hamlet essay help

• Utility Menu

Jeffrey R. Wilson

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.

Publications

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 .

Bibliography

Anand, Manpreet Kaur. An Overview of Hamlet Studies . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019.

Anglin, Emily. “‘Something in me dangerous’: Hamlet, Melancholy, and the Early Modern Scholar.” Shakespeare 13.1 (2017): 15-29.

Baker, Christopher. “Hamlet and the Kairos.” Ben Jonson Journal 26.1 (2019): 62-77.

Baker, Naomi. “‘Sore Distraction’: Hamlet, Augustine and Time.” Literature and Theology 32.4 (2018): 381-96.

Belsey, Catherine. “The Question of Hamlet.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016:

Bevington, David, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Bevington, David. Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet . New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama. Ed. By Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. 137-76.

Bowers, Fredson. Hamlet as Minister and Scourge and Other Studies in Shakespeare and Milton. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Brancher, Dominique. “Universals in the Bush: The Case of Hamlet.” Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm , ed. Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 143-62.

Bourus, Terri. Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Bourus, Terri. Canonizing Q1 Hamlet . Special issue of Critical Survey 31.1-2 (2019).

Burnett, Mark Thornton. ‘Hamlet' and World Cinema . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Calderwood, James L. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet . New York: Columbia, 1983.

Carlson, Marvin. Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

Cavell, Stanley. “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof.” Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 179–91.

Chamberlain, Richard. “What's Happiness in Hamlet?” The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017): 153-74.

Cormack, Bradin. “Paper Justice, Parchment Justice: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and the Life of Legal Documents.” Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature , ed. Donald Beecher, Travis Decook, and Andrew Wallace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015): 44-70.

Craig, Leon Harold. Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare's Method . London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Critchley, Simon; Webster, Jamieson. Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine . New York: Pantheon Books, 2013.

Curran, John E., Jr. Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be . Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.

Cutrofello, Andrew. All for Nothing: Hamlet's Negativity . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.

Dawson, Anthony B. Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance . Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1995.

Desmet, Christy. “Text, Style, and Author in Hamlet Q1.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 5 (2016): 135-156

Dodsworth, Martin. Hamlet Closely Observed . London: Athlone, 1985.

De Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Dromgoole, Dominic. Hamlet: Globe to Globe : 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play . Edinburgh: Canongate, 2018.

Dunne, Derek. “Decentring the Law in Hamlet .” Law and Humanities 9.1 (2015): 55-77.

Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet and His Problems.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism . London: Methuen, 1920. 87–94.

Evans, Robert C., ed. Critical Insights: Hamlet . Amenia: Grey House Publishing, 2019.

Farley-Hills, David, ed. Critical Responses to Hamlet, 1600-1900 . 5 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1996.

Foakes, R.A. Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Frank, Arthur W. “‘Who’s There?’: A Vulnerable Reading of Hamlet,” Literaature and Medicine 37.2 (2019): 396-419.

Frye, Roland Mushat. The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Josipovici, Gabriel. Hamlet: Fold on Fold . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Kastan, David Scott, ed. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet . New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.

Khan, Amir. “My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarerly 66.1 (2015): 29-46.

Keener, Joe. “Evolving Hamlet: Brains, Behavior, and the Bard.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 14.2 (2012): 150-163

Kott, Jan. “Hamlet of the Mid-Century.” Shakespeare, Our Contemporary . Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964.

Lake, Peter. Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

Lerer, Seth. “Hamlet’s Boyhood.” Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England , ed. Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017):17-36.

Levy, Eric P. Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008.

Lewis, C.S. “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” (1942). Studies in Shakespeare , ed. Peter Alexander (1964): 201-18.

Loftis, Sonya Freeman; Allison Kellar; and Lisa Ulevich, ed. Shakespeare's Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion . New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

Luke, Jillian. “What If the Play Were Called Ophelia ? Gender and Genre in Hamlet .” Cambridge Quarterly 49.1 (2020): 1-18.

Gates, Sarah. “Assembling the Ophelia Fragments: Gender, Genre, and Revenge in Hamlet.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34.2 (2008): 229-47.

Gottschalk, Paul. The Meanings of Hamlet: Modes of Literary Interpretation Since Bradley . Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Hunt, Marvin W. Looking for Hamlet . New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Iyengar, Sujata. "Gertrude/Ophelia: Feminist Intermediality, Ekphrasis, and Tenderness in Hamlet," in Loomba, Rethinking Feminism In Early Modern Studies: Race, Gender, and Sexuality (2016), 165-84.

Iyengar, Sujata; Feracho, Lesley. “Hamlet (RSC, 2016) and Representations of Diasporic Blackness,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 99, no. 1 (2019): 147-60.

Johnson, Laurie. The Tain of Hamlet . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.

Jolly, Margrethe. The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts . Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.

Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus . Garden City: Doubleday, 1949.

Keegan, Daniel L. “Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet's Dramatic Theory and Ours.” PMLA 133.1 (2018): 71-87.

Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Hamlet: Critical Essays . New York: Routledge, 2002.

Kiséry, András. Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Kottman, Paul A. “Why Think About Shakespearean Tragedy Today?” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy , ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 240-61.

Langis, Unhae. “Virtue, Justice and Moral Action in Shakespeare’s Hamlet .” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight , ed. Steve Brie and William T. Rossiter (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 53-74.

Lawrence, Sean. "'As a stranger, bid it welcome': Alterity and Ethics in Hamlet and the New Historicism," European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000): 155-69.

Lesser, Zachary. Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Levin, Harry. The Question of Hamlet . New York: Oxford UP, 1959.

Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Loftis, Sonya Freeman, and Lisa Ulevich. “Obsession/Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body , edited by Sujata Iyengar. Routledge, 2015, pp. 58-75.

Marino, James J. “Ophelia’s Desire.” ELH 84.4 (2017): 817-39.

Massai, Sonia, and Lucy Munro. Hamlet: The State of Play . London: Bloomsbury, 2021.

McGee, Arthur. The Elizabethan Hamlet . New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Megna, Paul, Bríd Phillips, and R.S. White, ed. Hamlet and Emotion . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Menzer, Paul. The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008.

