essay on claudius character in hamlet

William Shakespeare

Everything you need for every book you read., claudius quotes in hamlet.

Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

O, villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!

The play’s the thing, Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

CLAUDIUS: What dost thou mean by this?

HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

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Claudius character analysis: in-depth guide.

Claudius is the primary antagonist of the play “Hamlet”. This Claudius character analysis will give you a detailed study on his role and contribution to the plot. Check the complete character list of Hamlet so that you get a thorough understanding of all characters in the play.

Claudius is a criminal but is portrayed as a polite and wise King in the early part of the play. He displays genuine anguish at Polonius’s death and Ophelia’s madness. His words are not like that of a Shakespearean villain but of a kind-hearted King.

He gained his throne and his queen by worst methods, but he now seems to be passionately and genuinely longing for peace.

In the confrontation of King Claudius and Laertes, the King shows a fine dignity. His love for his ill-gotten wife appears to be quite genuine, so there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means to the throne.

His conscience, though ineffective, is certainly not dead. In spite of all the reproaches of his conscience, he plots new crimes to ensure his stability; and yet this plotting makes him unhappy ( Act 3 ).

Claudius unexpected Characteristics

• Claudius is courteous and never undignified.
• He performs his ceremonial duties efficiently.
• He takes good care of national interests.
• Claudius nowhere shows cowardice.
• When Laertes and the mob forced their way into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and confidence.

The King’s appraisal of Hamlet’s “madness” is creditable. The King finds that Polonius’s harping on love-madness is stupid. He quickly thinks of a way of getting rid of Hamlet. He determines to send him to England on a pretext connected with the payment of tribute by the English King. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are his agents in this undertaking, and so to them, he talks freely and intimately. Claudius has the schemer’s facility of quickly adjusting his plans to the current circumstances.

When the tragic incidents close in on him, Claudius is not insensitive. At the end of the scene in the graveyard, he remains in control. He reminds Laertes of his resolution and tells him that the fencing-match will take place without delay. In the castle-hall, the King, seemingly patient and unruffled, goes over the conditions of the match, and he watches without a show of passion as Hamlet and Laertes fight to the death. When he is stabbed he tries to make little of his death, saying “Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt”.

Claudius: What he is and what he isn’t!

• Claudius is a man of mean appearance.
• He is bloated by excessive drinking.
• He had a small nature.

On the other hand

• He wasn’t stupid, but quick-witted and adroit.
• He won the Queen with the “witchcraft of his wit” or intellect.
• Claudius seems to have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner.
• He used to smile on the person he addresses (“that one may smile and smile, and be a villain”).
• He isn’t a tragic character.

Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even annoyance.

Claudius, Hamlet

Claudius is a character in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. He is one of Shakespeare’s most manipulative characters.

We tend to think that Hamlet, is all about the prince. But it’s a play with a full cast of characters all interacting intricately with each other. Claudius is without doubt the second character in Hamlet . The substance of all dramas is the playing out of human relationships, and the action of Hamlet is mainly concerned with the relationship between Hamlet and Claudius. On the story level the two play a cat and mouse game with each other.

Patrick Stewart as Claudius

On the death of his father, the king of Denmark, the young prince returns from university to the Danish court at Elsinore Castle only to find that his father’s brother, Claudius has not only managed to make himself king, but has also married his brother’s widow, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. It is a giddy situation, everything happening very fast, and Hamlet is stunned into a surly sulk.

Claudius is a smooth-tongued, self-assured and convincing man – an experienced politician – and he slips easily into the role of king, where he takes command and presents himself as a charismatic national leader. The young man he has disinherited is an inexperienced student, a private, inward-looking man, not having the first idea of how to deal with the situation in which he finds himself.

What is particularly galling for Hamlet is that his mother has married this man who, compared with his late father, is a parody of a king. He’s also galled by Claudius’ pleasure-seeking habits – his eating and drinking and his excessive sexual appetite.

Both Claudius and Gertrude attempt to break through to Hamlet, imploring him to take off his black mourning suit and realise that everyone dies, that one just has to get back to normal and carry on with one’s life. But Hamlet is unable to do that.

Hamlet’s university friend, Horatio, has also come for the king’s funeral. He tells Hamlet that the guards on the castle battlements have seen the ghost of the dead king and that he should check it out for himself.

Hamlet goes to the battlements and his father’s ghost appears and tells him that he was murdered by his brother and that Hamlet should avenge his murder.

The rest of the action is about that. Hamlet finds himself paralysed by his inability to know what to do and is simply unable to do as the ghost has instructed him. For several reasons he just can’t bring himself to act. But that doesn’t stop Claudius from regarding him as a threat and he begins to plot against Hamlet’s life. He is a ruthless murderer sheltering behind the facade of a genial, likeable king. He employs some of Hamlet’s fellow students to spy on him. He and his most senior aide, Polonius, spy on him themselves as well, and as the threat grows, he finally sends Hamlet on a mission to England and gives instructions to the English king to execute him.

Hamlet manages to escape from that trap and, with the help of pirates, returns to Denmark. He gives up all thought of avenging his father’s death, deciding that he will just allow matters to take their course. A Christian theme creeps into the text here as Hamlet decides to let Heaven punish the wrongdoers.

Matters do take their own course and the wrongdoers do meet their ends in the final scene.

Claudius arranges a fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, the son of Polonius, recently killed accidentally by Hamlet and he and Laertes plot to murder Hamlet in the match by poisoning the tip of Laertes’ sword.

The duel takes place in the final scene of the play. So many characters die in that scene that Shakespeare has to bring in extra characters to carry the bodies off the stage! During the course of the play all those who have plotted against Hamlet die in the execution of their plots. That’s where the term ‘hoisted by one’s own petard’ comes from – Hamlet’s description to Horatio of what he thinks is going to happen.

Claudius is one of the most rounded of Shakespeare’s villains. For example he is not as heartless as his behaviour suggests and we get an insight into his remorse for the bad things he has done. He is aware that all those things – murdering his brother, marrying his widow, and plotting against Hamlet – are terrible. At the same time as he is carrying out his villainous deeds he is suffering badly from the effects of his acts in the extent of the guilt that he feels..

At one point he tries to pray for forgiveness but, displaying a measure of self-knowledge, he gives up because he recognises that the benefits of what he has done are things he couldn’t bear to give up and so could not hope for forgiveness. He has gained the throne, and a beautiful queen. He gets up from his knees because he knows that his words are flying up to heaven but his thoughts are solidly grounded in the realm of human ambition.

Claudius is a terrible human being but Shakespeare presents him in such a way as to allow us to sympathise with him. he takes us inside Claudius’ head and what we see is a very talented man and a gifted politician who, overwhelmed by ambition, has committed one of the worst possible crimes – the murder of his own blood. However, he is his own greatest critic and hates what he has done. And then to top it all and make him even more human, he admits to himself that he is too weak to do what he knows would be the right thing.

Top Claudius Quotes

‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father. But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness. ‘Tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschooled: ( act 1, scene 2 )

This sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father, But you must know your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his — and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubborness, ’tis unmanly grief, It shows a will most incorrect to heaven.  ( act 1, scene 2 )

How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience. The harlot’s cheek beautied with plast’ring art Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden! ( act 3, scene 1 )

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t, A brother’s murder. ( act 3, scene 3 )

poor Ophelia Divided from herself and her fair judgment, Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts; ( act 4, scene 5 )

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An Interesting Character Study: Claudius

The question of whether Claudius is a better king than Old Hamlet is one that critics have often encouraged us to ask. He shows some skill in diplomacy and dealing with court business in a timely and efficient fashion: in the scenes where he holds court, he gives every indication that he is a decisive and pragmatic king and an effective politician: perhaps more than Prince Hamlet would have proved to be, and perhaps even better than Old Hamlet, who whiled away his afternoons, on a regular basis, asleep in his orchard (all right for some, eh?). But, like Macbeth, he has only attained the crown through being ruthless, immoral, and murderous. He murders his own brother – by poison, too, while his brother slept in the Edenic paradise of his orchard, which suggests cowardice and treachery. (If he’d killed his brother in a duel, even one fought on unethical grounds, things would have been very different.) This crime is, as Claudius himself admits in III.3, the ‘primal eldest curse’, going back to the very first murder in the Bible: Cain’s murder of his brother Abel in the Book of Genesis.

If this all suggests a man greedy for power, then we should at least acknowledge that Shakespeare portrays Claudius as a character who is contrite – although more, we suspect, because he fears his punishment in the afterlife (and from Prince Hamlet, once he realises his nephew has learned the truth) than because he feels genuine remorse for having his brother murdered. As Claudius admits in the famous speech he gives in III.3 (‘O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven …’), when he tries to pray for forgiveness, it is useless to ask for forgiveness for a sin if he doesn’t also renounce all of the worldly benefits he has accrued from that sin: the crown, Gertrude, and his ambition to rule and carry on ruling.

If Claudius did usurp his brother because Old Hamlet wasn’t as good a ruler as Claudius knew he himself could be, this is neither stated nor even heavily implied in Shakespeare’s play. We are left to speculate ourselves: did Claudius do the wrong thing for honourable reasons, or did he simply want to grab the crown and rule for himself? Did he want to marry Gertrude, so that’s why he wanted his brother out of the way? (This is certainly what Old Hamlet believes, referring in I.5 to his brother’s ‘shameful lust’ which led him to contrive a way of winning his ‘most seeming-virtuous queen’ to his bed.)

Claudius shows himself to be a politician-king, delegating his dirty work to other characters, such as when he sends Hamlet to England and asks the English to kill his nephew upon arrival. But as V.2 reveals, this was a mistake, for Claudius’ clandestine behaviour proves his own undoing: Hamlet is able to forge a letter from Claudius, using the royal seal which he has in his possession, ordering the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern rather than Hamlet. Hamlet can then escape during his tussle with the pirates and speed his way back to Denmark, where he again uses Claudius’ underhand methods against him, with the poison-tipped sword leading to Laertes’ death as well as Hamlet’s, prompting Laertes to reveal the plot to Hamlet, culminating in Claudius’ own death. And, of course, Claudius’ back-up plan – the chalice of poisoned wine – leads to Gertrude inadvertently drinking it and dying.

Much ink has been spilt over Hamlet’s delaying and inaction, but in many ways, if we place the character of Claudius next to Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark shows himself to be more active and direct than his uncle. If Claudius is more decisive, he is also someone who rarely acts himself, if he can get someone else to do so on his behalf. This is partly because he is King, but also partly because the only way he can rid himself of Hamlet is through deceptive and underhand means.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons .

