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Hamlet’s Moral Philosophy: The Key to Unlocking Shakespeare’s Own Ethics

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Little is known about Shakespeare’s personal life or his own beliefs.  Most of what we know is derived from his expansive catalog of plays; the consensus is that the character of Hamlet is most similar to the Bard himself.  “In recent years, studies of Shakespeare’s plays have concerned themselves with everyday objects and ‘matter’ rather than with questions of philosophy or moral value” (Parvini).  To combat that tendency towards the everyday, it will be useful to examine the moral philosophy of Hamlet within his titular play, thus exposing Shakespeare’s own potential ethics.

There are, arguably, seven main schools of thought surrounding morals and ethics.  Those are as follows: objectivism, relativism, egoism, altruism, virtue ethics, duty ethics, and utilitarianism (Fieser).  (Some of these moral theories can overlap and interplay.)  Objectivism suggests that moral values are “beyond subjective human conventions” (Fieser).  Objectivism further suggests that moral values are absolute and never-changing and that they apply to all rational creatures (Fieser).  Basically, an objectivist believes every person is born with inherent, similar moral values.

Relativists argue that moral values are strictly human inventions (Fieser).  There are two basic relativist theories: individual relativism and cultural relativism.  Individual relativism states that everyone makes their own moral law/code and that each individual is right because their codes are tailored and separate.  Cultural relativism states that society creates the standard moral law/code and that each society is right because, again, their codes are specific to them.

Egoism can be scrutinized in two parts as well: psychological egoism and ethical egoism.  Psychological egoism “maintains that self-oriented interests ultimately motivate all human actions” (Fieser).  Ethical egoism builds on that idea; an ethical egoist believes an action is “morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable only to the agent performing the action” (Fieser).  Altruism is practically the opposite thought process, as it is a moral philosophy of selflessness.  One judges one’s actions based on how they hurt or help others rather than how they hurt or help oneself.

“Virtue ethics… places less emphasis on learning rules, and instead stresses the importance of developing good habits of character, such as benevolence… Once I’ve acquired benevolence, for example, I will then habitually act in a benevolent manner” (Fieser) Duty ethics reflects more upon the before-mentioned objectivist viewpoints. “Duty theories base morality on specific, foundational principles of obligation. These theories are sometimes called deontological , from the Greek word deon , or duty, in view of the foundational nature of our duty or obligation. They are also sometimes called nonconsequentialist since these principles are obligatory, irrespective of the consequences that might follow from our actions. For example, it is wrong to not care for our children even if it results in some great benefit, such as financial savings” (Fieser).

Finally, utilitarianism is all about what actions benefit the greatest number of people overall (including oneself).  Sometimes, callous decisions can still be considered morally upright under the view of utilitarianism since it is a numbers game.  For instance, if one has to kill someone in order to save, say, three others, then that murder is morally sound.

Hamlet’s actions fall under more than one moral philosophy as per the aforementioned definitions.  In fact, he seems to be battling between being an objectivist with a twisted sense of duty ethics and being a relativist in the cultural category.  As previously explained, objectivists believe morality is just that—objective.  Morality is a code that everyone has within them that cannot be altered by human conceit.  The fact that Hamlet is offended by the immorality of others (namely King Claudius and Hamlet’s own mother) suggests that he believes they, like everyone else, have a moral code within them to which they should adhere.  The first example of Hamlet’s objectivist morality comes in his first soliloquy—“…within a month:/ Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears/Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,/She married. O, most wicked speed, to post/With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!/It is not nor it cannot come to good” (Shakespeare).  Hamlet is holding his mother to the objective moral standard of “do not cheat” that he expects to find in everybody; more importantly, he expects everyone to live up to that standard.  His comments about her actions therefore serve to cast her as an immoral character, especially since her cheating is also described as “incestuous”.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 )

With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act.

—Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet

Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.”

Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries.

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist.

Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger.

Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there.

Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard.

Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be?

Hamlet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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A Modern Perspective: Hamlet

By Michael Neill

The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that “if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful.” 1 Perhaps Meyerhold exaggerated because of his frustration—he was prevented from ever staging the tragedy by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who apparently thought it too dangerous to be performed—but Meyerhold’s sense of Hamlet ’s extraordinary breadth of appeal is amply confirmed by its stage history. Praised by Shakespeare’s contemporaries for its power to “please all” as well as “to please the wiser sort,” 2 it provided his company with an immediate and continuing success. It was equally admired by popular audiences at the Globe on the Bankside, by academic playgoers “in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” and at court—where it was still in request in 1637, nearly forty years after its first performance.