Mercer, Peter. Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987.

Oldham, Thomas A. “Unhouseled, Disappointed, Unaneled”: Catholicism, Transubstantiation, and Hamlet .” Ecumenica 8.1 (Spring 2015): 39-51.

Owen, Ruth J. The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures . Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012.

Price, Joeseph G., ed. Hamlet: Critical Essays . New York: Routledge, 1986.

Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge . 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1971.

Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England , ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Ohio State University Press, 2013, pp. 73-87.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson. Revised Ed. London: Arden Third Series, 2006.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Norton, 2010.

Stritmatter, Roger. "Two More Censored Passages from Q2 Hamlet." Cahiers Élisabéthains 91.1 (2016): 88-95.

Thompson, Ann. “Hamlet 3.1: 'To be or not to be’.” The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: The World's Shakespeare, 1660-Present, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 1144-50.

Seibers, Tobin. “Shakespeare Differently Disabled.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiement: Gender, Sexuality, and Race , ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 435-54.

Skinner, Quentin. “Confirmation: The Conjectural Issue.” Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 226-68.

Slater, Michael. “The Ghost in the Machine: Emotion and Mind–Body Union in Hamlet and Descartes," Criticism 58 (2016).

Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds. Hamlet: A Critical Reader . London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Weiss, Larry. “The Branches of an Act: Shakespeare's Hamlet Explains his Inaction.” Shakespeare 16.2 (2020): 117-27.

Wells, Stanley, ed. Hamlet and Its Afterlife . Special edition of Shakespeare Survey 45 (1992).

Williams, Deanne. “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute.” Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 73-91

Williamson, Claude C.H., ed. Readings on the Character of Hamlet: Compiled from Over Three Hundred Sources .

White, R.S. Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen . Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015.

Wiles, David. “Hamlet’s Advice to the Players.” The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020): 10-38

Wilson, J. Dover. What Happens in Hamlet . 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1951.

Zamir, Tzachi, ed. Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts

Every academic paper starts with a captivating idea, and Hamlet research paper or essay shouldn’t be an exception. In the list below, our team has collected unique and inspiring topics for you. You can use them in your writing or develop your own idea according to the format.

Here are some Hamlet essay topics for you:

• Elaborate on the weather in Denmark. How does it reflect the state of affairs and mood in the country? How does it change throughout the play? Start this Hamlet essay by describing the foggy weather in the first scene and gradually provide more examples as evidence.
• Think of irony in Hamlet . How and for what purposes did Shakespeare incorporate it in the play? Provide examples of the lines and situations that can be considered ironic.
• Reflect on Gertrude’s marriages. Why did she marry Claudius? Did they have an affair when King Hamlet was alive? Or did she agree on the new marriage to help the country?
• Compare and contrast Claudius and King Oedipus from Oedipus the King . What character traits do they share? Who is a better politician? Why?
• Explain whether you think Gertrude is on Hamlet’s or Claudius’ side. Did she switch the side by the end of the play? Analyze her conversation with Hamlet and how she later told Claudius that Hamlet was mad. Why did she drink the suspicious (poisoned) wine?
• Analyze the fact that dying Hamlet asked Horatio to spread his story. Will Horatio retell it without changes? Can he tell the truth about what happened at all?
• Examine an approach to violence in Hamlet . Are violence and aggression excessive in the play? How do characters react to it? Comment on how violence is mainly linked to vengeance.
• Consider the Ghost of Old Hamlet and all his appearances in Hamlet . Who saw him? Who do you think can see him? In your Hamlet essay, analyze every scene where he occurred and elaborate on why he did so.
• Talk about the relationship between Gertrude and Old Hamlet. Analyze what we know about their marriage and her reaction to her husband’s death. Did Gertrude see the Ghost in the scene with Hamlet? Could she have pretended that she didn’t?
• If Hamlet had survived, would he have been a good king? Analyze his strengths and weaknesses concerning the matter. Did he prove to be a good leader or politician in the play? Consider that Fortinbras explicitly stated that Hamlet could’ve become a good ruler.
• Elaborate on the way Hamlet killed Polonius in act 3, scene 4. Why did Hamlet act so quickly and calmly when he hesitates to kill his enemy, Claudius? Was this murder intentional? Did Hamlet regret it or freak out about it?
• Explore Hamlet’s mental state. How did grief affect him? His depression and suicidal tendencies are apparent. How do they change throughout the play?
• Compare Hamlet’s attitude towards the only women in the play, Ophelia and Gertrude. Why does he shame both of them for their sexual relationships? Examine his dialogues with his mother and his (ex)girlfriend, where he expresses cruelty. Elaborate on how his mother’s remarriage affected his relationships with the women.
• Examine the madness that Hamlet may or may not obtain. Thanks to his dialogue with Horatio, we know that he fakes his insanity. But could it have changed by the end of the play? What could’ve caused it? Analyze the evidence of his abnormal behavior and whether you can consider it natural, not acted.
• Analyze how Hamlet reflects on suicide. Provide examples from the soliloquies where Hamlet presumably tells the truth about his feelings. He considers suicide as an option, way out of the situation. Why doesn’t he commit it? Or was his death close to suicide?
• Consider whether the Ghost exists or not. A few people have seen him, but may it have been a case of mass hysteria? Hamlet may have gone mad over the death of his father and his mother’s remarriage. What if he imagined his dialogues with deceased King Hamlet? Provide evidence for that opinion or refute it.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s trust issues. He suspects everyone from the start except for one person. Why does Hamlet trust Horatio? Analyze how the prince never lies during their conversations, even when the truth is a little insane. Why does Horatio believe everything he says?
• Examine friendship in Hamlet . Most of the relationships in the play are based on manipulation and benefit. Who can you see as friends in Hamlet ? Reflect on whether Hamlet values his friendship with Horatio. What can you say about Hamlet’s friends from childhood?
• Analyze the literary period during which Shakespeare came up with Hamlet . What features of the Elizabethan era does he illustrate in the play? Examplify various scenes and dialogues to prove your point.
• Consider prominent theatrical productions of Hamlet . How did they change over the centuries? What does modern theatre do that the Medieval one could not? Did theatrical performances evolve?
• Compare and contrast the original play and Lion King by Disney corporation. What are the key differences that were made in the cartoon? Why did Disney decide to come up with them? Analyze which version do you like more and why.
• Comment on the theme of death and mortality What events and objects made Hamlet obsessed with death? Elaborate on the role that religion plays in his considerations concerning the matter.
• Examine Claudius’ soliloquy . What’s its role in the play? What’s the crucial idea of his speech? Elaborate on the reasons why Claudius, the villain, has a soliloquy in Hamlet .
• Analyze all the symbols of death in the play What symbols from Hamlet refer to mortality? Speculate whether you can call fences, poison, unweeded gardens, flowers, and so on a symbol of death.
• Explore the conflicts of Hamlet . The play combines inner and outer conflicts, which are addressed mainly through Hamlet’s monologues. List the fundamental oppositions and lines that exemplify them.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude Why is he upset with her? How does it affect his actions and opinion about all the women? Does Gertrude love her son?
• Analyze the setting of the play. Does the fact that Hamlet takes place in Denmark play any crucial role? Speculate why Shakespeare may have decided upon this country and support your opinion with evidence.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia. Does the prince consider her significant? Does he care about her? Compare how he treated Ophelia before and after her death.
• Comment on Hamlet’s religious beliefs Does religion have an impact on the prince’s decisions? Why is Hamlet considered a protestant? Prove your point by providing evidence from the play.
• Reflect on the theme of revenge Why does everyone value revenge in the play? Why do people passionately seek it in the society presented in Hamlet ? Elaborate on what impact it has on the characters’ motivations and decisions.
• Consider the language of Hamlet . Explain that Shakespeare’s play is well-known for its rich language and broad vocabulary. He composed a few characters who pay close attention to the words they say and hear. Why is language crucial for Hamlet?
• Examine Fortinbras. Who is he? Why is he a character foil for Hamlet? Analyze why he succeeded in everything he did and even became the king of Denmark.
• Analyze imagery and descriptions in the play. How does Shakespeare enhance each scene by alternating descriptions of the weather and nature? Provide examples of prominent images presented in the play and elaborate on their purpose.
• Compare Hamlet to Oedipus Rex . What do the characters of the famous plays have in common? Do they have a similar goal? Elaborate on how their character traits affect the endings of the respective plays.
• Explore the deception in Hamlet . What things and events are built on lies? Why and how do characters try to manipulate each other throughout the whole play?
• Elaborate on the imagery of rot and diseases How do unweeded gardens reflect the state of affairs? Explain how ill atmosphere foreshadows and represents problems caused by the actions of the royal court’s members.
• Comment on the role of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the play. Speculate whether they are simply comic relief characters or they have another purpose in Hamlet . Why did Shakespeare decide that he needed such characters in the play?
• Analyze Gertrude’s attitude towards Ophelia. Elaborate on the scenes where Gertrude communicates with Ophelia and mentions her. What does the queen think of her and her relationships with Hamlet? How does Gertrude comments on Ophelia’s death?
• Compare Hamlet’s and Horatio’s character traits. In what ways are they different and similar? What Horatio’s qualities Hamlet explicitly admires and lacks?
• Speculate on Shakespeare’s opinion about theatre. Examine a few references to the English stage of the Elizabethan era that the author put in the play in Act 2. How does he comment on the theatre of his own time through Hamlet’s lines of dialogue?
• Explore the relationships between Hamlet and Claudius. Why does Hamlet suspect his uncle from the start? Does Claudius think of Hamlet as dangerous? When does he become highly aware of his nephew’s capabilities?
• Consider the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When and how did they die? Why does a reader find out about it after the deaths of the royal family members? Speculate on the reasons why it was structured to be so anticlimactic. Why did W. S. Gilbert write a short comic play about them?
• Analyze the reception and comprehension of Hamlet . Why is it one of the most popular Shakespeare’s plays even today? Is it still relevant? Explain why nowadays our understanding of the play differs from the one from the writer’s era.
• Comment on the appearance vs. reality in Hamlet . Why do so many characters pretend to have another personality or obtain character traits that they don’t have? Why does Hamlet see through the pretense?
• Elaborate on Ophelia’s death . Was it a suicide, how gravediggers presumed, or an accident, as Gertrude claimed? Explain in your Hamlet essay the reasons for Ophelia to commit suicide. Did she have a choice?
• Reflect on political corruption. What characters represent corrupted politicians in the play? How do they manipulate public opinion?
• Analyze one movie adaptation of Hamlet . Write about the changes that were made in the film version. What differences from the play did you like? What changes were you surprised to see?
• Examine the political situation in the play. What war did Fortinbras lead? Why? How does it affect Denmark during the play and after it’s the last scene?
• Explore the role of women in Hamlet . The play presents the social norms that were relevant for people of this period. What parts of women’s lives did men explicitly control? Provide examples from the play.
• Compare Laertes and Hamlet . Laertes is known as Hamlet’s character foil. Examine similarities and differences in their character traits.