5 thoughts on “An Interesting Character Study: Claudius”

Your blog is very well named as it is always interesting !

Thorough commentary. On the mark.

Seems to me the palace intrigue obscures the big picture to both Hamlet and Claudius. They’re so focused on what’s going on in the four walls of Elsinore that they dismiss and ignore the looming threat from the once defeated now scheming neighbours, who appear at the end to “honour” Hamlet in their victory. Claudius shows his lack of understanding over the “request” for passage, failing to see its true import, and Hamlet accepts it too. That “worthless piece of ground” turns out to be “Denmark”. There is an implication that Hamlet’s father would have seen through the ruse.

Hmmm so the question is ‘does the end justify the means?’ If Claudius is a fit ruler then is the murderous ‘incestuous’ beginning an acceptable cost? A good question indeed and one that, in many ways, can be asked of a good many presidents, monarchs and prime ministers ever since!

I did not realize that Hamlet had been cut out of the line of succession. I just assumed that Claudius usurped the crown through force.

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PRINCE HAMLET   →

“I shall win at the odds.”

KING CLAUDIUS   →

“He is justly served … a poison tempered by himself”

QUEEN GERTRUDE   →

“What devil was’t … That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind?”

OPHELIA   →

“Of ladies most deject and wretched … I cannot choose but weep.”

HAMLET AND THE GHOST   →

“Remember me … Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”

HAMLET AND CLAUDIUS   →

“Thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane.”

HAMLET AND GERTRUDE   →

“Go not to mine uncle’s bed.”

HAMLET AND OPHELIA   →

“The canker galls the infants of the spring.”

HAMLET AND HORATIO   →

“Those friends thou hast …”

CLAUDIUS AND GERTRUDE   →

“My uncle-father and aunt-mother.”

THE MAIN THEMES OF HAMLET    →

“Purposes mistook / Fallen on th’inventor’s heads.”

THEME OF REVENGE   →

“Show yourself in deed your father’s son.”

THEME OF APPEARANCE VERSUS REALITY   →

“Who’s there? … Stand and unfold yourself.”

THEME OF MADNESS   →

“Howsoever thou pursuest this act, / Taint not thy mind.”

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  Characters

• #1: Prince Hamlet
• #2: King Claudius
• #3: Queen Gertrude
• #4: Ophelia

  Relationships

• #5: Hamlet and the Ghost
• #6: Hamlet and Claudius
• #7: Hamlet and Gertrude
• #8: Hamlet and Ophelia
• #9: Hamlet and Horatio
• #10: Claudius and Gertrude

  Themes

• #11: Main Themes
• #12: Revenge
• #13: Appearance Versus Reality
• #14: Madness

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Character Analysis of Claudius in Hamlet

Free sample critical essay.

King Claudius is the crown-stealing and family-dividing villain who is the “something rotten” (1.4) in the state of Denmark. In the end, he is “justly served” by “a poison tempered by himself” (5.2).

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Essay introduction /  thesis statement, “one may smile … and be a villain”.

Claudius’ secret “brother’s murder” (3.3) of Prince Hamlet’s father, his within “a little month” marriage to his “sometime sister” (1.2) Queen Gertrude and his election shortly afterward as Denmark’s king provide the starting points to the storyline of Shakespeare’s Hamlet .

Both literally and metaphorically, Claudius is a poisoner. Old King Hamlet , Queen Gertrude and ultimately Claudius himself all fall victim to his “juice of cursed hebenon” (1.5).

Moreover, his corrupting reign contaminates with deception and distrust the natural human bonds of friendship and romantic love .

The two “Good lads” (2.2) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are executed in England. And in Claudius’ “unweeded garden” (1.2), the unwed couple of Hamlet and Ophelia end the play not together on Denmark’s throne but united only in death in Elsinore’s graveyard.

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Claudius in #Hamlet - Can a bad man be a good king and loving husband? Answer: 'No.'

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• Claudius is the crown and queen-stealing villain whose corrupt ambition is the “something rotten” (1.4) in the state of Denmark.
• Appropriately for the villain of the play, Claudius’ name is never spoken aloud by any other character.
• Does he really love Queen Gertrude as much as he loves the throne? And can a bad man be a good king?
• The motifs of the antagonist as a snake and Denmark as a once idyllic but now fallen kingdom recur throughout the play.
• For example, Claudius will later attempt to execute Hamlet using the “adders fanged” (3.4) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Key Supporting Quotes

Claudius’ kingship, “witchcraft of his wit”.

King Claudius may well have an exceptionally strategic mind. But the political gifts are dissipated in attempting to cover up his regicide. His criminal past forever clouds his kingly future.

Claudius is compelled to expend almost all his mental energy grappling with the events that flow from his pre-play murder of Old King Hamlet —recruiting courtiers as spies, calling in a political favor from the English king, arranging the “hugger-mugger” (4.5) burial of Polonius and manipulating Laertes into a rigged fencing match.

Old King Hamlet ruled Denmark successfully for at least three decades. His brother lasted only about six months. Claudius, who set out to rule a country, ended up losing it to a foreign power.

King Claudius in #Hamlet - His murderous past forever clouds his kingly future.

SOME KEY ESSAY TOPICS

• Claudius is a manipulative and ruthless figure who seems to come directly from Machiavelli’s book, The Prince .
• His conversation with Polonius in 2.2 suggests he is less focused on the Norwegian danger than the threat posed by his nephew.
• Even at the point of Laertes’ sword and with an angry mob outside the castle, Claudius cunningly turns the situation to his advantage.

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Claudius and Queen Gertrude

“our sometime sister”.

Despite Prince Hamlet’s accusation towards his mother of fickle disloyalty ( “Frailty thy name is woman” , 1.2), Gertrude remains steadfastly at the side of her second husband.

Claudius’ dark secrets mean he can never fully open his heart to her. But his comments about Gertrude— “I could not but by her” (4.7)—reveal another side of an otherwise cold and calculating man.

The on-stage royal relationship is far removed from the unrestrained sensuality which Old King Hamlet’s Ghost luridly imagines. It more resembles that of a middle-aged, married couple which, of course, Claudius and Gertrude actually are.

It is not that Claudius is incapable of love; rather he is incapable of placing love—anything else—above his passion for kingly power.

#Hamlet - King Claudius' sentimental descriptions of Gertrude reveal another side of his character.

• Both on the first and the final occasions we see King Claudius on stage he is accompanied by his wife, Queen Gertrude.
• His sentimental descriptions of Gertrude reveal another side of Claudius’ character.
• Gertrude defends her husband from an enraged, sword-wielding Laertes.
• The final bloodbath scene reveals Claudius will sacrifice his wife’s life to retain his throne.

Claudius and Prince Hamlet

“mighty opposites”.

For three decades, Old King Hamlet stood between Claudius and the throne he jealously coveted. Now, his son Prince Hamlet threatens Claudius’ hold on it.

Even the wily Claudius could not have foreseen that his spying efforts through Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Ophelia would be so transparent to the prince. Or that his nephew would respond with a display of feigned insanity and the psychological masterstroke of The Murder of Gonzago .

Claudius describes Hamlet as “like the hectic in my blood” (4.3); to the prince, his uncle is the man who “killed my king and whored my mother” (5.2). Hamlet is Claudius’ nemesis, the character he can never fully control and through whom he meets his ultimate comeuppance.

Old King Hamlet stood between Claudius and throne and queen. Prince #Hamlet threatens his hold on each.

• A suspicious Hamlet is unswayed by Claudius request “to think of us / As of a father” (1.2).
• A battle of wits between two very different types of intelligence: the political and the artistic.
• After the ‘play-within-a-play’, Claudius knows that Hamlet knows. Their conflict now becomes a battle to the death.
• In the end, Hamlet the intellectual scholar triumphs over Claudius the worldly, power-hungry politician.

Claudius as a tragic hero

“some vicious mole of nature”.

Of all the characters in the play, Claudius most resembles a ‘tragic hero’: an otherwise noble figure who dooms himself and everyone around him because of a fatal flaw— “some vicious mole of nature ” (1.4)—in his character.

His lust for political power leads him to commit one murder only to find that he must plot a second to cover up the first. When this plan fails, his next scheme leads to the death of the woman he loves , followed quickly by his own.

“ How smart a last that speech doth give my conscience!” , Claudius declares in an aside after hearing Polonius’ remark to Ophelia about how with “pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself” (3.1). But Claudius will not give up the rewards of his crime: “My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen” (3.3).

#Hamlet - "When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions."

• Claudius’ moment of triumph begins and ends with the court scene of 1.2.
• His secret crime sets in motion unanticipated events that bring calamity to everyone around him.
• The family of Polonius and ultimately Denmark itself fall victim to his unrestrained ambition.
• A deceitful manipulator of others, he is undeniably honest with himself.

Essay conclusion / Summary

“he is justly served”.

Claudius dies as he lived. His final action in 5.2 is an attempt to portray Gertrude’s fainting as a reaction to the fencing duel between Hamlet and Laertes: “She swoons to see them bleed. ”

But Claudius has spoken his last lie. Queen Gertrude dies knowing the true character of the man she married ( “O my dear Hamlet—The drink, the drink! I am poison’d ”).

Hamlet is at last able to bring himself to murder his usurping uncle. As he does, he bids farewell to Claudius with the words: “Follow my mother. ” And so, just like his brother, and by the same means of his own poison, Claudius is “Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched ” (1.5).

Like his brother, Claudius in #Hamlet is "Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched."

• A hugely gifted man who traded everything for his brother’s throne and wife.
• A measure of his cunning is how he contrives a fencing match between two characters who earlier were on the brink of killing him
• Gertrude’s poignant elegy for Ophelia offers a glimpse of what has been lost in the unfolding tragedy.
• Finally exposed: the false king, false husband, and false uncle.

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The most helpful book ever for students and teachers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet .

42 x 1,500-word model essays

Chapter-by-chapter guide to Hamlet Model Essays

IN THIS BOOK ARE THREE 1,500-WORD SAMPLE ESSAYS ON EACH ONE OF THE FOLLOWING 14 CHARACTERS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND THEMES. THAT’S 42 SAMPLE ESSAYS IN TOTAL.

#1: The Character of Hamlet

Born a prince, parented by a jester, haunted by a ghost, destined to be killed for killing a king, and remembered as the title character of a play he did not want to be in. If at the cost of his life, Hamlet does in the end “win at the odds. ”

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#2: The Character of Claudius

His “ambition ” for Denmark’s crown leads him to commit one murder only to find that he must plot a second to cover up the first. When this plan fails, his next scheme leads to the death of the woman he loves followed by his own.

