HAMLET’S THEMES (part 1)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a revenge tragedy but being by the mature Shakespeare, it is

very much more than that. Nevertheless, the play hangs on the skeleton of the then
fashionable revenge story – in this case, a young man told by his late father’s ghost
that he has been murdered by his brother and so, according to convention, the young
man has the obligation to seek and achieve revenge. There is no doubt that in that
sense, Hamlet is the simple story of a man avenging his father’s death. It is in the
telling of that story, though, that Shakespeare made this play what is so often
described as the most famous play ever written.

Hamlet is a play about so many things that they can’t be reckoned. Those things that
the play is about are the themes. One can name them as themes, but it should be
remembered that all each Hamlet theme interacts and resounds with all the others.

Here are brief accounts of a selection of the major Hamlet themes of revenge,
corruption, religion, politics, appearance and reality, and women.

6 MAJOR THEMES IN HAMLET

The theme of revenge in Hamlet

There are two young men bent on avenging their father’s death in this play. Hamlet
and Laertes are both on the same mission, and while Hamlet is pondering his approach
to the problem Laertes is hot on his heels, determined to kill him as Hamlet has killed
his father, Polonius. This is, therefore, a double revenge story. Shakespeare examines
the practice of revenge by having two entirely different approaches to it – the hot-
headed abandon of Laertes and the philosophical, cautious approach by Hamlet. The
two strands run parallel – invoking comparisons, each one throwing light on the other
– until the young men’s duel and both their deaths. The revenge theme feeds into the
religious element of the play as Hamlet is conflicted by his Christian aversion to killing
someone and his duty to avenge his father’s death, whereas it is not a consideration
for Laertes, whose duty is clear to him, and he acts on it immediately.
The theme of corruption
Corruption is a major concern in this play. The text is saturated with images of
corruption, in several forms – decay, death, poison. From the very first moments of the
play the images start and set the atmosphere of corruption which is going to grow as
Shakespeare explores this theme. The tone is set when Marcellus says, ‘Something is
rotten in the state of Denmark,’ after seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. What
Shakespeare is doing here, and in using the image structure of corruption, is
addressing the broadly held view that a nation’s health is connected to the legitimacy
of its king. Here we have the ghost of a murdered king, and his murderer – a decidedly
illegitimate king – is sitting on his throne. All through the play, Hamlet is preoccupied
with rot and corruption – both of the body and the soul, reflecting the way in which
society is destroyed by the corruption of its inner institutions – in this case, the court,
which is the government.

Decay, rot and mould are always in Hamlet’s mind, and his language is full of those
images – ‘an unweeded garden that grows to seed – things rank and gross possess it,’
and countless images of death and disease. He hides Polonius’ body in a place where it
will decay rapidly and stink out the castle. It’s an image of the corruption in secret
places that is going to contaminate the whole country.

The theme of religion

Religion has an impact on the actions of the characters in this play. Hamlet’s ‘to be or
not to be’ soliloquy outlines his religious thinking about suicide. He declines to kill
Claudius while he is praying for fear of sending him to heaven when he should be going
to hell. Hamlet believes, too, that ‘there is a destiny that shapes our ends.’

One of the most important things of all in this play is the Christian idea of making a
sacrifice to achieve healing. Hamlet is Christ-like in his handling of the crisis. The court
is rotten with corruption and the people in it are almost all involved in plotting and
scheming against others. Hamlet’s way of dealing with it is to wait and watch as all the
perpetrators fall into their own traps –‘hauled by their own petards,’ as he puts it. All
he has to do is be ready – like Christ. ‘The readiness is all,’ he says. And then, all around
him, the corruption collapses in on itself and the court is purified. Like Christ, though,
he has to be sacrificed to achieve that, and he is, leaving a scene of renewal and hope.
The Hamlet theme of politics
Hamlet is a political drama. Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his father, the king. He has
subsequently done Hamlet out of his right of succession and become king. Hamlet’s
mother has married the king while the rest of the palace is engaged in palatial
intrigues, leading to wider conspiracies and murders. The king, Claudius, determined to
safeguard his position in the face of the threat Hamlet presents, plots in several ways
to kill Hamlet. Polonius plots against Hamlet to ingratiate himself with Claudius.
Characters, including Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, spy on each other. This is all to do
with power and the quest to achieve and hold it.

