Themes in Hamlet

Themes in Hamlet

1. Revenge

   • There are ghosts, family drama, and a vow of enacting revenge: Hamlet is all set to present a story with a tradition of bloody revenge… and then it doesn't. It is interesting that Hamlet is a revenge tragedy driven by a protagonist unable to commit to the act of revenge. It is Hamlet’s inability to avenge the murder of his father that drives the plot forwards. During the course of the play, several different people want revenge on somebody. However, the story is not at all about Hamlet seeking vengeance for his father's murder—that's resolved quickly during Act 5. Instead, most of the play is revolved around Hamlet's inner struggle to take action. Thus, the play focus is on calling into question the validity and purpose of revenge than in satisfying the audience's lust for blood.
   • There are ghosts, family drama, and a vow of enacting revenge: Hamlet is all set to present a story with a tradition of bloody revenge… and then it doesn't. It is interesting that Hamlet is a revenge tragedy driven by a protagonist unable to commit to the act of revenge. It is Hamlet’s inability to avenge the murder of his father that drives the plot forwards. During the course of the play, several different people want revenge on somebody. However, the story is not at all about Hamlet seeking vengeance for his father's murder—that's resolved quickly during Act 5. Instead, most of the play is revolved around Hamlet's inner struggle to take action. Thus, the play focus is on calling into question the validity and purpose of revenge than in satisfying the audience's lust for blood.
   • ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love … Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder … If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.' Act 1.5 ‘Haste me to know ‘t, that I, with wings as swift/As meditation or the thoughts of love/May sweep to my revenge.' Act 1.5
   • Action and Inaction
     • Hamlet fits in a literary tradition called the revenge play, in which a man must take revenge against those who have in some way wronged him. Yet Hamlet turns the revenge play on its head in an ingenious way: Hamlet, the man seeking revenge, can't actually bring himself to take revenge. For reason after reason, some clear to the audience, some not, he delays. Hamlet's delay has been a subject of debate from the day the play was first performed, and he is often held up as an example of the classic "indecisive" person, who thinks to much and acts too little. But Hamlet is more complicated and interesting than such simplistic analysis would indicate. Because while it's true that Hamlet fails to act while many other people do act, it's not as if the actions of the other characters in the play work out. Claudius's plots backfire, Gertrude marries her husband's murderer and dies for it, Laertes is manipulated and killed by his own treachery, and on, and on, and on. In the end, Hamlet does not provide a conclusion about the merits of action versus inaction. Instead, the play makes the deeply cynical suggestion that there is only one result of both action and inaction—death.
   • Critical views
     • "It is not from any want of attachment to his father or abhorence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination on reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining upon his schemes of vengence than to put them into immediate practice." William Hazlitt "He is the prince of philosophical speculation; and because he cannot have his revenge perfect according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines it altogether." William Hazlit" [Melacholy] accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction" A.C.Bradley

2. Appearance vs. Reality

   • In Act 1, scene 2 of Hamlet, Gertrude asks why Hamlet is still in mourning two months after his father died: "Why seems it so particular with thee?" Hamlet responds: "Seems, madam? Nay, it is, I know not 'seems.'" (1.2.75-76). The difference between "seems" (appearance) and "is" (reality) is crucial in Hamlet. Every character is constantly trying to figure out what the other characters think, as opposed to what those characters are pretending to think. The characters try to figure each other out by using deception of their own, such as spying and plotting. But Hamlet takes it a step further. He not only investigates other people, he also peers into his own soul and asks philosophical and religious questions about life and death. Hamlet's obsession with what's real has three main effects: 1) he becomes so caught up in the search for reality that he ceases to be able to act; 2) in order to prove what's real and what isn't Hamlet himself must hide his "reality" behind an "appearance" of madness; 3) the more closely Hamlet looks, the less real and coherent everything seems to be. Many analyses of Hamlet focus only on the first effect, Hamlet's indecisiveness. But the second two effects are just as important. The second shows that the relationship between appearance and reality is indistinct. The third suggests that the world is founded on fundamental inconsistencies that most people overlook, and that it is this failure to recognize inconsistencies that allows them to act. Hamlet's fatal flaw isn't that he's wrong to see uncertainty in everything, but that he's right.
   • Madness
     • Hamlet's madness is deeply ambiguous. Whereas previous revenge tragedy protagonists are unambiguously insane, Hamlet plays with the idea of insanity, putting on "an antic disposition," as he says, for some not-perfectly-clear reason. Of course, there is a practical advantage to appearing mad. In Shakespeare's source for the plot of Hamlet, "Amneth" (as the legendary hero is known) feigns madness in order to avoid the suspicion of the fratricidal king as he plots his revenge. But Hamlet's feigned madness is not so simple as this. His performance of madness, rather than aiding his revenge, almost distracts him from it, as he spends the great majority of the play exhibiting very little interest in pursuing the ghost's mission even after he has proven, via "The Mouse Trap," that Claudius is indeed guilty as sin. No wonder, then, that Hamlet's madness has been a resilient point of critical controversy since the seventeenth century. The traditional question is perhaps the least interesting one to ask of his madness -- is he really insane or is he faking it? 
     • Hamlet's madness is deeply ambiguous. Whereas previous revenge tragedy protagonists are unambiguously insane, Hamlet plays with the idea of insanity, putting on "an antic disposition," as he says, for some not-perfectly-clear reason. Of course, there is a practical advantage to appearing mad. In Shakespeare's source for the plot of Hamlet, "Amneth" (as the legendary hero is known) feigns madness in order to avoid the suspicion of the fratricidal king as he plots his revenge. But Hamlet's feigned madness is not so simple as this. His performance of madness, rather than aiding his revenge, almost distracts him from it, as he spends the great majority of the play exhibiting very little interest in pursuing the ghost's mission even after he has proven, via "The Mouse Trap," that Claudius is indeed guilty as sin. No wonder, then, that Hamlet's madness has been a resilient point of critical controversy since the seventeenth century. The traditional question is perhaps the least interesting one to ask of his madness -- is he really insane or is he faking it? 
   • Critical Views
     •   My thesis about the play is that its leading theme is the relationship of appearance and reality—that its dilemma, or the series of dilemmas it poses for us, so to speak, is the difficulty of distinguishing between the actuality and the plausible appearance of wisdom or virtue or right action.- Edgar Johnson     “Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity.”  Samuel Jackson