#3: The Character of Gertrude

“Have you eyes? ”, Prince Hamlet demands of his mother. Gertrude‘s “o’erhasty marriage ” dooms her life and the lives of everyone around her when her wished-for, happy-ever-after fairytale ends in a bloodbath.

#4: The Character of Ophelia

As she struggles to respond to the self-serving purposes of others, Ophelia’s sanity collapses in Elsinore’s “unweeded garden ” of falsity and betrayal. Her “self-slaughter” is her revenge for her silencing and humiliation.

#5: Relationship of Hamlet and the Ghost

By surrendering Denmark to his rival’s son, Hamlet grants to the angry Ghost of his “dear father murdered ” the forgiveness his suffering soul needed more than the revenge he demanded.

Hamlet grants the Ghost the atonement his suffering soul needed more than the revenge he demanded: he surrenders Denmark to the son of the man murdered by his father on the day of the prince’s birth.

#6: Relationship of Hamlet and Claudius

Uncle and nephew are two men at war with each other—and themselves. Claudius is haunted by the murder he has committed ( “O heavy burden!” ); Hamlet by the one he hasn’t yet ( “Am I a coward?” ).

#7: Relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude

A haunted-by-the-past Hamlet seeks the truth about his father’s death ( “Do you see nothing there?” ). A live-in-the-present Gertrude seeks to protect her second husband and crown ( “No, nothing but ourselves” ).

#8: Relationship of Hamlet and Ophelia

Their relationship begins in uncertainty, descends into mutual deceit and rejection, and ends with their double surrender to death: Ophelia, to the water; Hamlet, to Claudius’ rigged fencing duel.

#9: Relationship of Hamlet and Horatio

“Those friends thou hast … Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.” Horatio is Hamlet’s trusted confidant in life and vows to remain the keeper of his memory after the prince’s death.

#10: Relationship of Claudius and Gertrude

A marriage of mutual self-interest: Claudius wanted to become king; Gertrude wanted to remain queen. In the end, both die by the same poison her second husband used to murder her first.

#11: Main Themes of Hamlet

A king murdered, an inheritance stolen, a family divided: Elsinore’s older generation destroys its younger when two brothers—one living, one undead—battle in a “cursed spite” over a crown and a queen.

#12: The Theme of Revenge

Hamlet and Laertes journey from revenge, through obsession and anger, to forgiveness. And the revenge sought by the Ghost on King Claudius becomes the revenge of Old King Fortinbras on Old King Hamlet.

#13: Deception and Appearance versus Reality

“Who’s there?” The characters struggle to distinguish between truth and falsehood in a play-long triple pun on the verb ‘to act’: to take action, to behave deceitfully, and to perform in theater.

#14: The Theme of Madness

“Your noble son is mad” , Polonius tells Denmark’s king and queen. But is Hamlet ever really insane? If not, why is he pretending to be? And is the prince’s “antic disposition” the cause of Ophelia’s traumatic breakdown?

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• Hamlet’s Claudius: Villain analysis

Claudius is undoubtedly considered the main villain in Hamlet, due to the murder of the King. However, Shakespeare has made his character a lot more nuanced.

His actions after his initial villainous crime are representations of his ability to manipulate, showing his intelligence rather than his villainy. This argument is supported by a possible interpretation of the fact that the killing of the Old King may have been justifiable, and beneficial for the country.

The King also shows signs of affection and empathy, causing one to rethink their assumption about him as a villain. When one sees his character, not in the presence or being talked about by Hamlet or the Old King, there are many instances where he is capable of evoking sympathy from the audience.

These mostly occur near the end of the play, or as soliloquies; as this is the only chance we must see Claudius’s perspective, rather than the bias of Hamlet or the Ghost.

We are informed by the Ghost that, “Thus was I, sleeping by a brother’s hand, Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched” , proving Claudius had done a villainous deed by taking King’s life, for his own gain. The fact that Claudius then waves the death off by telling Hamlet, “ But you must know, your father lost a father” , suggesting that Claudius perceives the death as an inevitable act of nature, completely justifiable.

Shakespeare uses repetition to emphasize Claudius’s point and creates a rhythmic structure to the sentence. It also makes the situation less personal, as the listing of people causes the audience to momentarily forget about the old King, making him just seem one of many. In the 1600s, when the play was first acted out, it was believed that the King was the embodiment of God, and murdering a King was blasphemy. Therefore in that era, Claudius would be despised by everyone watching.

This alone is enough reason to think that Claudius was solely a villain, and it would prevent the audience in Shakespeare’s time from thinking this could be for valid reasons. To a modern audience, Claudius’s action of murder is still wrong; but if there is a possibility that he did it to preserve Denmark, and its honor and people. There is a chance he had a firm belief in himself to rule Denmark better, as his level of intelligence is a proven trait of his.

This level of intelligence again may bring him across as a villain as his intentions are not moral, especially when he attempts to manipulate Laertes in order to kill Hamlet by playing his weakness against himself. Laertes is furious about the death of his father and insists that, “My revenge will come” .

To spur him on, Claudius subtly asks, “Was your father dear to you? Or are you like the painting of the sorrow”. This shows his ability to manipulate the exact way for each individual. It may seem villainous, however, one can also interpret that as having a high level of intelligence, which may be essential to the running of Denmark.

Claudius shows this in the opening scenes, where even though his attitude towards the death of the King is considered villainous, the fact that is overlooked is that he is concerned for the country, and talks about how, “ Young Fortinbras, holding a weak supposal of our worth ”, showing the audience his concern for the country.

One gets a biased view of Claudius, mainly through Hamlet and the Ghost; whom he has directly wronged. This portrays him to be villainous but one needs to consider the perceptual bias Hamlet has of Claudius. When one sees Claudius in the presence of other characters such as Gertrude or Ophelia, they see his loving side blossom, where Gertrude is, “ conjunctive to my life and soul” .  

With Ophelia, he shows genuine concern, as he questions, “ how do you, pretty lady?” Hamlet though fails to have the empathy Claudius has. Claudius has the empathy to understand the loyalty of Laertes, regardless of his intentions. Hamlet, “ clefts” his mother’s, “ heart in twain ”, and due to his lack of courage, is the root of Ophelia’s madness.

He tells her, “ get thee to a nunnery ”, as he projects his feelings of frustration and clear madness on them. One may even suggest that he is choosing to abuse women, as they are powerless against him. Claudius, compared to Hamlet; respects both women and protects them, regardless of his heinous crimes is not completely immoral.

One can presume that all of this is an act, and it seems so when he sends Hamlet to England, “ Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety—. Which we do tender as we … For your own protection” . In previous more private scenes, it is obvious Claudius thinks, “How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!”, which on one hand shows his superficiality and ease in lying to get rid of any chance of him being found out, but also shows him as caring.

Hamlet abused his mother, Ophelia, and was showing strong signs of madness; hence another instance where we are never shown enough about Claudius; lacking the soliloquy to decide which way is more likely.

As his soliloquy is a pivotal point of the play, where we see why he is not a complete villain and conjures the most sympathy for him. One must also consider that due to him being alone, there is a high chance that his true feelings about his crimes are finally heard. Claudius, uses strong imagery and variance of sentence structure to show his mental state as well as strong emotions about his actions.

His first sentence is shocking, where he tells the audience that, “my offence is rank. It smells to heaven” . This shows the audience that he is aware of the gravity of his crime, that its stench has reached the gods and Claudius laments that fact. “Pray can I not” is where the first real motive to evoke sympathy is shown, as he is unable to pray, due to the heaviness of the guilt.

These small actions represent Claudius’s extremely troubled state of mind, and the small sentences represent his instability; and dark imagery. Him talking about his, “bosom as black as death!” represents his high emotions, as well as the depressed state. All of these work together, in order that the audience is moved by him; and although this does not make him less of a villain, it does mean that one can feel sorry for him.

Related Posts

• Hamlet’s Banquo’s soliloquy: Summary & Analysis
• Immortality in Hamlet
• Hamlet: Horatio Character Analysis
• Hamlet: Polonius Character Analysis
• Hamlet: Analysis of Scene Act I, Scene V

Author:  William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

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A Modern Perspective: Hamlet

By Michael Neill

The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that “if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful.” 1 Perhaps Meyerhold exaggerated because of his frustration—he was prevented from ever staging the tragedy by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who apparently thought it too dangerous to be performed—but Meyerhold’s sense of Hamlet ’s extraordinary breadth of appeal is amply confirmed by its stage history. Praised by Shakespeare’s contemporaries for its power to “please all” as well as “to please the wiser sort,” 2 it provided his company with an immediate and continuing success. It was equally admired by popular audiences at the Globe on the Bankside, by academic playgoers “in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” and at court—where it was still in request in 1637, nearly forty years after its first performance.

In the four centuries since it was first staged, Hamlet has never lost its theatrical appeal, remaining today the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the same time, it has developed a reputation as the most intellectually puzzling of his plays, and it has already attracted more commentary than any other work in English except the Bible. Even today, when criticism stresses the importance of the reader’s role in “constructing” the texts of the past, there is something astonishing about Hamlet ’s capacity to accommodate the most bafflingly different readings. 3

In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Romantic critics read it as the psychological study of a prince too delicate and sensitive for his public mission; to later nineteenth-century European intellectuals, the hero’s anguish and self-reproach spoke so eloquently of the disillusionment of revolutionary failure that in czarist Russia “Hamletism” became the acknowledged term for political vacillation and disengagement. The twentieth century, not surprisingly, discovered a more violent and disturbing play: to the French poet Paul Valéry, the tragedy seemed to embody the European death wish revealed in the carnage and devastation of the First World War; in the mid-1960s the English director Peter Hall staged it as a work expressing the political despair of the nuclear age; for the Polish critic Jan Kott, as for the Russian filmmaker Gregori Kozintsev, the play became “a drama of a political crime” in a state not unlike Stalin’s Soviet empire; 4 while the contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney found in it a metaphor for the murderous politics of revenge at that moment devouring his native Ulster:

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections

murders and pieties 5

Even the major “facts” of the play—the status of the Ghost, or the real nature of Hamlet’s “madness”—are seen very differently at different times. Samuel Johnson, for example, writing in the 1760s, had no doubt that the hero’s “madness,” a source of “much mirth” to eighteenth-century audiences, was merely “pretended,” but twentieth-century Hamlets onstage, even if they were not the full-fledged neurotics invented by Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones, were likely to show some signs of actual madness. Modern readings, too, while still fascinated by the hero’s intellectual and emotional complexities, are likely to emphasize those characteristics that are least compatible with the idealized “sweet prince” of the Victorians—the diseased suspicion of women, revealed in his obsession with his mother’s sexuality and his needless cruelty to Ophelia, his capacity for murderous violence (he dies with the blood of five people on his hands), and his callous indifference to the killing of such relative innocents as Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.