The theme of appearance and reality

This is a major theme in every one of Shakespeare’s plays. The text of Hamlet is
saturated with references to the gap that exists between how things seem to be and
how they really are. Very little in this play is really as it seems. That is bound to be so in
a play in which there are so many murderous plots and schemes by those who, on the
surface, strive to appear innocent, like Claudius, who, behind his charismatic smile, is a
damned villain. He is, as Hamlet puts it, a ‘smiling villain.’ Although Ophelia loves
Hamlet, she pretends to spurn his affections. Hamlet pretends to be mad so that he
can explore the ghost’s assertion that Claudius killed him. All the characters, in one
way or another, are hiding their true intentions.

What makes this theme particularly interesting and different in this play is that as the
play develops the gap between appearance and reality narrows by the characters
becoming more like the masks they are using than any reality that may lie behind that
so the identities they have assumed eventually become their realities.

The theme of women

For much of the play, Hamlet is in a state of agitation. It is when he is talking to either
of the two female characters that he is most agitated – so much so that he is driven to
violence against them. He cares about both but does not trust either. He feels his
mother, Gertrude, has let him down by her ‘o’er hasty marriage’ to Claudius. To him, it
means that she didn’t really love his father. In the case of Ophelia, he is suspicious that
she is part of the palace plot against him.
Both women die in this play. Ophelia is driven mad by the treatment she receives from
the three men – Claudius, Polonius and Hamlet – and takes her own life. Gertrude’s
death is more complex because it raises the question: how far is she responsible for
the corruption that Hamlet has to deal with?

Whilst the play features the meeting and falling in love of the two main protagonists,
to say that love is a theme of Romeo and Juliet is an oversimplification. Rather,
Shakespeare structures Romeo and Juliet around several contrasting ideas, with
several themes expressed as opposites. To say that the tension between love and hate
is a major theme in Romeo and Juliet gets us closer to what the play is about. These –
and other – opposing ideas reverberate with each other and are intertwined through
the text.

HAMLET’S THEMES (PART II)

The Impossibility of Certainty

What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays (and maybe from every play written
before it) is that the action we expect to see, particularly from Hamlet himself, is
continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge about
what he is doing. This play poses many questions that other plays would simply take
for granted. Can we have certain knowledge about ghosts? Is the ghost what it appears
to be, or is it really a misleading fiend? Does the ghost have reliable knowledge about
its own death, or is the ghost itself deluded? Moving to more earthly matters: How can
we know for certain the facts about a crime that has no witnesses? Can Hamlet know
the state of Claudius’s soul by watching his behaviour? If so, can he know the facts of
what Claudius did by observing the state of his soul? Can Claudius (or the audience)
know the state of Hamlet’s mind by observing his behaviour and listening to his
speech? Can we know whether our actions will have the consequences we want them
to have? Can we know anything about the afterlife? Many people have seen Hamlet as
a play about indecisiveness, and thus about Hamlet’s failure to act appropriately. It
might be more interesting to consider that the play shows us how many uncertainties
our lives are built upon, and how many unknown quantities are taken for granted
when people act or when they evaluate one another’s actions.

The Complexity of Action

Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. How is it possible to
take reasonable, effective, purposeful action? In Hamlet, the question of how to act is
affected not only by rational considerations, such as the need for certainty, but also by
emotional, ethical, and psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the
idea that it’s even possible to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act,
he prefers to do it blindly, recklessly, and violently. The other characters obviously
think much less about “action” in the abstract than Hamlet does and are therefore less
troubled about the possibility of acting effectively. They simply act as they feel is
appropriate. But in some sense, they prove that Hamlet is right, because all of their
actions miscarry. Claudius possesses himself of queen and crown through bold action,
but his conscience torments him, and he is beset by threats to his authority (and, of
course, he dies). Laertes resolves that nothing will distract him from acting out his
revenge, but he is easily influenced and manipulated into serving Claudius’s ends, and
his poisoned rapier is turned back upon himself.

