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Hamlet’s struggle to re-order Denmark by killing Claudius results in many undeserving deaths. His deceitful method to reach his goal destroys his relationships with characters such as Ophelia and Gertrude. Hamlet’s reluctance to capitalize on his many given opportunities to kill King Claudius results in other characters contributing to the chaos he created which could have been easily preventable. Although he reaches his goal at the end of the play, many lives were undeservingly lost in the process including his own.
Hamlet’s wicked but clever method clearly aids him in reaching his goal, but also attracts unwanted forms of attention causing a negative impact on his relationships. He believes that by putting on an antic disposition,
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After the pray The Mouse Trap, It is proven that Claudius killed Hamlet’s father. Claudius is then vulnerable while praying giving Hamlet the perfect opportunity to stab him. Hamlet decides not to kill him right there because he was praying. He says “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; And now I 'll do 't. And so he goes to heaven, And so am I revenged. That would be scann 'd. A villain kills my father; and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven”(Act 3, Scene 3, 80). Hamlet is a religious person and believes that if he kills Claudius while he is supposedly confessing his sins, he would be sent to heaven straight away so he decides to wait until he can catch Claudius in a sinful act. If hamlet did kill Claudius, he would have gone to hell because he admitted he was not confessing once Hamlet left. When Hamlet is given the second opportunity to kill “Claudius”, he acts without thought by stabbing a figure through the curtain turning out to be Polonius. This is how the chaos in the play reaches its peak. Hamlet ruins his relationship even more with other characters while creating more distrust. This results in Claudius sending Hamlet to England to be executed. Hamlet’s hesitancy to kill Claudius when he had the chance gives Claudius the upper hand allowing him …show more content…
After Hamlet kills Polonius, Claudius sends Hamlet to his death in England along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Hamlet figures this out by finding a letter. He rewrites the letter in order to have Guildenstern and Rosencrantz killed instead. Ophelia is driven to further insanity after losing his father and commits suicide. She sings “He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass green turf, At his heels a stone”. Ophelia’s death is very tragic and undeserving. Polonius’s death provokes his son, Laertes into seeking revenge. Claudius then uses Laertes to get rid of Hamlet in a sword fight. Laertes stabs Hamlet, Hamlet stabs him back and kills him. Both Laertes and Hamlet are young noble men who are do not deserve to be killed. Right before Laertes dies, he says “He is justly serv 'd. It is a poison temper 'd by himself. Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Mine and my father 's death come not upon thee, Nor thine on me! *Dies*”(Act 5, Scene 2,327-331). He is willing to forgive Hamlet which shows that he is morally sound. Claudius has a back up plan to poison Hamlet if he wins by offering him a drink, but Gertrude ends up drinking the poison, killing her. Gertrude is an innocent woman with sexual needs who didn’t deserve to die as well. Before Hamlet dies, he finally
Though he was angry and confused due to the situation with his father, taking out his pain on Ophelia and Gertrude had a ripple effect of bad things to come. Not only did it in up in the death of Ophelia and Gertrude, but Polonius as well. Eventually Hamlet’s emotions should have been more centered on Claudius and setting his father free from his everlasting purgatory. In the end, Hamlet combined his wit and his negative emotions to hurt not only Claudius but everyone he believes is in assistance to Claudius, as well as innocent people such as Gertrude, Ophelia, and Polonius.
Hamlet's antic disposition may have caused him in certain times that he is in a roleplay.
Hamlet was a hero trying to do the right thing, but his tragic flaws turn everything around when everyone including himself dies. Hamlet goes back and forth throughout the play between pondering and procrastination to sudden acts out of anger and passion. Hamlet is extremely philosophical and contemplative which leads to his over thinking side. It's Hamlet's ability to reason that keeps him from killing Claudius at one of the prime opportunities in the play. And yet it is Hamlet's act of wrath that leads to Polonius' death. Which than later leads to Ophelia’s death. I think the play establishes that revenge is a wrongful act and not only should it be delayed, it should be dismissed. Everyone in the play would have lived if revenge wasn’t an issue .
By most accounts, this passage would be taken to mean that he does not kill Claudius because at this time the King is praying, and when praying one's soul will ascend to heaven if one should die. Hamlet wants Claudius to burn in hell; for him to go to heaven would make his revenge void. He will avenge his father's death when Claudius is engaged in some other less holy act, in order to insure the King's place in hell.
Hamlet does not take the opportunity to slay Claudius as he prays because he believes it will save his soul. His contemplative nature takes over regarding the ghost’s revelation and he decides to devise a play to pique Claudius’ conscience and make sure he is really guilty.
Why does hamlet delay so much in avenging his father’s murderer? Is there a part of him that really doesn’t want to take revenge? These are questions readers may come up with after reading and analyzing the play. Hamlet is a play built on a long tragedy between many characters. This tragedy starts with the main character Princess Hamlet and his Uncle Claudius. Claudius is the antagonist in this play and starts all of the drama. Claudius is the reason why hamlet is trying to seek revenge. Other characters are trying to seek revenge throughout the entirety of the play also. Shakespeare in the play Hamlet, is trying to make this a play on revenge between many characters and also show the insecurities of Hamlet as he tries to seek revenge.
