Mortality In Shakespeare's Hamlet-To Be Or Not To Be

In the beginning of the play Hamlet, the main character, is struggling with events that have taken place in his life. His Father has recently died and his Uncle has now married his Mother. With sorrow and pain, Hamlet tries to understand and unravel the aberrant events that have taken place with his family. The events have amended the way Hamlet views death. After his Father’s death, Hamlet questions the afterlife; whether it offers a “peaceful slumber” or an “everlasting nightmare”.

William Shakespeare’s titular character in the play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a young prince who is overwrought with grief after his father’s death. The king’s sudden death has a negative impact on Hamlet’s state of mind and psyche. Through Hamlet’s thoughts and soliloquies, the audience can see the main character’s obsession with spirituality, death, and mortality. Hamlet’s fixation on life after death causes his descent into madness. Because of this, spirituality, death, and mortality are the most important themes in Hamlet.

When Hamlet loses his father he must find a way to save himself before his depression hurts him. Hamlet looks to confide in the first person that truly understands him: Horatio. In his play, Hamlet, William Shakespeare uses the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio to represent the fatherly bond Hamlet lost. The characterization of Hamlet and Horatio 's bond through the grief of death, their respect for each other, and how much they care about one another proves how Hamlet replaces his father with Horatio out of desperation for someone to look up to, just as he did his father. Hamlet is immediately drawn to Horatio because of their shared grief over the death of King Hamlet.

To die,to sleep; No more; And by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, it 's a consummation devoutly to be wished. (Act3 Scene 1 Line 64-71) The speech in Hamlet not only reveals the death but also spreading rot and decay. Hamlet is quite struggling about to live or to die. At the beginning of the play, he is grieved at his father’s death and his mother’s hasty marriage with his uncle. He decided not to die at last.

King Hamlet comes to Hamlet as a ghost to tell him to kill Claudius, but it takes Hamlet the whole play to finally fulfill his father’s wish since he fears the consequences of murdering the king of Denmark. This affects Hamlet’s mental health and relationship with his mother as he considers committing suicide as well as blaming his mother to help him recover from his father’s death. Through Hamlet’s anger towards his uncle, depression, and blame towards his mother in conflict with his fears of killing his uncle, having God mad at him, and hurting his mother, Shakespeare explains that people often desire revenge, but feel too fearful to fulfill it. Claudius becomes king after killing Hamlet’s father and marrying his brother’s wife, establishing Hamlet’s negative attitude towards him throughout the play. The king also talks condescendingly towards Hamlet in multiple instances, making Hamlet more angry that his relative does not

Hamlet’s mind is violently pulled in divergent directions. He’s faced with many different decisions and has chronic indecision, which might be diagnosed as a cognitive symptom of depression by authorities such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He struggles with whether killing Claudius is morally right or not, but he also feels an obligation to avenge his father’s death. On account of his indecision and procrastination, he puts off killing Claudius until the very end of the play, which causes many unintentional deaths and causes a vicious circle of revenge. When King Hamlet’s ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet struggles with the morality of killing Claudius.

After Hamlet kills Polonius, Laertes faces the same problem that Hamlet does —a murdered father. And that 's where the similarities end. While Hamlet lollygags and broods over the murder for much of the play, Laertes takes immediate action. He storms home from France as soon as he hears the news, raises a crowd of followers, and invades the palace, saying "That drop of blood that 's calm proclaims me bastard" (Shakespeare 97). In other words, not being upset by his father 's death would prove that his mother was stepping out on his dad.

Hamlet’s uncle Claudius killed his father, which put a huge burden on his shoulders because he loved his father so much. What made it even worse was his mom, Gertrude, ended up marrying Claudius shortly after King Hamlet's death. After the king is murdered, Hamlet saw his father’s “ghost” which told him that Claudius was in fact the one that killed him and that he wanted Hamlet to seek revenge for him by killing Claudius, but not to punish his mother for remarrying. The ghost said to Hamlet, “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. Murder most foul, as in the best it is, / But this most foul, strange, and unnatural” and Hamlet replied, “Haste me to know 't, that I, with wings as swift / As

First, her boyfriend dumps her, then he calls her vulgar names, and lastly, he kills her father. Just one of these traumatic events could make a character go mad, but the combination of the three justifies Ophelia’s madness. The use of these three tragic events in Ophelia’s life makes her madness reasonable. The first event to happen that changes Ophelia’s demeanor is her relationship problems with her boyfriend, Hamlet. In Act III, Scene I of the play, Ophelia says to Hamlet “My lord, I have remembrances of yours, That I have longed long

At this point, she still doesn’t know that Claudius killed her first husband, but it still causes her grief about whether marrying her husband’s brother was the right thing to do. Her dilemma of having to choose one man over the other is driving her to insanity because she can’t pick just one of them. Certainly she loves both of them or at least that’s what she thought, but Hamlet’s father is her true love while Claudius is the brother of her husband that just so happened to become king after his brother died. In short, she doesn’t know her true feelings for either person. Gertrude feels confused and overwhelmed by everything that just unfolded in front of her.