• Consider the doubt and indecisiveness of Hamlet . Why are such traits uncommon for the genre? What do they say about the prince as a character? Explain how these qualities affect the plot and Hamlet’s thought process.
• Elaborate on the symbolism in the play. Finding symbolism can be challenging as the interpretations differ. Some individuals consider particular objects as symbols, while others don’t. What do you view as examples of symbolism in the play? Why? What role do they play in understanding the story?
• Reflect on the Oedipus complex. Comment on whether Hamlet has it or not. Provide evidence from the play, especially from the scene with Gertrude, to prove your point. How can this idea be approached on the stage? Find examples of theatrical productions where Hamlet and Gertrude had a conversation in her closet.
• Compare and contrast Claudius and Polonius. What character traits do they have in common? Explain how they are not who they are trying to appear. Who is better at lying and manipulating others? Why?
• Examine how revenge affected characters in Hamlet . Three characters wish to avenge their fathers: Laertes, Hamlet, and Fortinbras. How does revenge affect their lives? Who succeeded in getting their revenge?
• Consider the family theme. What role does family play for various characters? Elaborate on how blood ties motivate multiple characters.
• Reflect on Yorick’s role in the play. Who was Yorick? What impact did he have on Hamlet during the prince’s childhood and present time? Elaborate on how Yorick led Hamlet to his last soliloquy.
• Analyze the religious conflict of the play. How did events from Shakespeare’s time affect the theme of religion? Explain how Hamlet presents the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism through the prince and King Hamlet.
• Comment on the theme of madness. Who went mad in the play? Compare Hamlet’s and Laerte’s insanity to Ophelia’s one. How was her madness different from the other examples?
• Explore Polonius’ character. What was Polonius’ motivation throughout the play? Whom did he manipulate, and why? Explain why he tried to appear a good person and a parent.
• Elaborate on the reasons why Hamlet is the protagonist of the story. What makes him a tragic hero? Why is he considered a good person after every crime he committed and every cruel thing he said to his mother and Ophelia?
• Think of the conflict of good and evil. What imagery is associated with each of them in the play? Does evil spread like a disease?
• Explain how Hamlet differs from other plays of Shakespeare’s time . What new features and connections within the story did the writer present? How did Shakespeare make characters contribute to the plot?
• Analyze the “To be or not to be” speech. It’s one of the most famous lines in history, but what meaning is behind it? Elaborate on the circumstances around the monologue and whether Hamlet is partially lying.
• Reflect on performances of Hamlet. Choose a couple of performances on the stage or in a movie and compare them. Whose version of the character you prefer and why?
• Elaborate on the movie Ophelia (2018). What’s intriguing about a story told from Ophelia’s point of view? Exemplify the differences from the original play and how the change of perspective affected the story.
• Explore Hamlet’s obsession with inaction and action . What stops Hamlet from acting decisively? Exemplify situations from the play when characters act quickly, without any doubt compared to Hamlet’s almost constant hesitance.
• Compare Hamlet and King Lear. What similar character traits have an impact on the respective plays? Can we call the prince and the king victims of the social norms?
• Think of how the play’s themes are relevant nowadays . Which of them remained timeless, relevant for any period? Are any themes become obsolete and useless in today’s world? Elaborate on each theme separately with examples from the play.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s mood swings . Provide examples of how the prince’s mood affects his actions and speech. What can and did influence his mood?
• Examine Polonius’ death. Why was he hiding behind the tapestry during the scene? Was it his idea? How did he die? Elaborate on irony in the way he was murdered. How did it affect the plot?
• Analyze Hamlet as an actor. Is he good at playing a character? Elaborate on his dialogue with the First Player and his opinion about acting.
• Consider the motif of betrayal. Who betrays Hamlet? Explain how the attitude towards this act varies from character to character. How does Hamlet’s betrayal affect Ophelia?
• Explore the connection between honor and revenge . Explain why it’s the principal motivation for such characters as Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Comment on scenes where it reveals itself through actions and conversations.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s death. Was it the only logical conclusion for Hamlet’s psychological and emotional development? Was he satisfied?
• Comment on the genre of the play . Can we call it revenge tragedy without any reservation? How did Shakespeare ruin the genre by Hamlet ?
• Compare Hamlet and the Ghost. What can you say about the language that the characters use? List the lines that state that Hamlet and the Ghost look similar.
• Think of the father-son relationships in the play . Analyze the relationships between Hamlet and King Hamlet and compare them to those of Laertes and Polonius. Which features are common for both of them?
• Elaborate on the name Hamlet . What does it mean? What’s its country of origin? Add a sentence or two about Amleth.
• Consider allusions to historical figures in the play. Why does Hamlet mention Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in act 5? Why did Shakespeare include allusions at all?
• Examine soliloquies in Hamlet . What’s their role in the play? Provide lines from soliloquies that let us dive into the thoughts and intentions of a character. Does anyone lie during such a speech?
• Compare the two film adaptations of the play. Elaborate on different film techniques and alterations of the plot. Concentrate on one scene in particular and explain what changes were made.
• Explore Hamlet’s nihilism. When does Hamlet start to display features that are inherent to this school of thought? Explain how the prince came to nihilism, what pushed him to this.
• List the most painful moments of Hamlet’s life and elaborate on them. Include events that happened before the first act and within the play. Prove your point with evidence from the prince’s lines.
• Think of what poison represents. What does it refer to? Who dies from poison in the play?
• Consider the play from the public’s perspective. How does Claudius manipulate the public’s opinion? What do people think of the new king and Hamlet?
• Compare and contrast Gertrude and Ophelia. What traits do they have in common? Explain differences and similarities in their affection towards Hamlet. Who controls these women?
• Elaborate on the villain of the story. Who can be considered an antagonist of the play? Why do some people regard Hamlet as a villain?
• Imagine how Hamlet could’ve reacted to modern society. What aspects of the future would he appreciate? What social norms would shock him? Would he be more comfortable in our period?
• Evaluate all the relationships in Hamlet’s life. What’s the most significant one? Why? What relationships changed throughout the play?
• Comment on contradictions in the play. What contradictions does Hamlet face? Is he himself a contradictory character? Provide examples of Hamlet’s contradictions
• Explore the fencing in the last scene of Hamlet . What does it contribute to the story? Does it affect the end of the duel?
• Elaborate on the gravediggers. How did their job affect their attitude towards death? Comment on their humor and whether it’s a coping mechanism. Does it illustrate their perception of life?
• Compare Claudius and King Hamlet. What qualities differentiate them? What do they have in common? Speculate on who was a more talented politician and a better leader.
• Think of comic relief in Hamlet . Comment on how Polonius, Osric, gravediggers, and Hamlet’s dialogues with them enlighten the mood. Was the humor appropriate for revenge tragedies before Shakespeare?
• Consider foreshadowing in the play. What events are foreshadowed early on in Hamlet ? Present lines and features from act 1 that indicate the tragic end.
• Elaborate on justice and truth . How does Shakespeare show attitude towards justice common for this time? Does Hamlet approach fairness differently from the others? Elaborate on how Hamlet both pursue the truth and ignores it.
• Examine the “Get thee to a nunnery, go.” sentence. Why did Hamlet say so to Ophelia? What made the prince think that she was vicious?
• Comment on Hamlet’s cruelty. When does Hamlet become cruel towards other characters? Is he cruel towards himself? Analyze situations where Hamlet talks viciously and whether it’s intentional or not.
• Explore Hamlet’s character . Why is the prince such an unusual figure for revenge tragedies? Explain how Shakespeare created the hero who struggles to act with firmness and constantly reflects on his actions and decisions. Is he easy to understand and relate to?
• Analyze the play within the play. What’s its role in plot development? Why did Hamlet let the play take place? Explain what scene he added and why. Elaborate on the title The Mousetrap .
• Examine the consequences of revenge . What conclusion does Shakespeare provide for the theme of revenge? Explain how does it influence the deaths of Hamlet and Laertes, the absolute victory of Fortinbras.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s hesitance to kill Claudius . Why does he consider murdering his uncle in act 1? What stops him? Illustrate all the occasions when Hamlet could’ve killed Claudius but didn’t, and one time he did. What pushed him in the end?
• Compare Claudius to Laertes. Are there any similarities? How do these characters form an alliance by the end of the play?
• Comment on Gertrude’s guiltiness . Hamlet considers his mother guilty of too many crimes, but was she guilty of anything? Speculate whether she participated in King Hamlet’s murder or had an affair with Claudius before her husband’s death. Was she loyal to Hamlet?
• Elaborate on the “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark …“ line. Who says it? Explain the context of the line, its meaning, and what it foreshadows.
• Examine Polonius’ advice to Laertes. Provide its meaning and reflect on Polonius’ intentions. Why is this speech ironic?

