State Claudia Elena

Mourning and vengeance

Hamlet is one of the world’s best known plays ever written by the one and only English
playwright William Shakespeare that fascinates through its complexity even today. In this
revenge tragedy everything is questionable, uncertain, reason why all the characters are
going to be “sick at heart”, always suspicious, always with a question mark hanging
around their heads. But the biggest question out of all is: has Hamlet really gone mad? Or
is it a way of concealing a motive, an intention to set things right?. In Act I, Scene V, he
affirms: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right”.
Hamlet will have to take the leading role of an avenger that had received the task to
“cleanse” the world.

The play starts out with a regicide, the murder of the king of Denmark by his own
brother, Claudius who had now become the king and married his brother’s widow, Queen
Gertrude. Shakespeare might have had as a source of inspiration the situation of England
of that time, when the king, Henry VIII, had married his brother’s wife after his death.
Hamlet is the only one wearing mourning, the only one who actually was in terrible grief
caused by his father’s sudden death. He is furious, sad and he cannot understand why he
is the only one who cares about his father, that within a month his mother has forgotten
about her husband and has already married her brother-in-law, committing incest.
Hamlet’s despair is called out in the first soliloquy of the play: “O, that this too too solid
flesh would melt/ Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!”. Hamlet is disappointed by the
way things go in society, that lechery, gluttony makes people choose the wrong path and
forget about morality. He further adds: “Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/ His canon
‘gainst self-slaughter!”. He wants to put an end to his own misery by committing suicide
but his belief in God, his religious sense does not allow him to commit such a sin. During
the Elizabethan rule, most of the population of England was protestant due to Luther’s
Reformation. Hamlet is a protestant, a puritan and his mission is to cleanse the world.

The ghost represents one of the most important characters in this play. The appearance of
the unnatural “thing” in such a “questionable shape” which turns out to be the figure of
Hamlet’s father, will be the reason why the protagonist will start this journey towards
justice. It was believed that when a ghost came from the other world, it was sent to make
things right. The ghost turns Hamlet’s world upside down the minute it says to him that
Claudius is the one who had killed his father in order to take over Denmark, the whole
power, something similar to what Cain did to Abel. The ghost’s last words were
“Remember me.” (Act I, Scene V) meaning that his father wanted him to avenge his
memory, to punish the murderer and to keep mourning him. And so, Hamlet makes his
life’s mission to protect the state of Denmark, to escape the people from this lecherous
and weak of a king. He becomes “the champion of justice” he pretends to have gone mad
so that the other characters would not notice that he has become suspicious of things, that
he has a plan to get rid of Claudius.

One of the guard’s remarks is: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Act I,
Scene IV) which means that once Claudius took over the throne to satisfy his own
interests, the country was falling apart while he was entertaining himself with all the
worldly pleasures. Similar to what Hamlet said that the world is “an unweeded garden/
That grows to seed” , a metaphor by which Hamlet suggests that the bad people, like the
weeds, destroy everything, all the beautiful flowers that still remained pure. The world is
like a garden that has not been cared for and that now is full of sins and betrayal.

Hamlet’s mission is accomplished by the end of the play when justice is being served to
those who had wronged not only the country, but the values and principles of mankind as
well. Queen Gertrude is punished for the sin of incest, Laertes dies out of the act of
cheating, with the same weapon that he used against Hamlet, and Claudius drinks the
poison which was meant to kill Hamlet. Therefore, the task of the ghost is fulfilled, a task
that took Hamlet’s life as well. The order is re-established once Fortinbras had arrived at
Elsinore and took over the power. He is the dying voice of Hamlet and the one that will
make out of Denmark the country that once were.

Hamlets represents the figure of the rebellion, the figure of a man that in spite of all the
pleasures this world has to offer, he had not forgotten about his values, his principles that
define him as human being. His adoration for the “so excellent a king”, his father, put
him on the right path and motivated him to remain true to his memory and be honorable
in everything he does, qualities that would have made him suitable for a king. “Time is
out of joint” is not just a metaphor for escaping Denmark from a tyrant but also for
Hamlet to cleanse his conscience, to finally be at peace with himself.