It is the idea of revenge that sends a cool shiver down the spines of justly men when they begin to question as to why someone would stoop to such a level. But yet it is still more than an idea for revenge has been carried out in various forms along all the eras of history side-by-side of that of novels and tragedies. Even so, revenge is still a dark scheme; an evil plague of the mind per se. It is such a plague that will turn even the greatest persons of the brightest, optimistically capable of minds into lowly, as well as lonely, individuals. Thus, revenge will, and can, only end in despair and agony of the mind. Therefore, provided that all that has been said is true, revenge would appear quite unseemly to the observant onlooker. However, taking an in-depth insight into revenge you can uncover quite a compelling feature, which is best summed up into one word. Pride. Pride is the one clear motivational proprietor needed to push a protagonist into the downward spiral of personal vendetta. Without pride, revenge is no more than a mindless massacre of flesh and bone ending in the obliteration of any hope for reconciliation.
With his thinking mind Hamlet does not become a typical vengeful character. Unlike most erratic behavior of individuals seeking revenge out of rage, Hamlet considers the consequences of his actions. What would the people think of their prince if he were to murder the king? What kind of effect would it have on his beloved mother? Hamlet considers questions of this type which in effect hasten his descision. After all, once his mother is dead and her feelings out of the picture , Hamlet is quick and aggressive in forcing poison into Claudius' mouth. Once Hamlet is certain that Claudius is the killer it is only after he himself is and and his empire falling that he can finally act.
Following the performance of “The Mousetrap”, Hamlet is summoned to his mother's chamber. Upon arguing with Gertrude over the intentions of his play, and his reasons for wanting to distress the king so openly, Hamlet kills Polonius. “How now? A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead (III.iv.27-28)! Perhaps Hamlet did not know whom he was killing. “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / I took thee for thy better”(III.iv.38-39)! Perhaps Hamlet thought he was killing the king.
Throughout Shakespeare’s play, revenge intertwines to bring about the deaths of most of the main characters. Hamlet’s course of revenge initiates the first fatality when Polonius gets caught spying on him and Gertrude (III. iv. 24-25). By pursuing revenge, Hamlet killing Polonius paves the way for more lives to be lost. Claudius sees the murder as an opportunity to eliminate Hamlet, because Laertes’s obsession with revenge leaves him vulnerable. Laertes’s and Hamlet’s revenge lead to the deaths of Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and finally Hamlet (V. ii. 287-357). The revenge of each character ironically ended their own life. By acting upon revenge and having inimical intentions, the individuals brought fatalities that were unnecessary.
The king forbade Fortinbras to wage an attack against Denmark, and instead suggested he attack the Poles to vent his anger. Fortinbras agreed to the plan, but had no intentions of following it. Polonius was King Hamlet’s advisor and the father of Ophelia and Laertes, both of whom respected and loved him, despite his arrogant demeanour. Young Hamlet murdered Polonius accidentally, thinking him to be the king eves dropping on a conversation between Hamlet and his mother. "How now! A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!" Laertes returned home immediately after hearing of his father's death and confronted the King, accusing him of the murder of his father. Once Claudius told Laertes that Hamlet was responsible for his father's death, he and Claudius concoct a scheme to kill Hamlet using a poison tipped sword. "…Hamlet, thou art slain…The treacherous instrument is in thy, unbated and envenom'd…" Hamlet does indeed die as a result of wounds inflicted by Laertes, but it is the poisoned tipped sword that causes the demise of Laertes as well.
Revenge is a recurring theme in Hamlet. Although Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s death, he is afraid of what would result from this. In the play Hamlet, Hamlet’s unwillingness to revenge appears throughout the text; Shakespeare exhibits this through Hamlet’s realization that revenge is not the right option, Hamlet‘s realization that revenge is the same as the crime which was already committed, and his understanding that to revenge is to become a “beast” and to not revenge is as well (Kastan 1).
In the play, there are several characters wanting vengeance like that of Hamlet. Throughout the play, Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras all had a tragic death of a family member which caused their decision for revenge. Consequentially, these revenges caused the demise of two characters and the rise of power of another. The retaliation shown by the Prince of Denmark, as well as Laertes led to the downfall of their government. In the play, Hamlet seeks revenge on his uncle Claudius.
Hamlet contains three plots of revenge throughout the five acts of the play. Young Hamlet, after getting a shocking realization from his father’s ghost, wants to enact a plot of revenge against his uncle. Laertes, who was struck twice in quick succession by the death of his father and sister, wants to kill Hamlet. Away in Norway, Fortinbras wants to take revenge on the entire nation of Denmark for taking his father’s land and life. These three sons all want the same thing, vengeance, but they go about it in wildly different ways, but as Lillian wilds points out, “he also sees himself in the mirrors of Fortinbras [and] Laertes.”(153) It becomes clear that the parallels presented throughout the play are there to further illuminate the flaws of
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies. At first glance, it holds all of the common occurrences in a revenge tragedy which include plotting, ghosts, and madness, but its complexity as a story far transcends its functionality as a revenge tragedy. Revenge tragedies are often closely tied to the real or feigned madness in the play. Hamlet is such a complex revenge tragedy because there truly is a question about the sanity of the main character Prince Hamlet. Interestingly enough, this deepens the psychology of his character and affects the way that the revenge tragedy takes place. An evaluation of Hamlet’s actions and words over the course of the play can be determined to see that his ‘outsider’ outlook on society, coupled with his innate tendency to over-think his actions, leads to an unfocused mission of vengeance that brings about not only his own death, but also the unnecessary deaths of nearly all of the other main characters in the revenge tragedy.