Thanks for checking our list! You can consider some free Hamlet samples or other articles about the play, following the links below.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to email

Study Guide Menu

• Summary & Analysis
• Genre & Literary Analysis
• Important Quotes
• Essay Topics
• Essay Samples
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, August 14). 107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts. https://ivypanda.com/lit/hamlet-study-guide/essay-topics/

"107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts." IvyPanda , 14 Aug. 2023, ivypanda.com/lit/hamlet-study-guide/essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts'. 14 August.

IvyPanda . 2023. "107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts." August 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/lit/hamlet-study-guide/essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts." August 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/lit/hamlet-study-guide/essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts." August 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/lit/hamlet-study-guide/essay-topics/.

Table of Contents

William shakespeare.

Hamlet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601. It outlines the Prince of Denmark’s struggle to avenge his father’s murder, highlighting his difficulty pursuing his sense of duty and honor in the face of not just practical difficulties but also his sense of the inconsistencies and uncertainties in the political, religious, and cultural world that make his goal of taking revenge potentially immoral or even pointless. The play is arguably the most famous revenge tragedy ever written.

Hamlet William Shakespeare

Hamlet essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Hamlet Material

• Study Guide
• Lesson Plan

Únete Ahora para Ver el Contenido Premium

GradeSaver provee acceso a 2360 PDF de guias de estudio y pruebas, 11007 ensayos literarios, 2767 ejemplos de ensayos de aplicaciones para la universidad, 926 planes de lecciones y navegación libre de anuncios en este contenido premium, sección “Solo Miembros” de el sitio! Membresía incluye un descuento del 10% en todos los pedidos de edición.

Hamlet Essays

Through rose colored glasses: how the victorian age shifted the focus of hamlet rebecca rendell.

19th century critic William Hazlitt praised Hamlet by saying that, "The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken pace at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of the time fixed upon." (Hazlitt 164-169) Though...

Q to F7: Mate; Hamlet's Emotions, Actions, and Importance in the Nunnery Scene Rebecca Rendell

"Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh" Hamlet's trust is betrayed by the people who are dearest to his heart (III.i.87). The theme of betrayal takes root before the Shakespeare's tragedy begins, when Hamlet's uncle murders his father...

Before the Storm Rebecca Rendell

When Hamlet sees Fortinbras' army headed for combat in Poland he is moved to deliver a striking monologue about the battle raging in his soul. Passion and anger drive Hamlet to avenge his father's murder at any cost, while logic and reason turn...

Haunted: Hamlet's Relationship With His Dead Father Tommy Stevenson

William Shakespeare's Hamlet, a story grounded in worldly issues like morality, justice, and retribution, begins in a very otherworldly way: the appearance of a ghost desiring vengeance from beyond the grave. The supernatural confrontation between...

Heliocentric Hamlet: The Astronomy of Hamlet Theoderek Wayne

If imagination is the lifeblood of literature, then each new scientific advance which extends our scope of the universe is as fruitful to the poet as to the astronomer. External and environmental change stimulates internal and personal tropes for...

Paralytic Prince: Hamlet's "Thought" Complex Theoderek Wayne

"If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,

And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,

Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.

Who does it then? His madness. If't be so,

Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;

His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy."

"I Have Seen Nothing": Hamlet and His Home Eddie Borey

Hamlet begins at the open mouth of the Void. Barnardo and Francisco call out to each other and into darkness; they stand atop a guard platform that is naked to the open air and to the night. Every character's entrance is marked by a series of...

The Corruption in Hamlet Allison Masters

Central to the plot and the themes developed in Shakespeare's Hamlet, are the varying elements of corruption which occur during the play. This is echoed in Marcellus' famous comment of 'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' when Hamlet is...

Hamlet's Obsession With Death Marie Moulin

In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the author presents the main character of Hamlet as a man who is obsessed with death. Shakespeare uses this obsession to explore both Hamlet's desire for revenge and his need for certainty. In the...

Hamlet's Frustration with Himself: "A Rogue And Peasant Slave" David Sauvage

In order to understand Hamlet, we must understand his frustration. This frustration is most clear in his famous monologue, famously beginning with the line "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I."

This self-condemnation is contrasted by his...

"Pray God Restore Him": The Importance of the Origin of the First Quarto of Hamlet David Sauvage

Ofel: Alas, what a change is this?

Ham: But if thou wilt needes marry, marry a foole,

For wisemen know well enough,

What monsters you make of them, to a Nunnery goe.

Ofel: Pray God restore him.

Ham: Nay, I have heard of your painting too,

God hath giuen...