3. Women

   • Hamlet's view
     • There are two important issues regarding women in Hamlet: how Hamlet sees women and women's social position. Hamlet's view of women is decidedly dark. In fact, the few times that Hamlet's pretend madness seems to veer into actual madness occur when he gets furious at women. Gertrude's marriage to Claudius has convinced Hamlet that women are untrustworthy, that their beauty is a cover for deceit and sexual desire. For Hamlet, women are living embodiments of appearance's corrupt effort to eclipse reality.
   • Social standing
     • As for women's social position, its defining characteristic is powerlessness. Gertrude's quick marriage to Claudius, though immoral, is also her only way to maintain her status. Ophelia has even fewer options. While Hamlet waits to seek revenge for his father's death, Ophelia, as a woman, can't act—all she can do is wait for Laertes to return and take his revenge. Ophelia's predicament is symbolic of women's position in general in Hamlet: they are completely dependent on men.  
   • Critical views
     •  Poor Ophelia!" wrote Anna Jameson. "Oh, far too soft, too good, too fair to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life!"  Whereas the murder of his father evokes in him indignation, and a plain recognition of his obvious duty to avenge it, his mother's guilty conduct awakes in him the intensest horror.- Ernest Jones   “He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty.” Samuel Jackson       

4. Religion, Honor, and Revenge

   • In Hamlet, the codes of conduct are largely defined by religion and an aristocratic code that demands honor and revenge if honor has been soiled.
   • Social Constraints
     • Vengeance, or revenge — the taking of retribution for a perceived injustice or harmful act — is directly opposed to ideas of mercy, forgiveness and grace. Consequently in Christian theology it is seen as entirely the wrong response to an injury.  "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!" Act 1.2 As Hamlet actually begins to pursue revenge against Claudius, he discovers that the codes of conduct themselves don't fit together. Religion actually opposes revenge, which would mean that taking revenge could endanger Hamlet's own soul. In other words, Hamlet discovers that the codes of conduct on which society is founded are contradictory. In such a world, Hamlet suggests, the reasons for revenge become muddy, and the idea of justice confused.
   • Critical Views
     •  Theories of tragedy are many, but common to almost all is a basic pattern that fits Hamlet. Man in some way hurls himself against the barricades that confine him, whether of family or society or universal order or faith. In some way he defies the established code—challenges it, questions it, tests it—and is ultimately shattered by it. In the struggle, we see his greatness, but we know that he must go down. In the truly great tragedies, the tragic hero at his fall in some way attains a new awareness of the mystery of life and of his own role in that mystery. Thus the tragic self stands at the end inviolate in a new dignity. This applies no less to Hamlet than to Oedipus and King Lear. - Eleanor Prosser.   

5. Corruption, Death

   • In medieval times people believed that the health of a nation was connected to the legitimacy of its king. In Hamlet, Denmark is often described as poisoned, diseased, or corrupt under Claudius's leadership. As visible in the nervous soldiers on the ramparts in the first scene and the commoners outside the castle who Claudius fears might rise up in rebellion, even those who don't know that Claudius murdered Old Hamlet sense the corruption of Denmark and are disturbed. It is as if the poison Claudius poured into Old Hamlet's ear has spread through Denmark itself. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Act 1.4
   • Hamlet's view
     • For Hamlet himself there is a growing awareness of his mortality and coming death as the play progresses. Hamlet only seems comfortable with things that are dead: he reveres his father, claims to love Ophelia once she's dead, and handles Yorick's skull with tender care. No, what disgusts him is life: his mother's sexuality, women wearing makeup to hide their age, worms feeding on a corpse, people lying to get their way. By the end of the play, Hamlet argues that death is the one true reality, and he seems to view all of life as "appearance" doing everything it can—from seeking power, to lying, to committing murder, to engaging in passionate and illegitimate sex—to hide from that reality.