HAMLET

HAMLET

1. Morality

   • Realising and acknowledging your faults and what you've done wrong is the only way you can improve who you are
   • A play about trying to be better human beings

2. Duty

   • To the ghost/father/ex-king
     • for honour - to avenge his late father, the ex-king of Denmark
       • eager to take immediate revenge for his father's murder
         • "Hast me to know't, that I with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge."
   • To Denmark
     • As the prince of denmark - to protect it etc
       • "That ever I was born to set it right"
   • To himself
     • human conscience
     • an eye for an eye?
     • Is revenge right?

3. Concealment and deception

   • Madness
     • "antic-disposition"
   • Shakes's own meta-theatricality demonstrates the way ironically deception or disguise can prompt the truth
     • "Mousetrap"
       • a play to "catch the conscious of the King"
   • "Seeming"

4. Corruption

   • Of Denmark
     • "an unweeded garden that grows to seed"
   • of Hamlet
     • Corrupted/blinded by revenge - loss of morality
   • Can lead to chaos

5. Revenge

   • Revenge is a futile attempt in trying to find balance - we can not control what is out of our hands
   • impulse vs strategic action vs inaction
     • Hamlet contrast to Laertes
   • Events
     • Questions his action or lack of of revenge soliloquy - how does fiction evoke so much emotion (after the players leave)
     • So keen to act on his revenge when the ghost speaks of his murder - rage consumes him, blinds him of morality
     • Visits Fortinbras army, witnesses their loyalty, realises the value of human life, futility of war, yet he succumbs to revenge .... "we defy augury"
   • Hamlet struggles with the morality of revenge
     • Shakespeare uses Hamlet's soliloquies as a way to communicate the conflict in Hamlet around to revenge or not to revenge. They offer the audience insight into his inner turmoil and the way that he struggles to decide what to do