Hamlet ’s ability to adapt itself to the preconceptions of almost any audience, allowing the viewers, in the play’s own sardonic phrase, to “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” ( 4.5.12 ), results partly from the boldness of its design. Over the sensationalism and rough energy of a conventional revenge plot is placed a sophisticated psychological drama whose most intense action belongs to the interior world of soliloquy: Hamlet agrees to revenge his father’s death at the urging of the Ghost, and thus steps into an old-fashioned revenge tragedy; but it is Hamlet’s inner world, revealed to us in his soliloquies (speeches addressed not to other characters but to the audience, as if the character were thinking aloud), that equally excites our attention. It is as if two plays are occurring simultaneously.

Although Hamlet is often thought of as the most personal of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare did not invent the story of revenge that the play tells. The story was an ancient one, belonging originally to Norse saga. The barbaric narrative of murder and revenge—of a king killed by his brother, who then marries the dead king’s widow, of the young prince who must pretend to be mad in order to save his own life, who eludes a series of traps laid for him by his wicked uncle, and who finally revenges his father’s death by killing the uncle—had been elaborated in the twelfth-century Historiae Danicae of Saxo Grammaticus, and then polished up for sixteenth-century French readers in François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques. It was first adapted for the English theater in the late 1580s in the form of the so-called Ur- Hamlet , a play attributed to Thomas Kyd (unfortunately now lost) that continued to hold the stage until at least 1596; and it may well be that when Shakespeare began work on Hamlet about 1599, he had no more lofty intention than to polish up this slightly tarnished popular favorite. But Shakespeare’s wholesale rewriting produced a Hamlet so utterly unlike Kyd’s work that its originality was unmistakable even to playgoers familiar with Kyd’s play.

The new tragedy preserved the outline of the old story, and took over Kyd’s most celebrated contributions—a ghost crying for revenge, and a play-within-the-play that sinisterly mirrors the main plot; but by focusing upon the perplexed interior life of the hero, Shakespeare gave a striking twist to what had been a brutally straightforward narrative. On the levels of both revenge play and psychological drama, the play develops a preoccupation with the hidden, the secret, and the mysterious that does much to account for its air of mystery. In Maynard Mack’s words, it is “a play in the interrogative mood” whose action deepens and complicates, rather than answers, the apparently casual question with which it begins, “Who’s there?” 6

“The Cheer and Comfort of Our Eye”: Hamlet and Surveillance

The great subject of revenge drama, before Hamlet , was the moral problem raised by private, personal revenge: i.e., should the individual take revenge into his own hands or leave it to God? Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (and, one assumes, his lost play about Hamlet as well) captured on the stage the violent contradictions of the Elizabethan attitudes toward this form of “wild justice.” The surprising thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero’s taking justice into his own hands—an argument central to The Spanish Tragedy. Of course, the controversy about the morality of private revenge must have provided an important context for the original performances of the play, giving an ominous force to Hamlet’s fear that the spirit he has seen “may be a devil” luring him to damnation ( 2.2.628 ). But Shakespeare simply takes this context for granted, and goes on to discover a quite different kind of political interest in his plot—one that may help to explain the paranoiac anxieties it was apparently capable of arousing in a dictator like Stalin.

Turning away from the framework of ethical debate, Shakespeare used Saxo’s story of Hamlet’s pretended madness and delayed revenge to explore the brutal facts about survival in an authoritarian state. Here too the play could speak to Elizabethan experience, for we should not forget that the glorified monarchy of Queen Elizabeth I was sustained by a vigorous network of spies and informers. Indeed, one portrait of Elizabeth shows her dressed in a costume allegorically embroidered with eyes and ears, partly to advertise that her watchers and listeners were everywhere. Shakespeare’s Elsinore, too—the castle governed by Claudius and home to Hamlet—is full of eyes and ears; and behind the public charade of warmth, magnanimity, and open government that King Claudius so carefully constructs, the lives of the King’s subjects are exposed to merciless inquisition.

It is symbolically appropriate that the play should begin with a group of anxious watchers on the battlemented walls of the castle, for nothing and no one in Claudius’s Denmark is allowed to go “unwatched”: every appearance must be “sifted” or “sounded,” and every secret “opened.” The King himself does not hesitate to eavesdrop on the heir apparent; and his chief minister, Polonius, will meet his death lurking behind a curtain in the same squalid occupation. But they are not alone in this: the wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare’s chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. Denmark, Hamlet informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accurately enough, is “a prison” ( 2.2.262 ); and the treachery of these former school friends of Hamlet illustrates how much, behind the mask of uncle Claudius’s concern, his court is ruled by the prison-house customs of the stool pigeon and the informer. How readily first Ophelia and then Gertrude allow themselves to become passive instruments of Polonius’s and Claudius’s spying upon the Prince; how easily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are persuaded to put their friendship with Hamlet at the disposal of the state. Even Laertes’s affectionate relationship with his sister is tainted by a desire to install himself as a kind of censor, a “watchman” to the fortress of her heart ( 1.3.50 ). In this he is all too like his father, Polonius, who makes himself an interiorized Big Brother, engraving his cautious precepts on Laertes’s memory ( 1.3.65 ff.) and telling Ophelia precisely what she is permitted to think and feel:

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby. . . .

( 1.3.113 –14)

Polonius is the perfect inhabitant of this court: busily policing his children’s sexuality, he has no scruple about prostituting his daughter in the interests of state security, for beneath his air of senile wordiness and fatherly anxiousness lies an ingrained cynicism that allows him both to spy on his son’s imagined “drabbing” in Paris and to “loose” his daughter as a sexual decoy to entrap the Prince.

Hamlet’s role as hero at once sets him apart from this prison-house world and yet leads him to become increasingly entangled in its web of surveillance. To the admiring Ophelia, Hamlet remains “Th’ observed of all observers” ( 3.1.168 ), but his obvious alienation has resulted in his being “observed” in a much more sinister sense. He is introduced in Act 1, scene 2, as a mysteriously taciturn watcher and listener whose glowering silence calls into question the pomp and bustle of the King’s wordy show, just as his mourning blacks cast suspicion on the showy costumes of the court. Yet he himself, we are quickly made to realize, is the object of a dangerously inquisitive stare—what the King smoothly calls “the cheer and comfort of our eye” ( 1.2.120 ).

The full meaning of that silky phrase will be disclosed on Claudius’s next appearance, when, after Hamlet has met the Ghost and has begun to appear mad, Claudius engages Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to probe his nephew’s threatening transformation ( 2.2.1 –18). “Madness in great ones,” the King insists, “must not unwatched go” ( 3.1.203 ):

         There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger.                  ( 3.1.178 –81)

But of course Hamlet’s madness is as much disguise as it is revelation; and while the Prince is the most ruthlessly observed character in the play, he is also its most unremitting observer. Forced to master his opponent’s craft of smiling villainy, he becomes not merely an actor but also a dramatist, ingeniously using a troupe of traveling players, with their “murder in jest,” to unmask the King’s own hypocritical “show.”

The scene in which the Players present The Murder of Gonzago , the play that Hamlet calls “The Mousetrap,” brings the drama of surveillance to its climax. We in the audience become participants in the drama’s claustrophobic economy of watching and listening, as our attention moves to and fro among the various groups on the stage, gauging the significance of every word, action, and reaction, sharing the obsessional gaze that Hamlet describes to Horatio:

Observe my uncle. . . . Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,

And, after, we will both our judgments join

In censure of his seeming.             ( 3.2.85 –92)

“The Mousetrap” twice reenacts Claudius’s murder of his brother—first in the dumb show and then in the play proper—drawing out the effect so exquisitely that the King’s enraged interruption produces an extraordinary discharge of tension. An audience caught up in Hamlet’s wild excitement is easily blinded to the fact that this seeming climax is, in terms of the revenge plot, at least, a violent anticlimax. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had developed the play-within-the-play as a perfect vehicle for the ironies of revenge, allowing the hero to take his actual revenge in the very act of staging the villain’s original crime. Hamlet’s play, however, does not even make public Claudius’s forbidden story. Indeed, while it serves to confirm the truth of what the Ghost has said, the only practical effect of the Prince’s theatrical triumph is to hand the initiative decisively to Claudius. In the scenes that follow, Hamlet shows himself capable of both instinctive violence and of cold-blooded calculation, but his behavior is purely reactive. Otherwise he seems oddly paralyzed by his success—a condition displayed in the prayer scene ( 3.3.77 –101) where he stands behind the kneeling Claudius with drawn sword, “neutral to his will and matter,” uncannily resembling the frozen revenger described in the First Player’s speech about Pyrrhus standing over old Priam ( 2.2.493 ff.). All Hamlet can do is attempt to duplicate the triumph of “The Mousetrap” in his confrontation with Gertrude by holding up to her yet another verbal mirror, in which she is forced to gaze in horror on her “inmost part” ( 3.4.25 ).

Hamlet’s sudden loss of direction after the “Mousetrap” scene lasts through the fourth act of the play until he returns from his sea voyage in that mysteriously altered mood on which most commentators remark—a kind of fatalism that makes him the largely passive servant of a plot that he now does little to advance or impede. It is as if the springing of the “Mousetrap” leaves Hamlet with nowhere to go—primarily because it leaves him with nothing to say. But from the very beginning, his struggle with Claudius has been conceived as a struggle for the control of language—a battle to determine what can and cannot be uttered.

Speaking the Unspeakable: Hamlet and Memory

If surveillance is one prop of the authoritarian state, the other is its militant regulation of speech. As Claudius flatters the court into mute complicity with his theft of both the throne and his dead brother’s wife, he genially insists “You cannot speak of reason to the Dane / And lose your voice” ( 1.2.44 –45); but an iron wall of silence encloses the inhabitants of his courtly prison. While the flow of royal eloquence muffles inconvenient truths, ears here are “fortified” against dangerous stories ( 1.1.38 ) and lips sealed against careless confession: “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” Polonius advises Laertes, “. . . Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice . . . reserve thy judgment” ( 1.3.65 –75). Hamlet’s insistent warnings to his fellow watchers on the battlements “Never to speak of this that you have seen” ( 1.5.174 ) urge the same caution: “Let it be tenable in your silence still . . . Give it an understanding but no tongue” ( 1.2.269 –71). What for them is merely common prudence, however, is for the hero an absolute prohibition and an intolerable burden: “. . . break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” ( 1.2.164 ).