Hamlet's Problematic "Celestial Bed" David Sauvage

To understand Hamlet's insecurities, we must understand Ophelia's point of view. It is she who makes him most uncomfortable over the course of the play, and it is her rejection of him that drives Hamlet closer to insanity. Her reasons for this...

"He's Depressed": The Implications of Hamlet, II.ii.278-292 Alex Hoffer

In his famous speech, "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth[...]" (II.ii.280), Hamlet illustrates an Elizabethan fusion of medieval and humanist ideas, perhaps lost on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but not on E.M.W. Tillyard....

A Play of Espionage and War Joshua V. Rohe

"It is not the object of war to annihilate those who have given provocation for it, but to cause them to mend their ways; not to ruin the innocent and guilty alike, but to save both" (Polybius). From the start of man's political awareness, war has...

In Violence, the Rest is Silence Sara Liss

Location is everything. The setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the royal court, functions as more than the backdrop to the drama. On the contrary, embedded within the play is the implicit significance of its environment. Court society, with its...

The Interpretive Effects of an Affecting Interpretation Sara Liss

"For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" (2.2, 249-250)

From the start of Shakespeare's Hamlet it is clear that much of the action is cerebral. The play never escapes the confines of Hamlet's head. One is never sure if...

Hamlet's Conflict Between Play and Reality Chris Mays

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius puts forth a simple explanation of insanity, stating that "to define true madness, what is it to be nothing else but mad?" Such a diagnosis is necessary in the court of Denmark, in which the perspective of reality...

Cultural Identity In Hamlet Matt Zajic

In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, the concept of cultural identity is explored through Hamlet's isolation which is created by the conflict between his duty to his father, and his duties to the monarchy and society. Hamlet is isolated from his...

Thought as Inaction in William Shakespeare's Hamlet Megan DiGregorio

"Understanding kills action." With these three simple words, Nietzsche explains the idea behind Shakespeare's development of the acting of thought as inaction, and also the reason that Hamlet hesitates for over 3000 lines of blank verse and prose...

The Dishonest Ghost in "Hamlet" Marilyn Fu

Shakespeare has always been able to create characters richly dichotomous in nature. In "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," the portrayal of the ghost of Hamlet's father vacillates through the play from Hamlet's uncertainty of whether "it is an honest...

The Foils of Hamlet David McDevitt

Literary techniques evoke images, emotion and in the case of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" teach a lesson. The dominant literary technique ongoing throughout "Hamlet" is the presence of foils. A foil is a character who, through strong contrast and...

How All Deletions Do Inform Against Me: A Look at Hamlet's Psychological Transformation in His Final Soliloquy Jessica Hindman

Though the identity of the "editor" responsible for deleting Hamlet's final soliloquy from the 1623 Folio edition of Hamlet may be lost to history, the possible reasons for his omission of the Quarto's fifty-eight lines are as relevant and...

The Inseparability of Acting and Ruling: An Analysis of Hamlet and The First Part of Henry the Fourth Tyler Merritt

Within Hamlet and 1 Henry the Fourth are examples of Shakespeare including the trade of acting within the text as a central theme. Hamlet certainly shows us his skill as an actor throughout the play, but there is a more blatant preference to...

Wasting Away in Denmark: Of Course There's a Woman to Blame Kasey Schneider

William Shakespeare's Hamlet, says renowned pundit of literature, Harold Bloom, "is unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature" (Bloom 384). Surely, its story, style, and many famous lines have transcended time and place to such an extent...

Website navigation

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).

Stay connected

Find out what’s on, read our latest stories, and learn how you can get involved.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet — Madness In Shakespeares Hamlet

Madness in Shakespeares Hamlet

• Categories: Hamlet

About this sample

Words: 679 |

Published: Mar 14, 2024

Words: 679 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3.5 pages / 1683 words

2 pages / 1209 words

5 pages / 2049 words

1.5 pages / 763 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Hamlet

The ultimate stage of revenge is delayed when Hamlet goes into exile following Polonius's murder. During his absence, Hamlet's lover, Ophelia, goes mad and tragically drowns (Shakespeare 17). However, Hamlet eventually returns [...]

In conclusion, Hamlet is a masterpiece of literature and theater, endowed with numerous layers of meaning and exploration. Through our examination of the character of Hamlet, the play's themes and motifs, its symbolism and [...]

William Shakespeare's play Hamlet is a timeless classic that has captured the hearts of audiences around the world for centuries. The play's protagonist, Hamlet, is a complex and multi-dimensional character, whose significance [...]

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Print.Frye, Northrop. "The Mythos of Autumn." Shakespearean Criticism, edited by Laurie Lanzen Harris, vol. 4, Gale, 1986, pp. [...]

"This above all, to thine own self be true" (1.3.88). As Polonius offers this advice to his departing son Laertes, he also states one of the defining principles of the philosophical branch known collectively as existentialism. A [...]

William Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600-01), regarded by many scholars and critics as his finest play, is based on the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which first appeared in the Historia Danica, a Latin text by the [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Notebook

At the Louvre, the Olympics Are More French Than You Might Think

The Games were revived from an ancient Greek spectacle, but an exhibition timed for the Paris Olympics argues that France’s fascination with the ancient world played an outsized role.

By Emily LaBarge

Reporting from Paris

“The flame is coming home,” the director of the Paris Olympics, Tony Estanguet, told a crowd of reporters and critics gathered in the Louvre’s interior sculpture garden on Tuesday. The sun streamed through the vaulted glass roof, lighting up a bronze sculpture of a discus thrower installed beneath a lapis blue arch emblazoned with “L’Olympisme” — “Olympism.”

Estanguet, a former Olympic champion, might have been describing the Games’s centennial return to France. After the Olympic flame makes its way from Athens to Paris, via a handful of French overseas territories, it will be installed in the Tuileries Garden just beyond the Louvre, whose grounds will also be part of the marathon route this summer. But the museum itself holds a special connection to the birth of the modern Olympics, a relationship that is explored in the exhibition “ Olympism: Modern Invention, Ancient Legacy ,” running through Sept. 16.

