Hamlet

Revenge his father? No, that is what King Hamlet asked him to do. King Claudius asks (well, commands) that he stay in Denmark, and later that he go to England to collect an overdue debt from England to Denmark.

The guards are very tense. The first line is someone challenging the guard, when it's supposed to be the other way around. And of course the appearance of the spectral form of the late king might have caught the attention of anyone who wasn't engaged at that stage of the scene.

He has just seen Fortinbras leading an army to fight against the Poles. He has been told that the piece of land they are fighting over is not big enough to build a graveyard to bury the men who will die in the battle. Yet away they go "to their graves like beds." They aren't arguing with themselves about the rightness or logic of what they do. It makes no sense but they are doing it anyway. So why, Hamlet asks himself, do I keep asking myself to justify, to make sense of this act of revenge which is so much more justifiable than this insane military expedition?

Because hamlet struggles with his ability to see both sides of every issue and with his inability to kill the new King, so Hamlet wishes he was of a more fiery personality and then he would be able to just make a decision and kill the King (that would be his bloody thought)

Hamlet's father was king of Denmark before he died. Hamlet's uncle Claudius stepped in and married Hamlet's mother and became the De facto king, cutting out Hamlets rightful ascension to the throne. Hamlet had plenty of reason and motive to want Claudius dead, but to make things worse the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to him and informs him that it was Claudius who killed the king. Even though Hamlet is brought to see the ghost by his friend Horatio and two others who have also seen the ghost, it is, after all, a ghost story and Hamlet is rightfully wary of the information he received from a ghost. Swearing his friends to secrecy, he sets about investigating the truth in an attempt to prove his fathers murder before granting the command of his fathers ghost to exact revenge. Hamlet wants Claudius dead but wants him dead for the right reason and not blind ambition. He must feign madness and create distance between the ones he loves in order to accomplish his goals and increasingly his inability to make a decision and act upon it brings about intrigue and murder, and more murder, ending in a tragic blood bath where few survive. Hamlet could not decide whether it was right and just to kill Claudius and this indecision cost him the loss of the woman he loved, the loss of her father, the loss of her cousin, the loss of Hamlets mother and finally after discovering that he himself is dying from a poisoned tipped sword and that it was Claudius who commanded Tybalt to poison the sword Hamlet kills Claudius. People will say that Hamlet killed Claudius because his father the ghost told him to, but in truth, Hamlet killed Claudius with his last dying breath because it was Claudius that killed Hamlet. Sometimes it is better to make the wrong decision than make no decision at all.

Fortinbras is one of a very few characters to survive. He comes in at the end to find almost everyone dead and is confused. Not only does he survive, he gets to be the king of Denmark by default. His father, who shared his name, died long before the play started.

He doesn't. Hamlet tells Claudius that the name of the play is the Mousetrap, not the other way around. The actual name of the play is The Murder of Gonzago but Hamlet is using it to trap Claudius and so gives it a different name.

In Ophelia's mad scene she hands out flowers to various people in the Danish court.

Ophelia is really mad as in she is truly insane; today she would be institutionalized.

Hamlet is mad, but not in the crazy sense. After hearing what the Ghost tells him, he is mad at Claudius and his Mother for betraying him and his father. To conceal the fact that he knows Claudius killed his father, he acts mad to everyone around him so that he doesn't seem like a threat to Claudius. His goal is to be mad enough that he isn't institutionalized, but still be able to get away with his weird behavior.

Since he left us no letters, diaries, or other personal papers to tell us what he thought, we really have almost no information on Shakespeare's personal life or feelings about different subjects other then what we can deduce from his plays and poems. And since they were works of fiction and drama, we can't really deduce his own beliefs simply based on the stories he wrote.

However, since the question is not about what he personally thought, but what he did in his plays, let's just look at the women he wrote about. Where the women in Shakespeare's stories have committed their affection, they are absolutely true and unswerving, with few exceptions. The men are fickle and prone to jealousy. Check it out: Imogen is true, Postumus is jealous; Desdemona is true, Othello is jealous; Hero is true, Claudio is jealous; Mrs. Ford is true, Mr. Ford is jealous; Helena is true, Demetrius is fickle; Hermione is true, Leontes is jealous; Julia is true, Proteus is fickle. There is only one jealous woman in all of Shakespeare, Adriana in the early comedy The Comedy of Errors. There are only two adultresses, and one of them (Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays) is false to a political marriage with a man she loved before entering into that political marriage. And yet the popular wisdom of Shakespeare's day was that all women were fickle in love and would sleep with anyone.

