Grade 12 Hamlet
Themes
MADNESS
(faking madness to throw people off)
While Hamlet’s “mad” behaviour starts out as an “antic disposition,” his mental state
deteriorates over the course of the play so that he ends up legitimately insane.
It’s impossible to know whether or not Hamlet is actually “mad,” because our uncertainty
about Hamlet’s mental state is supposed to mirror the play’s general ambiguity and doubt.
REVENGE
The play isn’t about Hamlet’s ultimately successful vengeance for his father’s murder at all –
that’s taken care of in about two seconds during Act 5. Instead, most of the play is
concerned with Hamlet’s inner struggle to take action.
The play is a lot more interested in calling into question the validity and usefulness of
revenge than in satisfying the audience’s bloodlust.
Hamlet deals with three revenge plots, all of which involve a son seeking vengeance for the
death of a father.
In the end, though, the resolution of each revenge plot highlights the inadequacy of
revenge.
Hamlet’s delay is what separates the play from other revenge tragedies; it’s also what marks
the play as modern.
MORTALITY
Hamlet may talk and talk and talk about suicide, but what he is really concerned with is
mortality and the fact that the living world is made of death and decay.
The fact that Hamlet is still talking about suicide even after he has sworn to avnege his
father showes that the Prince’s problems lie much deeper than simple grief over his fathe’s
murder.
Hamlet’s anger against his mother is rooted in the fear that is someone’s life can be so easily
forgotten after death, life itself has no meaning.
His crisis is therefore an existential one, not one of morality.
RELIGION
For a play about incest and murder, Hamlet registers many of the 16 th Century’s religious
anxieties, like the effects of the Protestant Reformation on the Christian ideas about
mortality and the aftrerlife.
And it also seems to be in basic conflict with itself: how can a play about murder, sucide and
revenge square with Christian notions of acceptance, Providence and forgiveness?
Hamlet is a play that dramatizes the spirtual uncertainty and religious confusin of sixteenth
century Europe.
Shakespere’s play weaves together Christain attitudes towards murder with the clssid tenets
of revenge tragedy, which can’t always be reconciled; this makes the play all the more
dramatic and complex.
ART AND THEATRE
Hamlet is self-reflexive: it constantly draws attention to the fact that it’s a play.
By takingon various theatrica; roles, like “antic” or “revenge hero,” Hamlet is pushing us to
ask just how much of our identity is based on performance.
In Hamlet, theater is exactly what Hamlet says it is: a faithful reflection (a”mirror”) of what
is going on in the world. Hamlet defines theater as an art designed to “hold, as ‘twere, the
mirror up to Nature”
But in Hamlet, Shakespere presents theatre as something that shpaes reality, rather than
merely reflecting it.
LIES AND DECEIT
Hamlet is miserable not just because of his g=father’s death, but because he craves honesty
while everyone else around him is engaged in deception and manipulation.
For someone who hates deception, Hamlet sure finds himslef coming up with a lot of lies.
Hamlet depicts a seamy political world, where deception is a neceasry part of life and
political “spin” rules the day.
Hamlet’s form of justice involves punishing every character that pratices deception, often by
his own form of treachery.
SEX
The young prince is disgusted by his mother’s sexual appetite, which eventually becomes
the way he feels about all woman in general.
According to Hamlet, female sexuality makes the entire world seem like and “unweeded
garden” it’s associated with deception, sin and a fallen world.
Hamlet’s suicidal disgust with the world has more to do with his mother’s sexual betrayal of
his father than Claudius’s murder of his father.
Hamlet’s view that all woman are “breeders of sinners” not only reveals a sexiest attitude
but also suggest that Hamlet (a “sinner”) finds himself to be just as revolting as the corrupt
world around him.
GENDER
Hamlet is critical of woman because he believes that their sexual “appeitites” constantly
lead them to betray men.
The play does not share Hamlet’s sexist attitude. In fact, it oaints a sympathetic picture of
Ophelia and seems to bleam the men for her tragic death.
FAMILY
In Hamlet, parents cannot be trausted to look out for their children, especially when matter
of politics are involved.
Hamlet dwells on issues of incest and revenge, both of which just might be taking the
familial bond a little too far.
You should not have sex with your family – pretty much everyone can get behind that – but
maybe Hamlet says, you shouldn’t be murdering for them either.
Hamlet is sad that is father has been murdered but then he is more sad about his mother’s
remarriage to Claudius.