Hamlet

"Thou hast been as one in suffering all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards hast taken with equal thanks . . . Give me that man who is not passion's slave, and I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, as I do thee."

Hamlet's father was also named Hamlet. Throughout the play they may refer to them as "Old Hamlet" and "Young Hamlet," or, in the father's case "Denmark" as a reference to his royalty and the country he ruled.

In Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. Macbeth starts out as behind noble and practical but during the middle of the play he meets the weird sisters and they claim that Macbeth will be the Thane of cawdoor and king. due to this Macbeth's character takes a devilish twist and he turns into a brutal and unforgiving man who is crazy with the thought of power and will do every thing he possibly can to make it happen as quick as possible even killing his own king in his own home. So a summary is that he goes from Mr nice guy to a Deceiving and murderous beast.

Laertes thinks that his family is too insignificant to be involved in a royal marriage. He therefore thinks that Ophelia can never marry Hamlet. He is wrong; the Queen says that she hoped Ophelia would be Hamlet's wife.

Nothing really, He is a servant of brutus

Hamlet sees his father's ghost in the play telling him he was murdered and the ghost returns several times in the play. Shakespeare liked to use the supernatural in his plays with ghosts, witches, and other beings. Many times these characters foreshadow events or set events into action.

Nobody knows for sure, since the only documented facts are the dates when it was published. The current scholarly consensus is that it was probably written, more or less as we now have it, in the time period from 1603.

In his 40th year*

/D

If the King you are talking about is the King of England: He has them killed because Hamlet changes the message. Nice friends, eh?

However, in Hamlet, "the King" means Claudius, not the king of England. R+G bring him several messages. At the beginning of Act 3 Scene 1 they tell the king that although they cannot find out what is bothering Hamlet they were able to ascertain that he was excited about the arrival of the players. The king replies that they should encourage him in this interest. In Act 4 Scene 3 they bring the message that they could not get Hamlet to tell where Polonius's body was hidden but that he was captured and standing outside. Claudius orders Hamlet to be brought before him.

Hamlet changes the letter going to the King of England to kill him when he gets there to say to kill the people who give you this letter,which were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. So they were killed instead.

Against hamlet was his mere unkindness towards mainly everyone hamlet potrays a worried being who has promblems which go deep

There are more people than one alive at the end of the play. Fortinbras is still alive, since he delivers the last line. Horatio is usually also still alive (except in one production where Fortinbras had him shot). The English Ambassador (and other ambassadors if any) is still alive. Osric is usually still alive (but not in the Kenneth Branagh film). And of course there are all kinds of characters who are alive offstage--we usually count Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's offstage death, so why not them?

In what they call the Nunnery Scene, in Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1, Hamlet gets angry at Ophelia. The scene is very complicated and it is difficult to find a consistent explanation of the lines.

In one theory, Hamlet becomes mad at Ophelia because he thinks she's become Claudius's courtesan. The situation is that Hamlet knows he was summoned there by Claudius. Claudius, himself, tells us that he summoned Hamlet.

Hamlet finds Ophelia there, and then she returns the gifts he gave her, so Hamlet thinks Ophelia is returning his gifts because Claudius told her to. That's how it looks to him. Hamlet thinks he was summoned there by Claudius so Ophelia could return his gifts.

Thus, Hamlet suspects that Ophelia must have gone over to Claudius. Hamlet thinks the same kind of thing has happened again that he's already seen, that being, first his mother went to Claudius and married him, then Hamlet's old friends R & G went to Claudius and started working for him, so now Hamlet thinks it's happened with Ophelia, too, when she returns his gifts, after Claudius summoned him there. And why would a lecherous old king be interested in a pretty young girl? Hamlet draws the obvious conclusion. He's gotten the tragically wrong idea that Ophelia is a prostitute.

Here is another possible interpretation of what is going on. Hamlet expects Claudius to be behind the curtains and knows he is there watching this. He bumps into Ophelia. There is a lot he'd like to say to Ophelia, but he has to be careful because he is being overheard. She is going to return love-tokens to him (she is in fact doing this because her father told her to do it) His first thought is to deny it; he doesn't want Claudius to know about Ophelia and him. Then he thinks she is behaving oddly "Are you honest?" and she gets worried. Is he on to her? Hamlet then tries to tell her to get out of his life because he is too dangerous, and retire to a convent. "Why would thou be a breeder of sinners?" Then something happens, and he asks the question, "Where is your father?" Her answer gives away the fact that she knows that Polonius is behind the arras--she knew it all the time. Here he was trying to be nice to her, and she was selling him out. He is furious and instead of telling her to get to a "nunnery" that is a convent he tells her to get to the "nunnery" that is a brothel, because she had sold herself out like a prostitute.

Ophelia certainly is Claudius's and Polonius's tool. She has engaged Hamlet in conversation knowing that the purpose of the thing is to trap him in front of the hidden witnesses. She has sold out to Claudius just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Gertrude have. But she has done so because she is very weak, dependent and somewhat dimwitted, and she is trying to be a dutiful daughter and obey her father, without reflecting on what this might mean for Hamlet, or that it implies choosing sides in some court intrigue. When she finds that out, it will drive her mad. Hamlet is wrong about Ophelia, but he doesn't know that. She hasn't really gone over to Claudius. However, Hamlet's mistaken idea makes him very angry.

