Hamlet: A Tool of a Higher Power

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Hamlet: A Tool of a Higher Power

Throughout Shakespeare's Hamlet, it seems that a higher spiritual power is

influencing the events taking place in the state of Denmark. A ghost of the

recently deceased King Hamlet appears to Young Hamlet telling him of his "most

foul and most unnatural murder" (1.5.30). This begins a chain of events leading

up to the martyrdom of Hamlet, and the spiritual cleansing of the throne of

Denmark.

Firstly, Hamlet sees the evil and contemptible state of life in Denmark.

Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and the Queen of Denmark, marries his Uncle soon after

the death of his father. ". . .The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth

the marriage tables" (1.2.189-90). Depressed, and most likely confused, Hamlet

speaks his first soliloquy in the play, else named 'the dram of evil' speech,

". . . Frailty, thy name is woman!—

A little month, or ere those shoes were old

With which she followed my poor father's body

Like Niobe, all tears—why she, even she

married with my uncle . . .

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not, nor it can not come to good."

(1.2.152-158,163-4). In addition, Hamlet sees the corruption in

Denmark when the ghost of his recently deceased father appears to him. The

ghost claims that...

... middle of paper ...

...een dies from drinking

Hamlet's poisoned drink, and when Hamlet realized he is not going to live to see

another day, he kills the King, thus taking his revenge. Fortinbras, the Prince

of Norway, takes over the throne, while Horatio (Hamlet's one true friend) tells

the story of the awful, evil deeds done in the state of Denmark.

Furthermore, the deaths of the nobility of Denmark act as a sort of 'spiritual

cleansing', meaning that all the wrong-doing had been revenged and paid for by

the deeds at the end of the play. All the evil, and the foul doings of Denmark

had been absolved by the deaths of the main characters. Hamlet is also

considered a martyr because he was a good person who died, so that he could, in

essence, cause the purification that returned the natural order of things in the

state of Denmark.

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