Shakespeare's opposition to arranged marriages is portrayed over and over. Women whose parents or guardians try to arrange their marriages always get out of it one way or another, and we applaud this. Usually they have another fellow in mind. Take Hermia, for example, or Anne Page, or Juliet, or Sylvia, or Imogen. Portia in The Merchant of Venice has a marriage arranged for her, about which she complains bitterly, but she contrives to have the arrangement choose the man she wants. In one play and one play only is a man forced into an arranged marriage (All's Well that Ends Well). He tries to escape it, and everybody holds him in contempt for doing so until he sees reason and acquiesces to the arranged marriage.

How many female characters which Shakespeare wrote are unlikable? Lady Macbeth, Cymbeline's Queen, Regan and Goneril and . . . ? Queen Margaret, maybe, when she's taunting the Duke of York. Volumnia, maybe--she's a tough old bird and hard as nails. Not very many, really. Most of them we genuinely like.

As likeable as they are, they are still an amazingly diverse group of characters: innocent Miranda and streetwise Doll Tearsheet; patient Hermione and mercurial (but majestic) Cleopatra; idealistic Desdemona and pragmatic Cressida; Isabella the would-be nun; the antisocial Kate Minola; witty Beatrice; playful Princess Katherine, each one with her own foibles and strengths. They are real women, just as his men are real men--not perfect, but for the most part essentially good, dealing with the situations they find with great courage and intelligence.

Anyone who really knows Shakespeare's plays will know that his female characters are not stereotypes nor do they expose the female sex to ridicule or contempt. Quite the contrary.

The argument has, of course, been made that Shakespeare was mysogynistic but this argument usually proceeds by condemning all of Shakespeare's broad spectrum of female characters for some reason or other: they are too smart or too stupid, to bold or too timid, too tough or too empathetic, a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument. The real assumption underlying this thesis is that since Shakespeare was a 16th century male, he must have been misogynistic. There is no dealing with this kind of circular argument--if you buy the premise there is no further argument possible, but if you actually look at the evidence you will see it tells a different story.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are old schoolfriends of Hamlet's are called upon by the king to spy on Hamlet in order to find out what is bothering him. Hamlet, however, figures out why they are there, gets them to confess it and tells them what he guesses to be their business. He then lets out some vague and quite misleading hints as to what is on his mind (the "what a piece of work is man" speech.)

It wasn't originally inspired by it, but it just happened to go that way. When the production begun, they had no idea what the story would be about as the movie was about lions, and the story developed from scratch. The production team started to notice it has Hamlet-like story elements when they agreed to make Scar, who was originally a rogue lion who kills Mufasa like in the final film, Simba's uncle and decided to have more of them there. This information is from The Lion King Platinum Edition DVD release's Disc 2 bonus feature, Story Origins.

William Shakespeare's son was called Hamnet. He never directly named any of his plays after his son, but the title of his play 'Hamlet' is of course very close to the name Hamnet.

Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' also features twins of different genders (Hamnet had a twin sister named Judith).

Do you mean, it's all a play so nothing in it is real? Because within the context of the story, the ghost is very real indeed. He is seen by a number of people including Horatio and Barnardo as well as by Hamlet. Hamlet is the only one who hears him speak, but what the ghost tells him is true, not a fiction created by Hamlet's brain. The ghost in Hamlet is as real as the ghost in any other ghost story, like A Christmas Carol, or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

haha

In Act IV Scene iv Hamlet runs into Fortinbras's army, and after a chat with a captain of that army realizes at the end of a long soliloquy that if his thoughts are not violent then they are completely WORTHLESS.

He causes the death of every character in the play including himself. He mentally abuses Ophelia, by telling her he doesn't love her, then behaving sexually forward towards her. This begins Ophelia's madness. Hamlet then kills Polonius, a villainous act in itself, however he then carries on in the scene to ignore the dead body and continues to speak with his mother, finally dragging the body out of the room, hiding it, and then speaking in riddles when asked about the where abouts of the body. (The body is under the stairs(weird enough)) The murder of Polonius tips Ophelia over the edge and she kills herself. Her death would not have happened had Hamlet not mentally abused her then killed her father. He then kills Polonius' son, Laertes in a fight, during the fight his Mother, possibly knowning what was in the drink, and saving her son, drinks a poisoned drink meant for Hamlet. Hamlet then stabs Claudius, the only person which he aimed to kill at the start. However he is hurt from the fight and dies himself. Therefore he is a villain because causes all of the deaths, which is clearly not a characteristic of a tragic hero.

The above is an excellent example of how blame for anything can be attached to anyone. Claudius, intending to kill Hamlet, poisons a drink which Gertrude intentionally or unintentionally drinks and dies; Hamlet is to blame for this. That is why it is a pointless endeavor to try to blame people in literary analyses.