Refer to Act II, Scene II (361-362): "when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw"

Basically, he tells them to act in a natural way.

King hamlet, hamlets real father is already dead, poisened by claudious before the play begins, he is the ghost. then hamlet accidentally kills polonious.

She has asked him to come to her room so she can bawl him out. Instead he is bawling her out. She is upset and she plans to leave so that she can call the guard. "Then I'll set those to you that can speak". But Hamlet won't let her go: "You shall not budge" he says to her. It is suggested that he physically restrains her. She believes he is crazy, remember? So here she is with a certifiable looney physically pinning her to a chair (or a bed in some productions)--why shouldn't she be alarmed and worry that he might do violence to her?

He calls her Rose of May because after he says that, he says that she is a Dear maiden, kind sister, and calls her Sweet Ophelia.

EDIT: Roses symbolize beauty and May/springtime symbolizes youthfulness. Leartes may also be suggesting that Ophelia has "bloomed" or hit her greatest point in life already, from this point on her petals will continue to fall off one by one which may mean her life will only continue to get worse and worse.

Horatio is Hamlet's closest friend.

I disagree with the above statement, though it is commonly said. Horatio is *NOT* Hamlet's closest friend at the start of the play. He is a casual friend, that becomes increasingly closer to Hamlet as the play progresses.

First, Hamlet is not aware Horatio is in 'town' until they meet after the ghostly visit. And it should be noted that Marcellus is the one that knows where to find Hamlet, not Horatio. They are casual friends at school.

Horatio is the voice of reason for Hamlet, who remains unsure about his way and the righteousness of the ghostly request. But their friendship only solidifies in the second part of the play when Hamlet realizes the un-trustworthiness of his close friends, who are corrupted by power. It is after Hamlet has been freed by his time with the pirates that the friendship becomes utterly solid.

Hamlet uses Horatio during the play within the play scene to confirm the guilt of Claudius, but that is because he must use someone and only Horatio, a near aristocrat, is able to be used. Marcellus attending the play would be rather odd.

By no means. Most writing is not literature. Even some literature is not literature.

"All writings" includes a vast amount of factual material: historical records, technical information, law and legal commentary, journalistic writings, nonfiction of many other kinds. There is also the whole body of advertising, marketing, propaganda, political writing, and so on, whose aim is to sell something: product, point of view, position, cause, etc. None of this is literature.

Most of what you find in magazines and newspapers is not literature, even though there's an awful lot of words in them. (Some nonfiction is literature; the lines are not as crisp as all that.)

There is a very loose sense of "literature" to mean almost any kind of writing--for example, "advertising literature"--but that is not what we mean when we talk about literature as such.

Hamlet and Fortinbras do not actually meet. Fortinbras has no grounds for saying that Hamlet might have been a "goodly king". Hamlet does encounter Fortinbras's army in Act 4 Scene 4 and, in some versions of the play at least, goes off on a soliloquy in which he wonders if he is a coward, and yet again vows to complete his revenge.

Fortinbras uncle is the brother of Old Fortinbras (the father to the Fortinbras in the play), who was killed by Old Hamlet before the play begins. He, Fortinbras uncle, is the current ruler of Norway, and as such is often refered to as "Norway."

In Shakespeare's text, all of the action involving this uncle happens off-stage, hence he is not a listed character.

Polonius may actually care about his daughter, Ophelia but it's not very evident in his actions. He clearly is more concerned with his own personal reputation than his 2 children, Laertes and Ophelia.

Hamlet fakes death warrants for Ros and Guil which are acted on by the King of England. Hamlet justifies this by saying that they were spies and got what they deserved, especially as this was the death which Claudius had planned for Hamlet with Ros and Guil's help. "They did make love to this employment" says Hamlet. Horatio is not wholly convinced, especially since R and G probably had no idea what their warrant said (it was sealed, remember). "So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go to it" says Horatio, a bit disgusted by Hamlet's callousness.

Because Hamlet reenacted in a play his fathers death, which included Claudius because he killed hamlets father by putting poison into Hamlets fathers ear

hope this helped

The issue of suicide in Shakespeare has recently come to the fore because of the popular book Resolution and the Briefest End: Suicide in Shakespeare's Tragedies. The author of this book, Ra'ed Ali Al-Qassas, suggests that there are a larger number of suicides than ordinarily thought because there are indirect cases of suicide. See the related link for a review of this book.

In the tragedies there are fifteen suicides including Lady Macbeth, Ophelia and Iras in Antony and Cleopatra, who may not actually be suicides. (Lady Macbeth dies offstage and all we hear is "who, it is thought, took her own life" from a unreliable hearsay source. Ophelia's "death was doubtful" but she was clearly insane at the time of her death and probably did not know what she was doing.) See the related question for a list.

In the comedies, very few people die at all (a pirate captain dies in Measure for Measure) and in the histories people who die are either executed (like Joan la Pucelle), or die in battle (like Talbot or Richard III), are murdered (like Richard II or the Duke of Clarence), or die in their beds (like Falstaff or Henry IV)