Hamlet has only two ways of rupturing this enforced silence. The “pregnant” wordplay of his “mad” satire, as Polonius uneasily recognizes ( 2.2.226 –27), is one way, but it amounts to no more than inconclusive verbal fencing. Soliloquy is a more powerful resource because, since it is heard by no one (except the audience), its impenetrable privacy defines Hamlet’s independence from the corrupt public world. From his first big speech in the play, he has made such hiddenness the badge of his resistance to the King and Queen: “I have that within which passes show” ( 1.2.88 ), he announces. What is at issue here is not simply a contrast between hypocrisy and true grief over the loss of his king and father: rather, Hamlet grounds his very claim to integrity upon a notion that true feeling can never be expressed: it is only “that . . . which passes show ” that can escape the taint of hypocrisy, of “acting.” It is as if, in this world of remorseless observation, the self can survive only as a ferociously defended secret, something treasured for the very fact of its hiddenness and impenetrability. Unlike Gertrude, unlike Ophelia, unlike those absorbent “sponges” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet must insist he is not made of “penetrable stuff.”

If Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is the guardian of his rebellious inwardness, soliloquy is where this inwardness lives, a domain which (if we except Claudius’s occasional flickers of conscience) no other character is allowed to inhabit. Hamlet’s soliloquies bulk so large in our response to the play because they not only guarantee the existence of the hero’s secret inner life; they also, by their relentless self-questioning, imply the presence of still more profoundly secret truths “hid . . . within the center” ( 2.2.170 –71): “I do not know / Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do ’t” ( 4.4.46 –49). The soliloquies are the focus of the play’s preoccupation with speaking and silence. Hamlet is set apart from those around him by his access to this region of private utterance: in it he can, as it were, “be bounded in a nutshell and count [himself] a king of infinite space” ( 2.2.273 –74).

Yet there is a paradox here: the isolation of soliloquy is at once his special strength and the source of peculiar anguish. It saves him from the fate of Ophelia, who becomes “Divided from herself and her fair judgment” ( 4.5.92 ) by her grief at Polonius’s death and hasty burial; accustomed to speak only in the voice that others allow her, dutifully resolved to “think nothing, my lord” ( 3.2.124 ), she is left with no language other than the disconnected fragments of her madness to express outrage at a murder which authority seems determined to conceal. Hamlet, by contrast, finds in soliloquy an arena where the unspeakable can be uttered. But the very fact that these are words that others do not hear also makes soliloquy a realm of noncommunication, of frustrating silence—a prison as well as a fortress in which the speaker beats his head unavailingly against the walls of his own cell. Thus the soliloquy that ends Act 2 reproaches itself for a kind of speechlessness—the mute ineffectuality of a “John-a-dreams,” who, unlike the Player, “can say nothing”—and at the same time mocks itself as a torrent of empty language, a mere unpacking of the heart with words ( 2.2.593 –616). For all their eloquence, the soliloquies serve in the end only to increase the tension generated by the pressure of forbidden utterance.

It is from this pressure that the first three acts of the play derive most of their extraordinary energy; and the energy is given a concrete dramatic presence in the form of the Ghost. The appearance of a ghost demanding vengeance was a stock device borrowed from the Roman playwright Seneca; and the Ur- Hamlet had been notorious for its ghost, shrieking like an oysterwife, “Hamlet, revenge!” But the strikingly unconventional thing about Shakespeare’s Ghost is its melancholy preoccupation with the silenced past and its plangent cry of “Remember me” ( 1.5.98 ), which makes remembrance seem more important than revenge. “The struggle of humanity against power,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written, “is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness”; and this Ghost, which stands for all that has been erased by the bland narratives of King Claudius, is consumed by the longing to speak that which power has rendered unspeakable. The effect of the Ghost’s narrative upon Hamlet is to infuse him with the same desire; indeed, once he has formally inscribed its watchword—“Remember me”—on the tables of his memory, he is as if possessed by the Ghost, seeming to mime its speechless torment when he appears to Ophelia, looking “As if he had been loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors” ( 2.1.93 –94).

For all its pathos of silenced longing, the Ghost remains profoundly ambivalent, and not just because Elizabethans held such contradictory beliefs about ghosts. 7 The ambivalence is dramatized in a particularly disturbing detail: as the Ghost pours his story into Hamlet’s ear (the gesture highlighted by the Ghost’s incantatory repetition of “hear” and “ear”), we become aware of an uncanny parallel between the Ghost’s act of narration and the murder the Ghost tells about:

’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forgèd process of my death

Rankly abused. . . .

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leprous distilment. . . .               ( 1.5.42 –71)

If Claudius’s propaganda has abused “the whole ear of Denmark” like a second poisoning, the Ghost’s own story enters Hamlet’s “ears of flesh and blood” (line 28) like yet another corrosive. The fact that it is a story that demands telling, and that its narrator is “an honest ghost,” cannot alter the fact that it will work away in Hamlet’s being like secret venom until he in turn can vent it in revenge.

The “Mousetrap” play is at once a fulfillment and an escape from that compulsion. It gives, in a sense, a public voice to the Ghost’s silenced story. But it is only a metaphoric revenge. Speaking daggers and poison but using none, Hamlet turns out only to have written his own inability to bring matters to an end. It is no coincidence, then, that he should foresee the conclusion of his own tragedy as being the product of someone else’s script: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” ( 5.2.11 –12).

“To Tell My Story”: Unfinished Hamlet

In the last scene of the play, the sense that Hamlet’s story has been shaped by Providence—or by a playwright other than Hamlet—is very strong: the swordplay with Laertes is a theatrical imitation of dueling that becomes the real thing, sweetly knitting up the paralyzing disjunction between action and acting; at the same time, revenge is symmetrically perfected in the spectacle of Claudius choking on “a poison tempered by himself,” Laertes “justly killed with his own treachery,” and the Queen destroyed in the vicious pun that has her poisoned by Claudius’s “union.” Yet Hamlet’s consoling fatalism does not survive the final slaughter. Instead, he faces his end tormented by a sense of incompleteness, of a story still remaining to be told:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act,

Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,

Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you—

But let it be.                                     ( 5.2.366 –70)

Within a few lines Hamlet’s distinctive voice, which has dominated his own tragedy like that of no other Shakespearean hero, will be cut off in midsentence by the arrest of death—and “the rest is silence” ( 5.2.395 ).

The play is full of such unfinished, untold, or perhaps even untellable tales, from Barnardo’s interrupted story of the Ghost’s first appearance to the Player’s unfinished rendition of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido” and the violently curtailed performance of The Murder of Gonzago. In the opening scene the Ghost itself is cut off, before it can speak, by the crowing of a cock; and when it returns and speaks to Hamlet, it speaks first about a story it cannot tell:

                 But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy

 young blood . . .                   ( 1.5.18 –21)

Even the tale it is permitted to unfold is, ironically, one of murderous interruption and terrible incompleteness:

Cut off , even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

( 1.5.83 –86)

Act 5 at last produces the formal reckoning of this imperfect account, yet it leaves Hamlet once again echoing the Ghost’s agony of frustrated utterance.

But what, we might ask, can there be left to tell, beyond what we have already seen and heard? It seems to be part of the point, a last reminder of Hamlet’s elusive “mystery,” that we shall never know. The Prince has, of course, insisted that Horatio remain behind “to tell my story”; but the inadequacy of Horatio’s response only intensifies the sense of incompleteness. All that his stolid imagination can offer is that bald plot summary of “accidental judgments [and] casual slaughters,” which, as Anne Barton protests, leaves out “everything that seems important” about the play and its protagonist. 8 Nor is Fortinbras’s attempt to make “The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for [Hamlet]” ( 5.2.445 –46) any more satisfactory, for the military strongman’s cannon are no better tuned to speak for Hamlet than the player’s pipe.

It would be a mistake, of course, to underestimate the dramatic significance of Horatio’s story or of the “music and the rite of war”—these last gestures of ritual consolation—especially in a play where, beginning with the obscene confusion of Claudius’s “mirth in funeral” and including Polonius’s “hugger-mugger” interment and Ophelia’s “maimed rites,” we have seen the dead repeatedly degraded by the slighting of their funeral pomps. In this context it matters profoundly that Hamlet alone is accorded the full dignity of obsequies suited to his rank, for it signals his triumph over the oblivion to which Claudius is fittingly consigned, and, in its gesture back toward Hamlet’s story as Shakespeare has told it (so much better than Horatio does), it brings Hamlet’s story to a heroic end.

“The Undiscovered Country”: Hamlet and the Secrets of Death

How we respond to the ending of Hamlet —both as revenge drama and as psychological study—depends in part on how we respond to yet a third level of the play—that is, to Hamlet as a prolonged meditation on death. The play is virtually framed by two encounters with the dead: at one end is the Ghost, at the other a pile of freshly excavated skulls. The skulls (all but one) are nameless and silent; the Ghost has an identity (though a “questionable” one) and a voice; yet they are more alike than might at first seem. For this ghost, though invulnerable “as the air,” is described as a “dead corse,” a “ghost . . . come from the grave,” its appearance suggesting a grotesque disinterment of the buried king ( 1.4.52 –57; 1.5.139 ). The skulls for their part may be silent, but Hamlet plays upon each to draw out its own “excellent voice” (“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once”; 5.1.77 –78), just as he engineered that “miraculous organ” of the Ghost’s utterance, the “Mousetrap.”

There is a difference, however: Hamlet’s dressing up the skulls with shreds of narrative (“as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone . . . This might be the pate of a politician . . . or of a courtier . . . Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer”; 5.1.78 –101) only serves to emphasize their mocking anonymity, until the Gravedigger offers to endow one with a precise historical identity: “This same skull . . . was . . . Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” ( 5.1.186 –87). Hamlet is delighted: now memory can begin its work of loving resurrection. But how does the Gravedigger know? The answer is that of course he cannot; and try as Hamlet may to cover this bare bone with the flesh of nostalgic recollection, he cannot escape the wickedly punning reminder of “this same skull” that all skulls indeed look frightfully the same. Ironically, even Yorick’s distinctive trademark, his grin, has become indistinguishable from the mocking leer of that grand jester of the Danse Macabre , Death the Antic: “Where be your gibes now? . . . Not one now to mock your own grinning?”; so that even as he holds it, the skull’s identity appears to drain away into the anonymous memento mori sent to adorn “my lady’s” dressing table. It might as well be Alexander the Great’s; or Caesar’s; or anyone’s. It might as well be what it will one day become—a handful of clay, fit to stop a beer barrel.

