Themes of Hamlet
The themes within the Shakespearean drama Hamlet are several. Let us discuss in this essay some of the more commonly recognized themes.
In the essay “Hamlet: His Own Falstaff,” Harold Goddard makes a statement of the two main themes of the play, namely war and revenge, relating them to the final scene:
The dead Hamlet is borne out “like a soldier” and the last rites over his body are to be the rites of war. The final word of the text is “shoot.” The last sounds we hear are a dead march and the reverberations of ordnance being shot off. The end crowns the whole. The sarcasm of fate could go no further. Hamlet, who aspired to nobler things, is treated at death as if he were the mere image of his father: a warrior. Shakespeare knew what he was about in making the conclusion of his play martial. Its theme has been war as well as revenge. (23)
The interpretation of the main theme of the play as revenge is stated by Phyllis Abrahms and Alan Brody in “Hamlet and the Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy Formula”:
There are ten deaths in Hamlet, if we include the death of Hamlet’s father and the “make-believe” death of the Player-King. The cause of each can be attributed directly to another character’s action – or lack of it. But if a play is to be a coherent work of art there must be some central action around which all the other parts revolve. What is the central, unifying action of Hamlet? Revenge. (43-44)
R.A. Foakes continues on the revenge theme in “The Play’s Courtly Setting”:
And where there is no legal punishment for his father’s death, he must stoop, driven by the universal wrong, and “being thus be-netted round with villainies”, to revenge. He mu...
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...on Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of “Hamlet and the Court of Elsinore.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearean Study and Production. No. 9. Ed. Allardyce Nicoll. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. P., 1956.
Levin, Harry. General Introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.
Neill, Michael. “None Can Escape Death, the ‘Undiscovered Country’.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of “Hamlet: A Modern Perspective.” The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. N. P.: Folger Shakespeare Lib., 1992.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.
“Segu is a garden where cunning grows. Segu is built on treachery. Speak of Segu outside Segu, but do not speak of Segu in Segu” (Conde 3). These are the symbolic opening words to the novel Segu by Maryse Conde. The kingdom of Segu in the eighteenth and nineteenth century represents the rise and fall of many kingdoms in the pre-colonial Africa. Therefore, Segu indirectly represents the enduring struggles, triumphs, and defeats of people who are of African decent in numerous countries around the world. There are three major historical concepts that are the focus of this book. One is the spread of the Islamic religion. Another is the slave trade, and the last is the new trade in the nineteenth century and the coming of new ideas from Europe (legitimate commerce). However, Segu does not simply explain these circumstances externally, but rather with a re-enactment that tells a story of the state of affairs on a personal level, along with the political one. By doing this, the book actually unfolds many deceitful explanations for the decline of West African countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Affirmative action is the process of improving employment, hiring, and admission practices for groups previously discriminated against. Executive Order 10925 issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 created the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and introduced affirmative action to the country. Affirmative action is a way of compensating for the previous 345 years of slavery and legalized discrimination. Higher education has been utilizing affirmative action in their admission processes since the 1960’s. (Stewart)
The roots of affirmative action may be traced back to the early 1960’s, during the Civil Rights Movement. It was in 1961 that President John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order that first introduced affirmative action. This order included an establishment that government contractors “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” (University of California Irvine) Over the years, there have been many adjustments to affirmative action, but they all reiterated the same general idea. This idea is that there would be equal opportunity for all qualified persons, and to take positive actions in order to ensure there would be equal opportunity for all. (University of California Irvine) Affirmative action has been successful, it has increased the number of recruiting and screening practices by employers, raised employers’ inclination to hire denounced applicants, increased the number of minority or female applicants and employees, and it increased the likelihood that employers will provide training and evaluate the...
Cohen, Walter, J.E. Howard, K. Eisaman Maus. The Norton Shakespeare. Vol. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. New York, London. 2008. ISBN 978-0-393-92991-1
In 1961, the notion of affirmative action was first appeared when President John F. Kennedy asked government contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.1” Kennedy originally spoke of "affirmative steps" to prevent discrimination, suggesting general efforts to reach out to minority groups. However, the term is not defined or explained further; there is no indication that a specific policy was intended. Yet, by 1978, the first controversy in college admissions arose in the Bakke v. Regents of the University of California case. Since then, questions about whether or not affirmative action increases equality i...
To begin with, the second wave of feminism helped being equality to women in the areas of education, work and pay. Women’s education level has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Just over fifty years from today, there was a smaller percentage of women compared to men who were educated. In the twenty-first century, education indicators show that there is a greater rate of educated women than men. Before the second wave, girls were often bullied and treated unequally for attending school. Girls were expected to follow their mother’s footsteps and practice cooking, cleaning, gardening and other chores performed by the mother. The Title IX of the Education Amendment Act of 1972 was created to “forbid gender discrimination in schools and universities, and also addressed equity in sports.” Equality to girls was not given in school bu...
