Hamlet

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is without question one of the most famous, controversial and disputed plays in the Western World. An exploration of complex psychological profile of our eponymous protagonist, Shakespeare expertly moulds his construction, content and language to explore his own social and cultural realities. However, it is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of the tragic hero’s complex psychological struggle with vengeance and his disillusionment with both his interior and exterior worlds that imbue the play with a timeless universality. In the light of my critical study, it has become apparent that Hamlet is not so much a play about the action of ‘revenge’, but rather depicts a psychological and moral quandary and the implications this has on the human psyche through its examination of morality, appearance vs. reality, deception and the role of women.

Shakespeare characterises Hamlet as in the midst of an internal and eternal struggle between action and inaction, however, the underlying cause of this is due to the inherent conflict between revenge and morality. Shakespeare has adopted Greek and Roman dramatic conventions such as the unities of time, action and place but readily adapted them to suit his own cultural reality and offered Elizabethan audiences a humanist exploration of personality as well as a tale of justifiable vengeance in response to a usurper’s act of regicide. Hamlet’s soliloquies illuminate to the audience the true nature of revenge and its effects on the human psyche. In his soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Hamlet ruminates on the fact that he is “prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell”; his revenge is a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. On one hand, the Ghost has bestowed upon him his fate: he must avenge his father’s “most foul and unnatural murder”. Hamlet’s first soliloquy allows the audience to gain a direct understanding of the significance of the events that have surpassed through the mythological comparisons with...