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HAMLET
Plot
Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark who lives in Elsinore Castle. When the play opens he is very sad and angry because his father King Hamlet has died. Also, his mother Queen Gertrude has married Claudius, his father’s brother (Hamlet’s uncle). Claudius has become the new King but Hamlet does not like him or trust him. One night Hamlet and his best friend Horatio see a ghost, who looks very similar to the dead King. The ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by his brother Claudius, by pouring poison in his ear while he was sleeping in his garden. The ghost asks Hamlet to kill King Claudius. Hamlet pretends to be mad so that Claudius does not suspect that Hamlet knows his terrible secret. Polonius works at the Royal Court and has a beautiful daughter called Ophelia and a son named Laertes. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet but is confused by Hamlet’s strange behaviour. The King is also very suspicious. A theatre company arrives at Elsinore Castle for the Coronation of King Claudius. Hamlet asks the actors to perform the ghost’s story on stage, featuring the murder of King Hamlet with poison. When he sees the performance, Claudius is shocked, so he stands up and runs out of the court. This proves to Hamlet that Claudius really did kill his father. In the middle of the night, Hamlet goes to see his mother in her bedroom. The queen is afraid of Hamlet and she screams. Hamlet sees somebody hiding behind a curtain. Thinking it must be his uncle, King Claudius, Hamlet kills him, but then realises the person he has killed is not Claudius, but Polonius, who works for the King. Polonius’ daughter Ophelia goes mad, walking around the castle singing strange songs and talking to herself. Finally, she jumps off the castle tower into a river and drowns. Her brother, Laertes is very angry, because he thinks Hamlet has killed his father and caused his sister such a tragic condition.
With the help of Laertes, King Claudius plans to kill Hamlet. His idea is to organise a duel between Hamlet and Laertes, but Laertes will use a poisoned sword and poisoned wine. Later in the castle, Laertes and Hamlet meet for the duel. But accidentally, the Queen drinks the poisoned wine that Claudius intended for Hamlet. When they fight, Hamlet and Laertes are both wounded with the poisoned sword. Just before Laertes dies, he tells Hamlet that King Claudius planned to kill him with the poisoned sword. Hamlet attacks Claudius and forces him to drink the poisoned wine. In the end, everybody dies, including King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, together with Laertes and Hamlet.
CHARACHTER OF HAMLET
Hamlet is a learn man, a thinking man, a pessimist man and an introspective man. His indecision comes from the contrast between the urge to act and the necessity to think. He is the typical man of the Renaissance, because he always studies, that’s why he looks for solutions of his problems into books. In this play Shakespeare analyses the two situations of life and death. For Hamlet life is: struggle, suffering, fear and ill. Hamlet doesn’t know if is better to be a man or nobody, whether to go on living or die, whether to act and kill or give up. He thinks at the human problems in general. Hamlet has a pessimistic view of life and he prefers to die like dreaming or sleeping but he is afraid of the unknown after death. Hamlet is more willing to think, thinking too much he cannot decide. He isn’t a good king for Shakespeare because he isn’t able to decide.
THEMES
MORTALITY= It is the main theme of the whole work, because
everybody dies in the story (The king, Claudius, Ophelia, Gertrude, Polonius, Laertes and Hamleto himself). 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. Hamlet with death wants to describe the life-cycle of human existence. In other words: we eat in life; we are eaten in death. The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as he
Without deception this play would be nothing, and therefor it is the most prominent theme in Hamlet, beacuase it illustrates the consequences of deceitful actions.
THOUGHT VS ACTION= Hamlet is really thoughtful in the firts
acts, and even though the poem is rich in action scenes, these are always made after a process of deep thinking. For exampleIn the very beginning of the play we learn that Hamlet wants to kill his uncle, King Claudius to get revenge for his father's murder. But then we wait for the entire play for Hamlet to first make up his mind, and then to actually put a plan into action. All the while we listen to him obsess over the idea of it in his many monologues (speeches to himself). Indeed, is thinkinhg is to be detected in the monologues he utters.
MADNESS AND REVENGE= Shakespeare writes extensively
about madness. As the play progresses, the thin line between sanity and madness blurs, leaving readers to wonder if Hamlet is insane. Ophelia has a minor role in the play, but the theme of madness is central to her story. Even Claudius has moments of madness when he is not acting as the chief mourner of Denmark. Of these three characters, it is Ophelia whose madness is genuine. Hamlet is feigning madness, while Claudius is simply an evil man driven by his desire for power. As regarding Revenge, The play ‘Hamlet’ is a revenge tragedy. Throughout the play, several different people want revenge on somebody. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, wants revenge on the current king of his country, his uncle, who killed Hamlet’s father, the original king, in order to take the crown and marry the queen. When trying to revenge his father by killing his uncle, Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, the father of one of his best friends Laertes. In turn, Laertes wants to revenges his father’s death by killing Hamlet. The king of Norway, was killed by Hamlet’s father in battle. Now the prince of Norway, Fortinbras, therefore wanted revenge on Denmark. One of the morals of the play Hamlet is to forgive and forget rather than plotting revenge. To Be or Not to Be": Meaning and Analysis The "To be or not to be" soliloquy appears in Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this scene, often called the "nunnery scene," Prince Hamlet thinks about life, death, and suicide. Specifically, he wonders whether it might be preferable to
commit suicide to end one's suffering and to leave behind the pain and agony associated with living. Though he believes he is alone when he speaks, King Claudius (his uncle) and Polonius (the king’s councilor) are both in hiding, eavesdropping. The first line and the most famous of the soliloquy raises the overarching question of the speech: "To be, or not to be," that is, "To live, or to die."Interestingly, Hamlet poses this as a question for all of humanity rather than for only himself. He begins by asking whether it is better to passively put up with life’s pains ("the slings and arrows") or actively end it via suicide ("take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?"). Hamlet initially argues that death would indeed be preferable: he compares the act of dying to a peaceful sleep: "And by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to." However, he quickly changes his tune when he considers that nobody knows for sure what happens after death, namely whether there is an afterlife and whether this afterlife might be even worse than life. This realization is what ultimately gives Hamlet (and others, he reasons) "pause" when it comes to taking action (i.e., committing suicide). In this sense, humans are so fearful of what comes after death and the possibility that it might be more miserable than life that they (including Hamlet) are rendered immobile.
- Important themes in the soliloquy: The first lines of the soliloquy (“to be or not to be”, lines 1-5) can be interpreted in two ways and present two important themes: life vs death (or stoic attitude vs suicide): is it better to go on living (and suffering) or to commit suicide and put an end to our suffering? action vs inaction: is it better to remain indifferent and leave things as they are or to fully realize one’s potential and take important decisions?