In Hamlet Shakespeare is able to use revenge in an extremely skillful way that gives us such deep insight into the characters. It is an excellent play that truly shows the complexity of humans. You can see in Hamlet how the characters are willing to sacrifice t...
On March 6th, 1961, an executive order was passed by president John F. Kennedy that required government employers not to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employee based on their race, creed, color, or national origin. This executive order was called Affirmative Action. It was designed to make sure employers recognized different races when picking out candidates for jobs of applicants to universities. Even after establishing equal rights, not everyone treated each other equally, so this was a good solution at the time. Affirmative Action gave a boost to minority students based on grades, so it was easier for them to get into harder schools. But over time, this solution turned into a problem, as everyone had already established equal rights. Some whites and asians applied for universities, but were denied because their grades were not up to standards for their racial group. They were, however, enough to meet standards of minority students, so minority students ended up going to the same schools, even though they had lower grades than non-minority students, who were denied. Because non-minority students were denied admission even though they were more qualified to attend the school than minorities, they filed lawsuits, and all of the Affirmative Action cases have got the Supreme Court turned upside down on what decision they should make. Affirmative Action should be abolished because it solves a problem that no longer exists, it perpetuates social division, and causes reverse discrimination.
Throughout Hamlet, each character’s course of revenge surrounds them with corruption, obsession, and fatality. Shakespeare shows that revenge proves to be extremely problematic. Revenge causes corruption by changing an individual’s persona and nature. Obsession to revenge brings forth difficulties such as destroyed relationships. Finally, revenge can be the foundation to the ultimate sacrifice of fatality. Hamlet goes to show that revenge is never the correct route to follow, and it is always the route with a dead
Hamlet’s mourning about the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother drives him to madness. This is the main characters inner tragedy that Shakespeare expresses in the play. First he considers suicide but the ghost of King Hamlet sends him on a different path, directing him to revenge his death. Shakespeare uses Hamlet to articulate his thoughts about life, death and revenge. Being a moral character he must decide if revenge is the right thing to do. Shakespeare relays many scenarios of reasoning to the audience about mankind His hero sets the wrongs on mankind right again.
Up until this point the kingdom of Denmark believed that old Hamlet had died of natural causes. As it was custom, prince Hamlet sought to avenge his father’s death. This leads Hamlet, the main character into a state of internal conflict as he agonises over what action and when to take it as to avenge his father’s death. Shakespeare’s play presents the reader with various forms of conflict which plague his characters. He explores these conflicts through the use of soliloquies, recurring motifs, structure and mirror plotting.
Hamlet is the best known tragedy in literature today. Here, Shakespeare exposes Hamlet’s flaws as a heroic character. The tragedy in this play is the result of the main character’s unrealistic ideals and his inability to overcome his weakness of indecisiveness. This fatal attribute led to the death of several people which included his mother and the King of Denmark. Although he is described as being a brave and intelligent person, his tendency to procrastinate prevented him from acting on his father’s murder, his mother’s marriage, and his uncle’s ascension to the throne.
Hamlet is one of the most often-performed and studied plays in the English language. The story might have been merely a melodramatic play about murder and revenge, butWilliam Shakespeare imbued his drama with a sensitivity and reflectivity that still fascinates audiences four hundred years after it was first performed. Hamlet is no ordinary young man, raging at the death of his father and the hasty marriage of his mother and his uncle. Hamlet is cursed with an introspective nature; he cannot decide whether to turn his anger outward or in on himself. The audience sees a young man who would be happiest back at his university, contemplating remote philosophical matters of life and death. Instead, Hamlet is forced to engage death on a visceral level, as an unwelcome and unfathomable figure in his life. He cannot ignore thoughts of death, nor can he grieve and get on with his life, as most people do. He is a melancholy man, and he can see only darkness in his future—if, indeed, he is to have a future at all. Throughout the play, and particularly in his two most famous soliloquies, Hamlet struggles with the competing compulsions to avenge his father’s death or to embrace his own. Hamlet is a man caught in a moral dilemma, and his inability to reach a resolution condemns himself and nearly everyone close to him.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.
Like all Shakespearean tragedies, Hamlet’s ending is no different in end-result. Hamlet’s separation from society and his self-imposed confusion caused by over-thinking results in the unnecessary deaths of most of the major characters. In turn, Hamlet’s pre-occupation with factors inessential to his mission of revenge slows down his action. It is this internal struggle that illustrates the intensity and complexity of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy, something that is often looked at from a psychological perspective.