The Mystery of Death

In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and
over the course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. He
ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, and the physical
remainders of the dead, such as by Yorick’s skull and the decaying corpses in the
cemetery. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality,
truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest
questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in an
ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge,
it is intimately tied to the theme of revenge and justice—Claudius’s murder of King
Hamlet initiates Hamlet’s quest for revenge, and Claudius’s death is the end of that
quest. The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly
contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably
painful world. Hamlet’s grief and misery is such that he frequently longs for death to
end his suffering, but he fears that if he commits suicide, he will be consigned to
eternal suffering in hell because of the Christian religion’s prohibition of suicide. In his
famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy (III.i), Hamlet philosophically concludes that no
one would choose to endure the pain of life if he or she were not afraid of what will
come after death, and that it is this fear which causes complex moral considerations to
interfere with the capacity for action.

The Nation as a diseased Body

Everything is connected in Hamlet, including the welfare of the royal family and the
health of the state as a whole. The play’s early scenes explore the sense of anxiety and
dread that surrounds the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. Throughout the
play, characters draw explicit connections between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and
the health of the nation. Denmark is frequently described as a physical body made ill
by the moral corruption of Claudius and Gertrude, and many observers interpret the
presence of the ghost as a supernatural omen indicating that “[s]omething is rotten in
the state of Denmark” (I.iv.67). The dead King Hamlet is portrayed as a strong,
forthright ruler under whose guard the state was in good health, while Claudius, a
wicked politician, has corrupted and compromised Denmark to satisfy his own
appetites. At the end of the play, the rise to power of the upright Fortinbras suggests
that Denmark will be strengthened once again.
Performance
Hamlet includes many references to performance of all kinds – both theatrical
performance and the way people perform in daily life. In his first appearance, Hamlet
draws a distinction between outward behaviour— “actions that a man might play”—
and real feelings: “that within which passeth show” (I.ii.). However, the more time we
spend with Hamlet, the harder it becomes to tell what he is really feeling and what he
is performing. He announces in Act One, scene five that he is going to pretend to be
mad (“put an antic disposition on”.) In Act Two, scene one, Ophelia describes Hamlet’s
mad behavior as a comical performance. However, when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern that “I have lost all my mirth,” he seems genuinely depressed.
Generations of readers have argued about whether Hamlet is really mad or just
performing madness. It’s impossible to know for sure – by the end of the play, even
Hamlet himself doesn’t seem to know the difference between performance and
reality. Hamlet further explores the idea of performance by regularly reminding the
audience that we are watching a play. When Polonius says that at university, he “did
enact Julius Caesar” (III.ii), contemporary audiences would have thought of
Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar, which was written around the same time as Hamlet.
The actor who played Polonius may have played Julius Caesar as well. The device of the
play within the play gives Hamlet further opportunities to comment on the nature of
theater. By constantly reminding the audience that what we’re watching is a
performance, Hamlet invites us to think about the fact that something fake can feel
real, and vice versa. Hamlet himself points out that acting is powerful because it’s
indistinguishable from reality: “The purpose of playing […] is to hold as ’twere the
mirror up to Nature” (III.ii.). That’s why he believes that the Players can “catch the
conscience of the King” (II.ii.). By repeatedly showing us that performance can feel
real, Hamlet makes us question what “reality” actually is.

Madness
One of the central questions of Hamlet is whether the main character has lost his mind
or is only pretending to be mad. Hamlet’s erratic behaviour and nonsensical speech
can be interpreted as a ruse to get the other characters to believe he’s gone mad. On
the other hand, his behaviour may be a logical response to the “mad” situation he
finds himself in – his father has been murdered by his uncle, who is now his stepfather.
Initially, Hamlet himself seems to believe he’s sane – he describes his plans to “put an
antic disposition on” and tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he is only mad when the
wind blows “north-north-west” – in other words, his madness is something he can turn
on and off at will. By the end of the play, however, Hamlet seems to doubt his own
sanity. Referring to himself in the third person, he says “And when he’s not himself
does harm Laertes,” suggesting Hamlet has become estranged from his former, sane
self. Referring to his murder of Polonius, he says, “Who does it then? His madness.” At
the same time, Hamlet’s excuse of madness absolves him of murder, so it can also be
read as the workings of a sane and cunning mind.

