play is about are the themes. One can name them as themes but it should be remembered that all each Hamlet theme interacts and resounds with all the others.
Here are brief accounts of a selection of the major Hamlet themes of revenge, corruption; religion, politics, appearance and reality, and women.
The theme of revenge in hamlet.
There are two young men bent on avenging their father’s death in this play. Hamlet and Laertes are both on the same mission, and while Hamlet is pondering his approach to the problem Laertes is hot on his heels, determined to kill him as Hamlet has killed his father, Polonius. This is, therefore, a double revenge story. Shakespeare examines the practice of revenge by having two entirely different approaches to it – the hot-headed abandon of Laertes and the philosophical, cautious approach by Hamlet. The two strands run parallel – invoking comparisons, each one throwing light on the other – until the young men’s duel and both their deaths. The revenge theme feeds into the religious element of the play as Hamlet is conflicted by his Christian aversion to killing someone and his duty to avenge his father’s death, whereas it is not a consideration for Laertes, whose duty is clear to him, and he acts on it immediately.
Corruption is a major concern in this play. The text is saturated with images of corruption, in several forms – decay, death, poison. From the very first moments of the play the images start and set the atmosphere of corruption which is going to grow as Shakespeare explores this theme. The tone is set when Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ after seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. What Shakespeare is doing here, and in using the image structure of corruption, is addressing the broadly held view that a nation’s health is connected to the legitimacy of its king. Here we have the ghost of a murdered king, and his murderer – a decidedly illegitimate king – is sitting on his throne. All through the play, Hamlet is preoccupied with rot and corruption – both of the body and the soul, reflecting the way in which society is destroyed by the corruption of its inner institutions – in this case, the court, which is the government.
Decay, rot and mould are always in Hamlet’s mind, and his language is full of those images – ‘an unweeded garden that grows to seed – things rank and gross possess it,’ and countless images of death and disease. He hides Polonius’ body in a place where it will decay rapidly and stink out the castle. It’s an image of the corruption in secret places that is going to contaminate the whole country.
Religion has an impact on the actions of the characters in this play. Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy outlines his religious thinking on the subject of suicide. He declines to kill Claudius while he is praying for fear of sending him to heaven when he should be going to hell. Hamlet believes, too, that ‘there is a destiny that shapes our ends.’
One of the most important things of all in this play is the Christian idea of making a sacrifice to achieve healing. Hamlet is Christ-like in his handling of the crisis. The court is rotten with corruption and the people in it are almost all involved in plotting and scheming against others. Hamlet’s way of dealing with it is to wait and watch as all the perpetrators fall into their own traps –‘hauled by their own petards,’ as he puts it. All he has to do is be ready – like Christ. ‘The readiness is all,’ he says. And then, all around him, the corruption collapses in on itself and the court is purified. Like Christ, though, he has to be sacrificed to achieve that, and he is, leaving a scene of renewal and hope.
Hamlet is a political drama. Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his father, the king. He has subsequently done Hamlet out of his right of succession and become king. Hamlet’s mother has married the king while the rest of the palace is engaged in palatial intrigues, leading to wider conspiracies and murders. The king, Claudius, determined to safeguard his position in the face of the threat Hamlet presents, plots in several ways to kill Hamlet. Polonius plots against Hamlet to ingratiate himself with Claudius. Characters, including Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, spy on each other. This is all to do with power and the quest to achieve and hold it.
This is a major theme in every one of Shakespeare’s plays. The text of Hamlet is saturated with references to the gap that exists between how things seem to be and how they really are. Very little in this play is really as it seems. That is bound to be so in a play in which there are so many murderous plots and schemes by those who, on the surface, strive to appear innocent, like Claudius, who, behind his charismatic smile, is a damned villain. He is, as Hamlet puts it, a ‘smiling villain.’ Although Ophelia loves Hamlet she pretends to spurn his affections. Hamlet pretends to be mad so that he can explore the ghost’s assertion that Claudius killed him. All the characters, in one way or another, are hiding their true intentions.
What makes this theme particularly interesting and different in this play is that as the play develops the gap between appearance and reality narrows by the characters becoming more like the masks they are using than any reality that may lie behind that so the identities they have assumed eventually become their realities.
For much of the play, Hamlet is in a state of agitation. It is when he is talking to either of the two female characters that he is most agitated – so much so that he is driven to violence against them. He cares about both but does not trust either. He feels his mother, Gertrude, has let him down by her ‘o’er hasty marriage’ to Claudius. To him, it means that she didn’t really love his father. In the case of Ophelia, he is suspicious that she is part of the palace plot against him.
Both women die in this play. Ophelia is driven mad by the treatment she receives from the three men – Claudius, Polonius and Hamlet – and takes her own life. Gertrude’s death is more complex because it raises the question: how far is she responsible for the corruption that Hamlet has to deal with?
Whilst the play features the meeting and falling in love of the two main protagonists, to say that love is a theme of Romeo and Juliet is an oversimplification. Rather, Shakespeare structures Romeo and Juliet around several contrasting ideas, with a number of themes expressed as opposites. To say that the tension between love and hate is a major theme in Romeo and Juliet gets us closer to what the play is about. These – and other – opposing ideas reverberate with each other and are intertwined through the text.
Hamlet themes , Macbeth themes , Romeo and Juliet themes
Ambition, Appearance & Reality , Betrayal , Conflict , Corruption , Death , Deception , Good & Evil , Hatred , Order & Disorder , Revenge , Suffering , Transformation
Kenneth Brannagh looks at skull, symbolising the recurring Hamlet theme of death
What do you think of these Hamlet themes – any that you don’t agree with, or would add? Let us know in the comments section below!
Don’t bereavement and madness feature in Hamlet too or are they subsumed by themes you identify?
Wonderful notes
I believe the king Claudius is frevolous. Logacious and cantacarous as reflected by his mean personality and in terms of psychoanalysis as he asserts assert his dominance and show superiority as an alpha-male.
What if the character of hamlet was not pointed sheakspear..
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