It is significant that (with the trivial exception of 4.4) the graveyard scene is the only one to take place outside the confines of Claudius’s castle-prison. As the “common” place to which all stories lead, the graveyard both invites narrative and silences it. Each blank skull at once poses and confounds the question with which the tragedy itself began, “Who’s there?,” subsuming all human differences in awful likeness: “As you are now,” goes the tombstone verse, “so once was I / As I am now, so shall you be.” In the graveyard all stories collapse into one reductive history (“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust”; 5.1.216 –17). In this sense the Gravedigger is the mocking counterpart of the Player: and the houses of oblivion that gravediggers make challenge the players’ memorial art by lasting “till doomsday” ( 5.1.61 ). Hamlet shares with the Gravedigger the same easy good-fellowship he extends to the play’s other great outsider, the First Player; but the Gravedigger asserts a more sinister kind of intimacy with his claim to have begun his work “that very day that young Hamlet was born” ( 5.1.152 –53). In this moment he identifies himself as the Prince’s mortal double, the Sexton Death from the Danse Macabre who has been preparing him a grave from the moment of birth.

If there is a final secret to be revealed, then, about that “undiscovered country” on which Hamlet’s imagination broods, it is perhaps only the Gravedigger’s spade that can uncover it. For his digging lays bare the one thing we can say for certain lies hidden “within” the mortal show of the flesh—the emblems of Death himself, that Doppelgänger who shadows each of us as the mysterious Lamord ( La Mort ) shadows Laertes. If there is a better story, one that would confer on the rough matter of life the consolations of form and significance, it is, the play tells us, one that cannot finally be told; for it exists on the other side of language, to be tantalizingly glimpsed only at the point when Hamlet is about to enter the domain of the inexpressible. The great and frustrating achievement of this play, its most ingenious and tormenting trick, the source of its endlessly belabored mystery, is to persuade us that such a story might exist, while demonstrating its irreducible hiddenness. The only story Hamlet is given is that of a hoary old revenge tragedy, which he persuades himself (and us) can never denote him truly; but it is a narrative frame that nothing (not even inaction) will allow him to escape. The story of our lives, the play wryly acknowledges, is always the wrong story; but the rest, after all, is silence.

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich , as related to and edited by Solomon Volkow, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Faber, 1981), p. 84.
• See F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 1564–1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 435, 209; see also pp. 262 and 403.
• The most lucid guide to this critical labyrinth, though he deals with no work later than 1960, is probably still Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Faber, 1964).
• Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964).
• Excerpt from “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” from Poems, 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Permission for use of these lines from North by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber Limited, is also acknowledged.
• See Mack’s classic essay, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952): 502–23; Mack’s approach is significantly extended in Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
• The most balanced treatment of this and other contentious historical issues in the play is in Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
• Introduction to T. J. B. Spencer, ed., Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 52. See also James L. Calderwood’s To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Meta-drama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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Home — Guides — Hamlet — Hamlet Characters: Shakespeare’s Intriguing Personalities

by William Shakespeare

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Hamlet: Characters

Table of contents.

Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is the central character in William Shakespeare's play, "Hamlet." He is a complex character, full of contradictions and inner conflicts that make him one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures in all of literature.

Hamlet is introduced as a melancholy and grieving young man, mourning the death of his father, King Hamlet. He is deeply disturbed by his mother's hasty remarriage to his uncle, Claudius, who has now become the new king of Denmark. This sets off a series of events that ultimately lead to Hamlet's downfall.

Throughout the play, Hamlet is constantly questioning the meaning of life, the nature of reality, and the morality of his actions. He is plagued by indecision and self-doubt, which often leads him to hesitate and delay in taking action. This internal conflict is reflected in his famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be," where he contemplates the merits of living versus dying.

Despite his internal struggles, Hamlet is also a brilliant and intelligent character. He is a master of language, often using wordplay and wit to outsmart his opponents. His wit and intelligence are evident in his interactions with Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, as he outwits them at every turn.

Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia is also a significant aspect of his character. He is initially infatuated with her but later rejects her, causing her to spiral into madness. Some critics interpret this as an indication of Hamlet's misogyny, while others see it as a reflection of his distrust of women in general, as he is deeply betrayed by his mother's actions.

Despite his flaws and struggles, Hamlet is a sympathetic character. He is deeply affected by his father's death and the corruption and decay he sees in his society. He is also deeply conflicted about his duty to avenge his father's death, which ultimately leads to his tragic downfall.

In conclusion, Hamlet is a complex and multi-dimensional character who embodies many of the themes and conflicts of the play. He is a deeply troubled and introspective character, struggling with his own morality and the morality of those around him. His intelligence and wit are matched by his indecision and self-doubt, creating a fascinating and enigmatic character that continues to captivate audiences to this day.

Claudius, the antagonist of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, is a complex character with conflicting traits that make him both an interesting and terrifying figure. He is a skilled politician, a charismatic leader, and a master manipulator. However, he is also a murderer, a liar, and a coward.

From the beginning of the play, it is clear that Claudius is a skilled politician. He is intelligent, confident, and knows how to manage people. He easily gains the trust and admiration of the people of Denmark, and he is adept at handling foreign affairs. He is also a skilled public speaker, able to rally his people to support him and to project a sense of authority and competence.

At the same time, Claudius is a master manipulator. He is able to manipulate his way to the throne of Denmark by using his charm and political savvy. He also manipulates his wife, Gertrude, by convincing her to marry him shortly after her husband's death. He is a man who knows how to get what he wants, and he is not afraid to use any means necessary to achieve his goals.

Claudius's darkest trait, however, is his willingness to murder. He kills his own brother, King Hamlet, in order to become the king of Denmark. This act of regicide is the driving force behind the play's plot, as Hamlet seeks to avenge his father's death. Claudius's willingness to murder also extends to other characters in the play. He orders the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two of Hamlet's friends, and he conspires with Laertes to kill Hamlet.

Despite his many negative traits, Claudius is not a one-dimensional character. He is also capable of feeling guilt and remorse, as demonstrated in his soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 3. In this scene, he admits his guilt and prays for forgiveness, showing a human side to his character.

The relationship between Hamlet and Claudius is also complex. At first, he is friendly and welcoming towards his stepson, but as Hamlet becomes more suspicious of his uncle, Claudius becomes more hostile towards him. This tension between the two characters leads to several key moments in the play, such as the play-within-a-play scene, where Hamlet attempts to confirm his suspicions about Claudius's guilt.

In conclusion, Claudius is a complex character with many conflicting traits. He is a skilled politician and leader, a master manipulator, and a murderer. However, he is also capable of feeling guilt and remorse, and his relationship with Hamlet is multifaceted. He is a character who represents the corrupting influence of power and the dangers of unchecked ambition.

Gertrude, the queen of Denmark, is a complex and controversial character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. She is the mother of the protagonist, Prince Hamlet, and the wife of King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle. Gertrude is depicted as a sensual and passionate woman, who is torn between her love for her son and her loyalty to her husband. Her character is significant to the play as she is a catalyst for many of the events that take place.

At the beginning of the play, Gertrude is presented as a character who is deeply in love with her husband, King Hamlet. She is still grieving the death of her husband when the play opens, and her remarriage to Claudius is seen as hasty and inappropriate. However, Gertrude is also portrayed as a woman who is able to adapt to changing circumstances and is pragmatic in her approach. She quickly accepts Claudius as her new husband and defends him against Hamlet's accusations.

Throughout the play, Gertrude's actions are often ambiguous, and it is difficult to determine her true motives. She is accused by Hamlet of being complicit in her husband's murder, as she married Claudius shortly after her husband's death. However, it is unclear whether Gertrude was aware of Claudius's role in her husband's death. It is suggested that she may have been blinded by her love for Claudius and her desire for power.

Gertrude's relationship with Hamlet is complicated, and she is often caught between her loyalty to her son and her loyalty to her husband. Hamlet is deeply resentful of his mother's remarriage and sees her as a weak and immoral woman. He accuses her of being complicit in his father's murder and of being unfaithful to his memory. Gertrude, on the other hand, is torn between her love for her son and her loyalty to her husband. She is unable to understand Hamlet's anguish and is bewildered by his behavior.

Gertrude's character is further complicated by her sexuality. She is presented as a sensual and passionate woman, who enjoys the pleasures of the flesh. Her relationship with Claudius is often portrayed as incestuous, and this adds to the sense of moral ambiguity surrounding her character. Gertrude's sexuality is used as a tool by Hamlet to attack her character, and he accuses her of being a whore and a "most pernicious woman."

Despite her many flaws, Gertrude is also presented as a sympathetic character, who is caught up in the tragic events of the play. She is unable to prevent the deaths of those she loves and is ultimately a victim of the violence that surrounds her. Her final act of heroism, where she drinks from the poisoned cup intended for Hamlet, is a testament to her love for her son and her desire to protect him.

In conclusion, Gertrude is a complex and controversial character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. She is torn between her loyalty to her son and her loyalty to her husband and is often caught up in the tragic events that surround her. Her character is significant to the play as she is a catalyst for many of the events that take place, and her actions are often ambiguous and difficult to interpret. Despite her many flaws, Gertrude is ultimately a sympathetic character, who is a victim of the violence and tragedy that unfolds around her.

Polonius is one of the central characters in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. As the chief counselor to King Claudius, he plays a crucial role in the unfolding of the play's events. In this character analysis, we will examine Polonius's personality, actions, and motivations, and how they contribute to the overall themes of the play.

In Hamlet, Polonius is portrayed as a wise and respected advisor to the king, but he is also a somewhat comical character. He is often shown as being long-winded and prone to giving lengthy speeches full of platitudes and aphorisms. For instance, when he first appears in the play, he lectures his son Laertes on the dangers of excess and advises him to be true to himself. Polonius is also shown as being somewhat self-important, always eager to demonstrate his own intelligence and wisdom.

Despite these flaws, Polonius is also a well-intentioned character. He genuinely cares for his family, especially his children Laertes and Ophelia. He is concerned for Ophelia's well-being when she becomes involved with Hamlet, and he advises her to stay away from him. This advice is motivated by a desire to protect his daughter, as he believes that Hamlet's affection for her is not genuine and that he is likely to hurt her.