Doubt
In Hamlet, the main character’s doubt creates a world where very little is known for
sure. Hamlet thinks, but isn’t entirely sure, that his uncle killed his father. He believes
he sees his father’s Ghost, but he isn’t sure he should believe in the Ghost or listen to
what the Ghost tells him: “I’ll have grounds / More relative than this.” In his “to be or
not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet suspects he should probably just kill himself, but doubt
about what lies beyond the grave prevents him from acting. Hamlet is so wracked with
doubt, he even works to infect other characters with his lack of certainty, as when he
tells Ophelia “You should not have believed me” when he told her he loved her. As a
result, the audience doubts Hamlet’s reliability as a protagonist. We are left with many
doubts about the action – whether Gertrude was having an affair with Claudius before
he killed Hamlet’s father; whether Hamlet is sane or mad; what Hamlet’s true feelings
are for Ophelia.
MOTIFS
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and
inform the text’s major themes.

Incest And Incestuous Desire

The motif of incest runs throughout the play and is frequently alluded to by Hamlet
and the ghost, most obviously in conversations about Gertrude and Claudius, the
former brother-in-law and sister-in-law who are now married. A subtle motif of
incestuous desire can be found in the relationship of Laertes and Ophelia, as Laertes
sometimes speaks to his sister in suggestively sexual terms and, at her funeral, leaps
into her grave to hold her in his arms. However, the strongest overtones of incestuous
desire arise in the relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude, in Hamlet’s fixation on
Gertrude’s sex life with Claudius and his preoccupation with her in general.

Misogyny
Shattered by his mother’s decision to marry Claudius so soon after her husband’s
death, Hamlet becomes cynical about women in general, showing a particular
obsession with what he perceives to be a connection between female sexuality and
moral corruption. This motif of misogyny, or hatred of women, occurs sporadically
throughout the play, but it is an important inhibiting factor in Hamlet’s relationships
with Ophelia and Gertrude. He urges Ophelia to go to a nunnery rather than
experience the corruptions of sexuality and exclaims of Gertrude, “Frailty, thy name is
woman” (I.ii.146).

Ears And Hearing

One facet of Hamlet’s exploration of the difficulty of attaining true knowledge is the
slipperiness of language. Words are used to communicate ideas, but they can also be
used to distort the truth, manipulate other people, and serve as tools in corrupt quests
for power. Claudius, the shrewd politician, is the most obvious example of a man who
manipulates words to enhance his own power. The sinister uses of words are
represented by images of ears and hearing, from Claudius’s murder of the king by
pouring poison into his ear to Hamlet’s claim to Horatio that “I have words to speak in
thine ear will make thee dumb” (IV.vi.21). The poison poured in the king’s ear by
Claudius is used by the ghost to symbolize the corrosive effect of Claudius’s dishonesty
on the health of Denmark. Declaring that the story that he was killed by a snake is a lie,
he says that “the whole ear of Denmark” is “Rankly abused. . . .” (I.v.36–38).
SYMBOLS
Yorick’s Skull
In Hamlet, physical objects are rarely used to represent thematic ideas. One important
exception is Yorick’s skull, which Hamlet discovers in the graveyard in the first scene of
Act V. As Hamlet speaks to the skull and about the skull of the king’s former jester, he
fixates on death’s inevitability and the disintegration of the body. He urges the skull to
“get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she
must come”—no one can avoid death (V.i.178–179). He traces the skull’s mouth and
says, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft,” indicating his
fascination with the physical consequences of death (V.i.174–175). This latter idea is
an important motif throughout the play, as Hamlet frequently makes comments
referring to every human body’s eventual decay, noting that Polonius will be eaten by
worms, that even kings are eaten by worms, and that dust from the decayed body of
Alexander the Great might be used to stop a hole in a beer barrel.

QUESTIONS
1. What is seen as causing the fall of Denmark?
Indecisiveness
Lack of military power
International relations
Moral corruption
2. Which of these relationships would not be construed as incestuous?
Laertes and Ophelia
Hamlet and Ophelia
Hamlet and Gertrude
Gertrude and Claudius

3. How do characters use language in Hamlet?

As a means of personal enlightenment

As a way to express their desires
As a manipulative political tool
As a means of courtship

4. How are women generally viewed in Hamlet?

They are viewed as manipulative and untrustworthy
They are viewed purely as sexual objects
They are viewed as inspirational muses

5. Why is Hamlet considered unique among revenge plays?

Because it is about betrayal
Because it takes place in Denmark
Because action is repeatedly put off
Because it is a tragedy