The show brings together 120 artworks and artifacts that show how the quadrennial sporting events of 8th century B.C. Greece, devoted to the worship of Zeus, influenced the late-19th-century development of the modern Games. The first iteration of these new competitions took place in Athens in 1896, but Frenchmen and a French fascination with antiquity played a large role, and in 1900 and 1904, the Games moved to Paris.

A wall of photographic portraits at the Louvre identifies six men, four of them French, who envisioned the revival. For the aristocratic Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, it was about sporting education; for his Greek counterpart, Demetrius Vikelas, it was a mix of business and history. This slightly dry introductory display gives way to a series of rooms that focus on the art of the Olympics: a mix of antique veneration and turn-of-the-century innovation.

Greek vases, plates, and cups from the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. illustrate the classical imagery, deeply rooted in mythology, that was associated with ancient Games. On the “Lambros Cup” (540-520 B.C.), nude runners — black figures on red clay — race around the ample vessel, their muscular legs frozen mid-stride. A cup from around 490 B.C. shows a discus thrower encircled by a decorative motif.

Many of these objects are from the Louvre’s collection, and it was one of its own curators, Edmond Pottier, who pioneered the study of ancient Greek pottery around the time that de Coubertin and his peers were seized with Olympic fervor. Pottier’s profile features on a giant 1934 bronze medallion that hangs above a copy of his “Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum” — a definitive catalog of Greek vases in collections around the world that began as an index of Louvre artifacts.

Herakles, the divine warrior credited with founding the ancient Olympics, also looms large in the exhibition as an embodiment of preternatural strength. A calyx krater (a tall bowl for mixing water and wine) from 515-10 B.C. shows Herakles, a son of Zeus, fighting the giant Antaois. On the black vessel, Herakles is a taut nude figure in red clay against black, wrestling his burly opponent into submission. Elsewhere, he is a portly infant struggling against a snake that coils above him, in a statue admired by Émile Gilliéron, the official artist of the inaugural modern Games.

Gilliéron’s drawings for Olympic brochures, commemorative albums and posters hang alongside his sketches and studies for medallions, plaques and trophies. The artist also produced images of wrestlers, discus throwers, torch bearers and weight lifters for special-edition stamps whose colored sheets are on display in vitrines, as well as blown up on the gallery walls behind the statues that inspired them. Unlike the ancient ceramics, however, these are 20th-century replicas made to aid study: What is new can seem old, and vice versa.

Amid these elegant but somewhat staid arrangements are hints at the more idiosyncratic aspects of the Olympic Games as reimagined by the French. A contact sheet produced by the photographer (and rival of Eadweard Muybridge) Étienne-Jules Marey shows how the technology of chronophotography, which captures frames of movement in quick succession, was used to reconstruct the movements of ancient Greek athletes, based on the still postures seen in relics. In Marey’s stills, a nude man spins around and around, disc in hand, gathering speed, until he flings it into the distance.

Nearby, Jean Rovéra’s 1924 film “The Olympic Games as They Were Practiced in Ancient Greece” stages the act of discus throwing as a slow-motion pantomime in which an artfully dressed modern-day Adonis theatrically lobs his disc with the elegance of a dancer. Another shot shows a still-life tableau of six spear throwers paused mid-movement, elapsing time from left to right, their arms shaking with effort as they hold their unmoving posture.

An attempt at including women in the history of the Games doesn’t really work, mostly because they were hardly permitted to compete in the 1896 Athens Olympics, or those that followed in Paris in 1900 and 1904, London in 1908, Stockholm in 1912 and onward. While other international sporting competitions evolved, the Olympics continued refusing full participation to women until 1928. (London 2012 was the first time every participating country sent women to the Games, and this summer in Paris there will be quotas to ensure an equal number of female and male participants .)

There was one video of women competing in the 1896 Games on display, but it was broken, so I don’t know what it showed: perhaps croquet or sailing, two of the sports available to female athletes. Elsewhere — a curatorial stretch — were some films of Isadora Duncan, the late-19th-century choreographer who admired neoclassical traditions, dancing in her garden. A few drawings and plates of Greek heroines hung in the same display — Nike the winged goddess flying, or sowing seeds over a stadium — but female allegories are not women.

An 1869 painting, “The Soldier of Marathon,” depicts the famous messenger who ran home — shedding all extraneous objects, including clothes and shoes, along the way — to announce the triumph of his compatriots over the invading Persians. As soon as he delivered the news, he dropped dead.

This legend inspired the French linguist and educator Michel Bréal to conceive of the 26.2-mile marathon race as the ultimate physical test and a cornerstone of the 1896 Games. In a darkened Louvre walkway filled with relics and replicas of gleaming trophies, “Bréal’s Silver Cup,” which he designed himself, is spotlit on a small plinth. It is a sparkling object, pure silver, but modest and slender. Reeds and flowers swirl around its base, just like the Marathon marshlands that foiled the Persian attack.

“Olympism” tells us much about the ancient history admired by the modern Frenchmen whose games return to Paris in July. During the ancient Games, it was decreed that all hostilities must cease for their duration. It is this sentiment, however utopian, that we still see in the Olympic emblem, with its five interlocking rings, designed by de Coubertin over a century ago. “These five rings represent the five parts of the world now won over to Olympism,” he wrote in 1913 in the Olympic Review. At the Louvre, you may be won over, too.

Olympism: Modern Invention, Ancient Legacy Through Sept. 16 at the Louvre in Paris; louvre.fr .

Arts and Culture Across Europe

Our theater critics and a reporter discuss the big winne r —  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” — and the rest of the honorees at this year’s Olivier Awards .

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

The internet latched on to 16-year-old Felicia Dawkins’ performance as The Unknown at a shambolic Willy Wonka-inspired event . Now she’s heading to a bigger and scarier stage in London.

When activists urged Tate Britain in London to take an offensive artwork off its walls, the institution commissioned Keith Piper  to create a response instead. The result recently went on display.

The new National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam has been in the works for almost 20 years. It is the first institution to tell the full story  of the persecution of Dutch Jews during World War II.

At a retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s portraits in London, where the American expatriate fled after creating a scandal in Paris, clothes offer both armor and self-expression .