The role of Polonius in Hamlet is significant in several ways. First, he is the catalyst for many of the events that follow. He is responsible for sending Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in France, which leads to Hamlet's famous soliloquy about the nature of acting. He also orchestrates the plan to eavesdrop on Hamlet's conversation with Ophelia, which sets in motion the tragic events that lead to the play's climax.

In addition to his role as a plot device, Polonius also embodies several of the play's key themes. One of these themes is the nature of appearance versus reality. Polonius is often more concerned with the appearance of things than their true nature. He believes that he can control the situation by spying on his daughter and manipulating her relationship with Hamlet. However, his attempts at control ultimately lead to tragedy.

Another important theme that Polonius embodies is the corrupt nature of the court. He is a product of the corrupt system that exists at the Danish court, and his actions are motivated more by a desire for power and influence than a genuine concern for the welfare of the state. He is willing to betray his own family members in order to curry favor with the king, and this ultimately leads to his downfall.

In conclusion, Polonius is a complex character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is a well-intentioned character who genuinely cares for his family, but he is also prone to self-importance and long-winded speeches. His actions are motivated more by a desire for power and influence than a genuine concern for the welfare of the state, and he ultimately becomes a tragic figure. Through his character, Shakespeare explores several key themes, including the corrupt nature of the court and the nature of appearance versus reality.

Ophelia is a complex character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and her tragic arc serves as a commentary on the limited role that women played in society during the Elizabethan era. She is a young woman who is caught between the expectations of her father, Polonius, and the conflicting desires of Hamlet, whom she loves deeply.

At the beginning of the play, Ophelia is presented as a dutiful daughter who is obedient to her father's wishes. She agrees to reject Hamlet's advances and to avoid spending time alone with him. However, as the play progresses, it becomes clear that Ophelia is struggling to reconcile her loyalty to her father with her love for Hamlet. She is torn between her desire to please her father and her desire to follow her heart.

Ophelia's mental state deteriorates over the course of the play, and her descent into madness is a tragic consequence of the conflicting demands placed upon her. Her father's death, which is caused indirectly by Hamlet, and Hamlet's subsequent rejection of her love are too much for Ophelia to bear. Her madness is characterized by a disjointed and fragmented speech, which reflects her fractured state of mind.

The character of Ophelia in Hamlet represents the tragic fate of women who were forced to conform to societal expectations during the Elizabethan era. Ophelia is a victim of the patriarchal society in which she lives, and her tragedy is a result of the limited roles that were available to women at the time. She is a young woman who is not allowed to make her own choices or decisions, and her fate is ultimately decided by the men around her.

Another interpretation of Ophelia's character is that she represents the danger of unrequited love. Ophelia is deeply in love with Hamlet, but her love is not returned. This unrequited love drives her to madness and ultimately leads to her death. Ophelia's story serves as a warning about the dangers of love and the consequences of unrequited passion.

In conclusion, Ophelia is a complex and tragic character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Her story serves as a commentary on the limited roles that women played in society during the Elizabethan era and the dangers of unrequited love. She is a victim of the patriarchal society in which she lives and ultimately pays the price for the conflicting demands placed upon her. Despite her limited role in the play, Ophelia's tragic arc has made her one of the most memorable characters in all of Shakespeare's works.

The Ghost is a mysterious and powerful character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, appearing only a few times but playing a crucial role in the plot. As the spirit of Hamlet's deceased father, he sets in motion the main conflict of the play, and his appearance and commands drive Hamlet's actions.

The Ghost's appearance in the play is initially met with suspicion and fear, as he appears to the guards on the watch, then to Hamlet himself. However, he quickly establishes his credibility by revealing information that only Hamlet's father could know. He tells Hamlet that he was murdered by his own brother, Claudius, and commands him to seek revenge. This revelation sets Hamlet on a path of self-destruction as he becomes obsessed with avenging his father's death.

The Ghost is a powerful figure, not only because he is a supernatural being, but also because of his authority as Hamlet's father. He commands Hamlet's obedience and loyalty, urging him to seek revenge against his uncle. His appearance and commands carry a sense of urgency and danger, making it clear that failure to carry out his wishes would have dire consequences.

However, the Ghost's character is not without ambiguity. Some critics argue that he is a product of Hamlet's imagination, a manifestation of his grief and desire for vengeance. Others suggest that he may be a demon or a malevolent spirit, tempting Hamlet to commit murder and leading him down a path of damnation.

The Ghost's influence on Hamlet is profound, and the Prince's actions are shaped by his father's commands. However, the Ghost's presence is also a source of torment and confusion for Hamlet, as he struggles to reconcile his duty to his father with his own doubts and fears. In some ways, the Ghost represents the past and the weight of history, pressing down on Hamlet and preventing him from moving forward.

Overall, the Ghost analysis shows he is a complex and mysterious character, central to the plot of Hamlet. His role as a catalyst for the play's main conflict, and his power as a supernatural and paternal figure, make him a crucial presence. However, his ambiguous nature and the questions surrounding his true identity and intentions add an extra layer of intrigue and mystery to the play, highlighting Shakespeare's mastery of character and plot.

Laertes is a character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet who plays a crucial role in the plot's climax. He is the son of Polonius, the lord chamberlain of King Claudius's court. Laertes is a passionate and impulsive young man who is consumed by a desire for revenge following his father's death. In this character analysis, we will examine the different aspects of Laertes's personality, his motivations, and his actions.

Laertes is introduced early in the play when he is preparing to leave Denmark to study in France. During his conversation with his father Polonius, it becomes clear that Laertes is a young man with a lot of energy and enthusiasm for life. He is also fiercely loyal to his family and his country. Laertes's love for his sister, Ophelia, is evident in his advice to her to be careful in her relationship with Hamlet, whom he perceives as a potential threat to her virtue.

Laertes's character undergoes a dramatic change when he learns of his father's murder. He is filled with rage and is willing to do anything to avenge his father's death. This marks a turning point in his personality, and he becomes single-minded in his desire for revenge. He seeks out Claudius and demands to know who is responsible for his father's death, but he is easily manipulated by the king, who convinces him that Hamlet is the one responsible. This is an example of Laertes's impulsiveness, as he is quick to act without considering all the facts.

Laertes's anger towards Hamlet is compounded when he learns of Ophelia's death. He is heartbroken by her passing and is determined to make Hamlet pay for his role in her demise. In this way, Laertes is similar to Hamlet in his desire for revenge. However, while Hamlet is hesitant and indecisive, Laertes is decisive and takes action immediately. He conspires with Claudius to murder Hamlet in a duel, using a poisoned sword.

In the final act of the play, Laertes and Hamlet engage in a deadly duel, which results in both of their deaths. Laertes's actions throughout the play demonstrate his loyalty, passion, and impulsiveness. His motivations are driven by a desire for revenge and a sense of honor, but his haste and impatience lead to his downfall. In the end, Laertes serves as a foil to Hamlet, highlighting the differences in their personalities and approaches to life.

In conclusion, Laertes is an important character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is initially introduced as a loyal and passionate young man, but his character undergoes a dramatic change when he learns of his father's death. His desire for revenge consumes him and leads to his downfall. Laertes's character serves as a contrast to Hamlet's indecisiveness, highlighting the dangers of impulsiveness and haste.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor characters in Hamlet who are old friends of the prince. They are summoned by King Claudius to spy on Hamlet and discover the cause of his apparent madness. These characters serve as a symbol of betrayal and manipulation, as they are willing to sacrifice their friendship with Hamlet to serve their own interests. They are portrayed as weak and easily manipulated by those in power, as they blindly follow Claudius's orders without questioning their morality. Ultimately, their fate is sealed when Hamlet discovers their betrayal and switches the letter that orders their execution with one that orders the execution of the messengers who were sent to England with them. In this way, their death serves as a symbol of the ultimate consequence of betrayal and manipulation.

Horatio is a minor character in Hamlet who serves as Hamlet's closest friend and confidant. He is portrayed as intelligent, loyal, and level-headed, providing a contrast to the other characters in the play who are often driven by their emotions. Horatio is a voice of reason throughout the play, providing a sense of stability and grounding in the midst of the chaos and madness that surrounds him. His role in the play is primarily to serve as a witness and commentator on the events that unfold, as well as to provide support and advice to Hamlet. Horatio's loyalty to Hamlet is unwavering, and he is one of the few characters in the play who remains alive at the end. In this way, the character of Horatio in Hamlet serves as a symbol of the power of loyalty and friendship in the face of tragedy and loss.

Fortinbras is a minor character in Hamlet who serves as the prince of Norway and a foil to Hamlet. Fortinbras, like Hamlet , is a young man who is seeking to avenge the death of his father. However, unlike Hamlet, Fortinbras is depicted as a strong and decisive leader who is willing to take action to achieve his goals. Fortinbras is portrayed as a symbol of honor, duty, and strength, contrasting with the indecisiveness and weakness of many of the other characters in the play. His appearance in the final scene, where he takes over the kingdom of Denmark, serves as a symbol of the restoration of order and the return to stability after the chaos and tragedy of the play.

Yorick is a minor character in Hamlet who is a jester and a friend of Hamlet's father. Although Yorick is dead before the events of the play, he is frequently referenced by the characters as a symbol of the transience of life and the inevitability of death. Yorick's skull, which is famously held by Hamlet in the graveyard scene, serves as a powerful symbol of mortality and the fragility of human life. The role of Yorick in Hamlet is primarily as a symbol rather than an active character, but his presence serves as a reminder of the ultimate fate that awaits all of the characters in the play.

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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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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 Sample Answer: Claudius

“claudius can be seen as both a heartless villain and a character with some redeeming qualities in the play, hamlet”. .

This essay discusses the evidence in the play for viewing Claudius as both a heartless villain and as possessing some redeeming qualities. It follows the trajectory the audience takes as they are initially presented with an efficient, diplomatic and seemingly caring man. As the play progresses, the audience is provided with evidence of the villainous characteristics of the King. The question to be considered is whether these redeeming qualities outweigh those of a heartless villain. But it isn’t as simple as an equation of good versus evil. Indeed, Shakespeare’s work survived for many generations because of the realism and depth of insight with which he describes the dichotomy between good and evil in a single person: Claudius’s good side allows him to be so evil.

Claudius appears to show concern for his nephew as he asks ‘how is it that the clouds still hang on you?’. However, his reference to Hamlet as his son could be seen as mischievous and heartless. Claudius appears to observers to be supportive of Hamlet as he considers Hamlet’s actions to be ‘sweet and commendable’. When Hamlet isolates Claudius in his reply to Gertrude: ‘I shall in all my best obey you, madam’, Claudius claims to consider it ‘a loving and a fair reply’. On the surface to the unaware audience, Claudius appears to be doing his utmost to be civil and generous to his nephew. However, given what we know as the play develops, Claudius clearly has the attributes of someone who has the ability to be cunning and mischievous.

