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.
Hamlet – A Psychological Play
Hamlet – A Psychological Play
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a psychological drama for the basic reasons that it treats the mind of the protagonist as the critical force in the play, and it displays one dimension of that mind – the melancholy dimension – as the overarching concern of just about everyone in the play.
Helen Gardner in “Hamlet and the Tragedy of Revenge” explains how Hamlet’s psyche is the basis for his victory over the antagonist Claudius:
Hamlet’s agony of mind and indecision are precisely the things which differentiate him from that smooth, swift plotter Claudius, and from the coarse, unthinking Laertes, ready to “dare damnation” and cut his enemy’s thr’at in a churchyard. He quickly learns from Claudius how to entrap the unwary and the generous, and betters the instruction. (222)
The psychological aspect of Hamlet which is most prominently displayed is his melancholy. Lily B. Campbell in “Grief That Leads to Tragedy” explains:
If my analysis is correct, then, Hamlet becomes a study in the passion of grief. In Hamlet himself it is passion which is not moderated by reason, a passion which will not yield to the consolations of philosophy. And being intemperate and excessive grief, Hamlet’s grief is, therefore, the grief that makes memory fade, that makes reason fail in directing the will, that makes him guilty of sloth. . . . (95-96)
At the outset of the play, the prince is dejected by the “o’erhasty marriage” of his mother to his uncle. His first words say that Claudius is “A little more than kin and less than kind,” indicating a disapproval of the new king’s values – another cause of his melancholy. Hamlet’s first soliloquy, about his mother, is quite depre…
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… “The World of Hamlet.” Yale Review. vol. 41 (1952) p. 502-23. Rpt. in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism. Rev. ed. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. New York: Oxford University P., 1967.
Rosenberg, Marvin. “Laertes: An Impulsive but Earnest Young Aristocrat.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware P., 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.
Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. “Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. N. p.: Pocket Books, 1958.