The Higher Power in Shakespeare´s Hamlet

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As a Shakespearean hero, Hamlet must accept the control of a Higher Power, especially when it comes to his own death. Throughout the play Hamlet expresses a changing attitude towards death in several soliloquies that he performs. Hamlet goes from a confused soul in despair to a noble and faithful man.
At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is discouraged with his life because his mother remarried his uncle soon after his father’s death. According to Simon Critchley in the New York Times, Hamlet in the beginning of the play “is a creature of endless vacillation, a cipher for the alienated, inward modern self in a world that is insubstantial and rotten.” In the eyes of his friends and family he is melancholic and people can not quite understand why he is depressed. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy about death Act I, Scene II l.130-159 he expresses his first thoughts on suicide. He is “an outraged man who, disgusted by his ‘sullied flesh’, can see no outcome to his disgust other than death” (Delville, Michel). Hamlet appears to be more melancholic, and desperate than at any other point in the play. Desiring his flesh to “melt,” and wishing that God had not made “self-slaughter” a sin, saying that the world is “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” Hamlet thinks suicide seems like a desirable alternative to life in a painful world, but he feels that taking his own life is not an option because religion forbids suicide. According to Michel Delville, “ God, the Everlasting, he tells us, does not allow one to act in this way. God still rules the universe and Hamlet must obey his strictures. Hamlet then goes on to describe the causes of his pain, primarily his disgust towards his mother’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. His speech is imbued ...

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...e to act upon revenge. In the beginning of the play according to ‘Hamlet a world in Transition’, Hamlet “questions the certainties of the world, where everything was fixed and unchanging, where death was an everyday occurrence, not worth commenting on, where there was an absolute certainty about an afterlife, a final judgment, ghosts and spirits”. For much of the play Hamlet appears to be overwhelmed with grief and self-pity, and consumed with hesitation towards the role of being a hero and killing his uncle. Because of this Hamlet continues to delay his revenge on his uncle who deserves to die. In whatever way, to whatever extent throughout thinking, actions and situations Hamlet recognizes the conflicts within himself. This leads to a gradual change in his demeanor, which concludes with this final exchange with Horatio and the long awaited murder of Claudius.

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