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: April 23, 2016
• Post category: Hamlet

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Critic’s Notebook

Two Shakespearean Triumphs in Paris, or a Plague on Both Their Houses?

New productions of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” follow a French tradition of adapting familiar works. The results are innovative, and sometimes cryptic.

By Laura Cappelle

The critic Laura Cappelle saw the shows in Paris.

Two Paris playhouses, both alike in dignity, putting on rival new Shakespeare productions.

Thus expectations were high for a springtime face-off — with contemporary stagings of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” — between the Comédie-Française, France’s top permanent company, and the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, the Left Bank’s most venerable theater.

The results certainly felt French. The country has long been a haven for concept-driven theater-makers, and the two directors involved, Silvia Costa and Christiane Jatahy, have no qualms about cutting and splicing the Bard’s plays in experimental, sometimes cryptic ways.

At the Comédie-Française, Costa’s “Macbeth” edits the two dozen named characters down to only eight actors and leans heavily into religious symbolism. In “Hamlet,” Jatahy goes so far as to keep Ophelia alive. Far from going mad, Ophelia climbs down from the stage and exits through the auditorium after declaring: “I died all these years. This year, I won’t die.”

Jatahy, a Brazilian director who has a significant following in France, has performed this sort of bait-and-switch with classics before. Her adaptations of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (“What If They Went to Moscow?”) and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (“Julia”) reworked the plays’ story lines and characters from a feminist perspective, lending greater weight to female roles.

At the Odéon, Jatahy also cast a woman, the outstanding Clotilde Hesme, as Hamlet, explaining in a playbill interview that her goal was to refocus the story on three female characters: Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. And while a female Hamlet is hardly news — the French star Sarah Bernhardt performed the role back in 1886 — Jatahy’s premise looks promising for the first few scenes.

Slouching on a couch, Hesme cuts a grave figure as she rewinds a video: the message Hamlet receives from her murdered father, here projected on a large scrim. After the ghost blames his brother, Claudius, the scene transitions seamlessly into a wedding — that of Claudius and the widowed Gertrude, who seals her new life with a karaoke rendition of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Servane Ducorps plays Gertrude with a chirpy energy that contrasts nicely with Hesme’s coolness. Yet as Jatahy’s “Hamlet” progresses, their interactions rarely ring true, in no small part because the characters have all been transplanted into a humdrum contemporary interior. There, Gertrude and Claudius (a quasi-affable Matthieu Sampeur) try to play happy blended family. They sing sweet nothings to each other over the kitchen table, while Hamlet sulks in the corner.

It’s “Hamlet” as a 21st-century parent-child drama, with the odd interjection from Ophelia and her father, Polonius, who speak Portuguese — an attempt to signal their foreignness that instead makes them look like visitors from another play. Similarly, while Isabel Abreu brings an earnest intensity to the role of Ophelia, her relationship with Hesme’s Hamlet never settles into familiarity.

Her lucky escape is equally contrived. In the playbill, Jatahy says that in choosing not to die, Ophelia “refuses to be a toy in the face of patriarchal violence.” Although Abreu delivers the inserted text bravely, it is such a jarring volte-face for her character.

According to the Odéon’s publicity material, 85 percent of the text in this version is from Shakespeare’s original “Hamlet.” Yet it rarely feels as if Jatahy trusts the Bard. Instead, she wills the characters to escape his world, in an act of feminist defiance without a clear target.

Across the Seine, Costa also follows her singular vision for “Macbeth” — her second production for the Comédie-Française after an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s “A Girl’s Story” — to the bitter end.

Her staging of the Scottish play opens with an arresting tableau. Lady Macbeth sits hunched over, her face hidden under a disheveled mane. As she rips out clumps of her hair, a portrait of Macbeth, her husband, starts spinning on a wall behind her — until an invisible knife seems to cut into the painting.

It’s an ominous way to position Lady Macbeth, as a shadow addition to the three witches who prophesy that Macbeth will be king. When the trio appears shortly afterward to deliver their message, a giant ring materializes above the empty stage. In true “Lord of the Rings” fashion, it then descends upon Macbeth (Noam Morgensztern), metaphorically anointing him even as recorded whispers of “murder” fill the Comédie-Française’s auditorium.

So far, so impressive. But Costa, an Italian native who has collaborated with the provocative director Romeo Castellucci and shares his taste for visual symbolism, is so focused on the imagery that “Macbeth” loses dramatic steam.

Compressing all of the named characters into just eight roles is a dubious choice given the resources of the Comédie-Française’s permanent ensemble, and it leads to a sense of monotony. The three witches (Suliane Brahim, Jennifer Decker and Birane Ba) occasionally — and confusingly — double as random soldiers and messengers, and when the Macbeths go on their murderous spree, there is no one around to react to the destabilization of the kingdom.

Perplexingly, heavy-handed Roman Catholic allegories also seep into this “Macbeth” midway through, paralyzing the action. The second half of the production takes place in front of a bulky backdrop showing a winged altarpiece that is entirely blacked out. The banquet scene, in which Macbeth is haunted by his victims’ ghosts, is confined to a small confessional.

In that scene, King Duncan, whose death paves the way for Macbeth’s ascension, hovers like God surrounded by angels and martyrs. Macduff, who eventually restores order by killing Macbeth, is costumed to look every inch like Jesus, down to a wound in his side that he reveals theatrically by opening his white robe.

There are Christian themes in “Macbeth,” but Costa takes them so far that the characters disappear behind them. One of the last scenes shows Jesus-Macduff overcoming Macbeth simply by pointing a finger to his forehead, as if performing a miracle.

As a result, the production also undercuts Julie Sicard’s eerily shameless performance as Lady Macbeth. There is no doubt throughout that she has the upper hand: In fact, one scene even makes that point a little too forcefully, when she pretends to breastfeed a childlike Macbeth and hands him a pacifier.

The moment is effective in telegraphing a message, yet so dramatically improbable that the characters start to feel like pawns in the director’s game. “Macbeth,” like “Hamlet” at the Odéon, is too multilayered to be subsumed into a single grand idea. In Paris, at least, it wasn’t to be.

An earlier version of this article misidentified Ophelia’s father. He is Polonius, not Claudius.

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In riveting Court production, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ captures worries, wit of Hamlet’s stooges

Nate burger and erik hellman have a chemistry that crackles in charles newell’s staging, which plays up the meta-theatrics of tom stoppard’s absurdist take on shakespeare..

In “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the title characters (Erik Hellman, left, and Nate Burger, right) banter with the leader of a traveling acting troupe (Lorenzo Rush Jr.).

Michael Brosilow

Imagine a 95-minute mashup between the trippy, alternate realities of “Black Mirror,” and the vaudevillian patter/existential angst of “Waiting for Godot,” splashed with the haunting poetry of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” That will give you a sense of the myriad forces at play in Court Theatre’s riveting production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

Directed by Charles Newell in his last show as Court's artistic director, Stoppard’s inverted take on “Hamlet” is at once absurdly funny and — as it spins deeper and deeper into questions of free will versus destiny, what lies beyond the known universe and what becomes of us after we die — tantalizing and terrifying.

In “Hamlet,” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters, interchangeable courtiers within the royal Denmark court. Stoppard puts the pair front and center, sending Prince Hamlet and his fratricidal, incestuous family to the periphery.

In “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," the titular duo is in the same predicament as scientists trying to suss out what lies beyond the known universe or theologians trying to explain the length of eternity: They are outside the only world they can conceive, the world contained within the pages of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

But you don’t need to know “Hamlet” to appreciate “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” (Spoiler alert if you haven’t read the title: Everybody dies.)

Stoppard’s text fills in the story with crystalline clarity. As in “The Lion King,” it involves a king who is murdered by a jealous brother. The brother Claudius then marries the king’s widow Gertrude and takes the crown for himself. The rightful king’s son is Prince Hamlet, and his quest to avenge his father drives the narrative.

Rosencrantz (Nate Burger) and Guildenstern (Erik Hellman) are swept up in this web like pawns in a tidal wave. They’re ordered by newly installed King Claudius (Amir Abdullah) first to spy on Prince Hamlet (Blake Hamilton Currie) and then to deliver Hamlet to England, where he’ll be murdered. The plot goes awry after Hamlet uncovers it and comes up with a counter-scheme that sacrifices Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead.

Crucially, “Hamlet” also contains a play-within-the-play performed by a troupe of traveling players who blur the line between reality and pretend as they act out a story of regicide and fratricide that mirrors events at the Danish court with the accuracy of a documentary.

In Newell's memorable, cinematic staging, the play-in-the-play becomes a nightmare in crimson and flickering darkness, a bloody dumb show rendered via shadow play.

Newell plays up the meta-theatrics — when the fourth wall wobbles and the world of the play bleeds into actual reality of watching the play — to dazzling effect. The play-within-the-play is rehearsed against a massive, blood-red brick wall where Court Theatre’s logo is faintly silhouetted. John Culbert’s set design also features tiers of diaphanous curtains that slide back and forth, thin scrims that barely divide the world of the living from the world of the dead, the real and the pretend.

At times, lighting designer Keith Parham brings the house lights fully up or plunges the stage into darkness, sending the audience into brief, blinking confusion that mirrors that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as they try to navigate scenes beyond the pages of “Hamlet.”

Yet even fathoms down in its brain-twisting, soul-searching depths, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” bubbles with wit.

Burger and Hellman have a chemistry that crackles, sparks and pops whether they’re bickering Abbott and Costello-style about the law of probability or clinging to each other like children awakened by a nightmare they can’t quite remember.

The supporting cast moves with the ease of mist as it brings to life both the Danish royals and the traveling troupe of actors playing their murderous doppelgangers. As The Player, Lorenzo Rush Jr. brings an enigmatic, omniscient agility to the stage, addressing matters of mortality with chilling, pragmatic fatality. Blake Hamilton Currie’s Hamlet is extraordinary: His first line is just a sound — a cross between a wail and a roar that captures all of Hamlet’s dire confusion and fear.

Amir Abdullah delivers a menacing, alluring King Claudius, while Rob Lindley turns the verbose Polonius into a gently persnickety soul who — like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — has no real agency over his life.

Newell’s garotte-tight pacing keeps “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” moving with furious intent from start to finish. And in reclaiming the lives of two largely disregarded characters, the production opens up a marvelous alternate universe to “Hamlet” and all that it explores.