Suggestions

• Crime and Punishment
• Fahrenheit 451
• The Outsiders
• The Scarlet Letter

Please wait while we process your payment

Reset Password

Your password reset email should arrive shortly..

If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.

Something went wrong

Log in or create account.

•   Be between 8-15 characters.
•   Contain at least one capital letter.
•   Contain at least one number.
•   Be different from your email address.

By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy .

Don’t have an account? Subscribe now

Create Your Account

Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial

• Ad-free experience
• Note-taking
• Flashcards & Quizzes
• AP® English Test Prep
• Plus much more

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Already have an account? Log in

Choose Your Plan

Group Discount

$4.99 /month + tax

$24.99 /year + tax

Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!

Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?

Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!

$24.99 $18.74   / subscription + tax

Subtotal $37.48 + tax

Save 25% on 2-49 accounts

Save 30% on 50-99 accounts

Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.

Payment Details

Payment Summary

SparkNotes Plus

 Change

You'll be billed after your free trial ends.

7-Day Free Trial

Not Applicable

Renews May 4, 2024 April 27, 2024

Discounts (applied to next billing)

SNPLUSROCKS20  |  20% Discount

This is not a valid promo code.

Discount Code (one code per order)

SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan - Group Discount

SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at [email protected] . Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.

For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!

You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.

Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.

Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.

We're sorry, we could not create your account. SparkNotes PLUS is not available in your country. See what countries we’re in.

There was an error creating your account. Please check your payment details and try again.

Your PLUS subscription has expired

• We’d love to have you back! Renew your subscription to regain access to all of our exclusive, ad-free study tools.
• Renew your subscription to regain access to all of our exclusive, ad-free study tools.
• Go ad-free AND get instant access to grade-boosting study tools!
• Start the school year strong with SparkNotes PLUS!
• Start the school year strong with PLUS!
• Study Guide
• No Fear Translation
• Mastery Quizzes
• Infographic
• Graphic Novel

William Shakespeare

Unlock your free sparknotes plus trial, unlock your free trial.

• Ad-Free experience
• Easy-to-access study notes
• AP® English test prep

Literary Context Essay

Revenge tragedy.

Audiences watching Hamlet at the time it was first performed would recognize the play as belonging to a particular genre: they didn’t have a name for it, but modern scholars call it “revenge tragedy.” In a revenge tragedy the hero has suffered a great wrong, usually the murder of someone he loves, and the plot is driven by his desire for revenge. At the end of the play, the hero murders the person who has wronged him, and typically the hero also dies. The first really popular revenge tragedy was The Spanish Tragedy  by Thomas Kyd. It was written more than a decade before Hamlet , and it was still being performed when Hamlet was first staged. Shakespeare’s audiences would have noticed that Hamlet borrows several features from Kyd’s play, including a vengeful ghost, a play-within-a-play and a hero who goes mad. But rather than simply repeating the familiar conventions of the revenge tragedy, Hamlet subverts many of the tropes to question both the genre of revenge tragedy, as well as the nature of revenge itself.

Read more about the effects of seeking revenge in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights .

Hamlet turns revenge tragedy on its head by taking away the usual obstacles to the hero’s vengeance. In a typical revenge tragedy like The Spanish Tragedy , the hero faces two obstacles: to find out who the murderers are, and then to get himself into a position where he can kill them. In Hamlet , the hero learns the identity of his father’s murderer at the end of Act I, and he’s in a position to kill Claudius from the very beginning. No character thwarts him in his desire for revenge, and, living in the same palace as his nemesis, he has many chances to enact his plot. Hamlet’s only real obstacle is in his head: he is uncertain what he should believe and how he should act. By making the obstacles to Hamlet’s revenge internal, Shakespeare introduces philosophical questions to the revenge tragedy which had not appeared in the genre before. Can we believe the evidence of our eyes? Is revenge justified? Can we predict the consequences of our actions? What happens when we die?

While Hamlet , being a tragedy, is generally seen as a very serious play, in some ways it seems to make fun of the revenge tragedies that came before it. When Hamlet cries “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless Villain! / O, vengeance!” (II.ii.) he sounds like a sillier version of Hieronimo, the hero of The Spanish Tragedy . The play-within-a-play staged in Act III, Scene 2 is a parody of a revenge tragedy: its rhymes would have made it sound absurdly old-fashioned to an audience in Shakespeare’s time. With the character of Laertes, Shakespeare pokes fun at the traditional heroes of revenge tragedy. Unlike Hamlet, Laertes is ready to rush to his revenge, but Claudius is easily able to manipulate him and Laertes ends up begging forgiveness from the man he wanted to murder. By making traditional revenge tragedies look ridiculous, Shakespeare shows us that the troubling philosophical doubt of Hamlet is more realistic than the passion and fury of plays like The Spanish Tragedy.

After Hamlet , the genre of revenge tragedy would never be taken entirely seriously again. Later revenge tragedies follow Hamlet in using humor, especially humor at the expense of the revenge tragedy genre itself. The best-known revenge tragedy written after Hamlet is The Revenger’s Tragedy , by Thomas Middleton, which was first performed in 1606. Despite its title, The Revenger’s Tragedy is as much a black comedy as a revenge tragedy. Its violence is deliberately over-the-top and its plot absurdly complicated. Middleton was also influenced by Hamlet ’s philosophical questions. Where Hamlet doubted the morality of seeking revenge, Middleton’s hero Vindice is openly immoral in pursuing his: by the end of the play Vindice is more a villain than a hero. Modern action movies also owe a great deal to Hamlet ’s comic take on the revenge plot. Movies like Kill Bill and John Wick share with Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy amoral heroes and complex revenge plots ending in comically gory action sequences.

Hamlet SparkNotes Literature Guide

Ace your assignments with our guide to Hamlet ! 

Popular pages: Hamlet

No fear hamlet no fear, full play analysis summary, character list characters, themes literary devices, madness quotes, take a study break.

Every Literary Reference Found in Taylor Swift's Lyrics

The 7 Most Messed-Up Short Stories We All Had to Read in School

QUIZ: Which Greek God Are You?

QUIZ: Which Bennet Sister Are You?