What distinguishes a villain from a hero is more probably motivation. Richard III is clearly a villain because he tells us in numerous soliloquys that he is killing people so he will be a king. Macbeth is a villain because whether the Scottish people know it or not, the audience knows that he has murdered a lot of people either to become king or to make himself safe.What are Hamlet's motivations? He kills Claudius to revenge his father's death, Polonius by accident, thinking he was Claudius, and Laertes in self-defence.

The question of whether revenge is a moral or immoral activity was explored by Shakespeare in his early revenge play Titus Andronicus. In that play revenge only leads to more and greater revenges until everyone is dead. In Hamlet the issue is much more ambiguous. Indeed the play is so ambiguous in so many different ways that it would be possible to stage it playing Hamlet as a bloodthirsty young man who has formed an inordinate dislike for his uncle, and who is only held back from killing him right off by his own cowardice and his desire that his revenge should be as complete as possible.

Hamlet - questioning the meaning of life

The Queen would have never set foot in a playhouse like The Globe. Plays at the Globe were attended by the lower class citizens. She did, however, enjoy watching plays at indoor playhouses or at her castle.

The exact reason why Gertrude drinks from the poison cup is not clear based on the text. Ultimately, there are two options 1) It's accidental - the cup was there, she was thirsty, she didn't realize it was poisoned.
2) It's intentional - she realizes Claudius is trying to kill her son, and drinks to keep it from Hamlet.


Olivier's 1948 film version leans towards option 2, as indicated by the shots of Gertrude before she drinks. Other Oedipal interpretations will similarly indicate that she knows what she's doing and why.


However, there is little in what she says that suggests she knows the cup is poisoned. The king asks her not to drink it, she says she will. He notes in an aside that it is the cup with poison, and when dying she recognizes what has happened. The simpler explanation is that she does not realize it until too late.

Director's call. Claudius seems well-disposed to Hamlet at the start, but faced with Hamlet's insane (but not really insane) behaviour and the murder of Claudius's chief counsellor (a murder in which Claudius correctly identifies himself as the intended victim) his disposition towards him sours. Understandably so. By Act 4 he has decided that Hamlet must be killed because he's too darn dangerous. "Do it, England, for like the hectic in my blood he rages, and thou must cure me."

It would be normal to have a guard on the king's palace anywhere at any time. But you may be alluding to the fact that a ghost of the dead King Hamlet appears on the battlements every night.

He is stabbed by the tip of Laertes' poisoned rapier during their dual.

Not necessarily...

He is wounded by the rapier, but then stabs Laertes, and kills his uncle before he himself dies.

Elsinore. It's a real place in Denmark.

He isn't. Oh, he is not innocent, since he did in fact murder his brother in order to steal away his wife. But his administration is not corrupt, at least at the start of the play. He deals with the threat of Fortinbras efficiently and prudently; everybody seems to be happy with the job he is doing as king. Everyone except Hamlet, of course.

Hamlet hates Claudius, even before he meets the ghost. Whether it's because he expected to succeed his father as king, or he has the usual feeling of a stepchild to a step parent or both, nothing Claudius does can be right in Hamlet's eyes. When Claudius maintains the honoured custom of Denmark, Hamlet sneers "'tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance."

In many productions, the director creates a Claudius who is just how Hamlet imagines him to be--licentious and alcoholic. Sometimes, though, the director shows that Hamlet is unbalanced, and can even go to the length of implying that what the ghost says to Hamlet is in fact what Hamlet hopes the ghost will say by having the actor playing Hamlet also voice the Ghost.

However on the face of the play itself, there is no particular reason to think that Claudius is a corrupt king until Hamlet sets the kingdom on its ear by killing Claudius's chief counsellor and causing disturbances at theatrical performances. The problem of dealing with Hamlet, both for his own safety and the safety of the kingdom, increasingly occupies Claudius's thoughts as the play proceeds. In Kenneth Branagh's film of the play, he has Fortinbras leading a full-blown invasion of Denmark, which the whole royal court is too distracted to even notice until it is too late.

One of the factors in Shakespeare's mind was likely the question of succession to the throne. As Queen Elizabeth had no children, many people became worried as she neared death about whether she would be succeeded in an orderly way. During her lifetime she had been threatened by those who wanted to replace her with Mary Queen of Scots, and her sister had been threatened by the pretender Lady Jane Grey. To the Elizabethan mind, the proper person to succeed Hamlet Sr. would be Hamlet, and Claudius was an usurper. Part of the theme of the play (as in other Shakespeare plays such as Macbeth, the eight plays in the War of the Roses cycle, and Julius Caesar) is that to disturb the passage of power to the heir is to cause an unstable political situation. In this sense the adminsistration of Claudius might have been seen to be corrupt just because he was the king's brother, not his son.