In the four centuries since it was first staged, Hamlet has never lost its theatrical appeal, remaining today the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the same time, it has developed a reputation as the most intellectually puzzling of his plays, and it has already attracted more commentary than any other work in English except the Bible. Even today, when criticism stresses the importance of the reader’s role in “constructing” the texts of the past, there is something astonishing about Hamlet ’s capacity to accommodate the most bafflingly different readings. 3

In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Romantic critics read it as the psychological study of a prince too delicate and sensitive for his public mission; to later nineteenth-century European intellectuals, the hero’s anguish and self-reproach spoke so eloquently of the disillusionment of revolutionary failure that in czarist Russia “Hamletism” became the acknowledged term for political vacillation and disengagement. The twentieth century, not surprisingly, discovered a more violent and disturbing play: to the French poet Paul Valéry, the tragedy seemed to embody the European death wish revealed in the carnage and devastation of the First World War; in the mid-1960s the English director Peter Hall staged it as a work expressing the political despair of the nuclear age; for the Polish critic Jan Kott, as for the Russian filmmaker Gregori Kozintsev, the play became “a drama of a political crime” in a state not unlike Stalin’s Soviet empire; 4 while the contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney found in it a metaphor for the murderous politics of revenge at that moment devouring his native Ulster:

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections

murders and pieties 5

Even the major “facts” of the play—the status of the Ghost, or the real nature of Hamlet’s “madness”—are seen very differently at different times. Samuel Johnson, for example, writing in the 1760s, had no doubt that the hero’s “madness,” a source of “much mirth” to eighteenth-century audiences, was merely “pretended,” but twentieth-century Hamlets onstage, even if they were not the full-fledged neurotics invented by Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones, were likely to show some signs of actual madness. Modern readings, too, while still fascinated by the hero’s intellectual and emotional complexities, are likely to emphasize those characteristics that are least compatible with the idealized “sweet prince” of the Victorians—the diseased suspicion of women, revealed in his obsession with his mother’s sexuality and his needless cruelty to Ophelia, his capacity for murderous violence (he dies with the blood of five people on his hands), and his callous indifference to the killing of such relative innocents as Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.

Hamlet ’s ability to adapt itself to the preconceptions of almost any audience, allowing the viewers, in the play’s own sardonic phrase, to “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” ( 4.5.12 ), results partly from the boldness of its design. Over the sensationalism and rough energy of a conventional revenge plot is placed a sophisticated psychological drama whose most intense action belongs to the interior world of soliloquy: Hamlet agrees to revenge his father’s death at the urging of the Ghost, and thus steps into an old-fashioned revenge tragedy; but it is Hamlet’s inner world, revealed to us in his soliloquies (speeches addressed not to other characters but to the audience, as if the character were thinking aloud), that equally excites our attention. It is as if two plays are occurring simultaneously.

Although Hamlet is often thought of as the most personal of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare did not invent the story of revenge that the play tells. The story was an ancient one, belonging originally to Norse saga. The barbaric narrative of murder and revenge—of a king killed by his brother, who then marries the dead king’s widow, of the young prince who must pretend to be mad in order to save his own life, who eludes a series of traps laid for him by his wicked uncle, and who finally revenges his father’s death by killing the uncle—had been elaborated in the twelfth-century Historiae Danicae of Saxo Grammaticus, and then polished up for sixteenth-century French readers in François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques. It was first adapted for the English theater in the late 1580s in the form of the so-called Ur- Hamlet , a play attributed to Thomas Kyd (unfortunately now lost) that continued to hold the stage until at least 1596; and it may well be that when Shakespeare began work on Hamlet about 1599, he had no more lofty intention than to polish up this slightly tarnished popular favorite. But Shakespeare’s wholesale rewriting produced a Hamlet so utterly unlike Kyd’s work that its originality was unmistakable even to playgoers familiar with Kyd’s play.

The new tragedy preserved the outline of the old story, and took over Kyd’s most celebrated contributions—a ghost crying for revenge, and a play-within-the-play that sinisterly mirrors the main plot; but by focusing upon the perplexed interior life of the hero, Shakespeare gave a striking twist to what had been a brutally straightforward narrative. On the levels of both revenge play and psychological drama, the play develops a preoccupation with the hidden, the secret, and the mysterious that does much to account for its air of mystery. In Maynard Mack’s words, it is “a play in the interrogative mood” whose action deepens and complicates, rather than answers, the apparently casual question with which it begins, “Who’s there?” 6

“The Cheer and Comfort of Our Eye”: Hamlet and Surveillance

The great subject of revenge drama, before Hamlet , was the moral problem raised by private, personal revenge: i.e., should the individual take revenge into his own hands or leave it to God? Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (and, one assumes, his lost play about Hamlet as well) captured on the stage the violent contradictions of the Elizabethan attitudes toward this form of “wild justice.” The surprising thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero’s taking justice into his own hands—an argument central to The Spanish Tragedy. Of course, the controversy about the morality of private revenge must have provided an important context for the original performances of the play, giving an ominous force to Hamlet’s fear that the spirit he has seen “may be a devil” luring him to damnation ( 2.2.628 ). But Shakespeare simply takes this context for granted, and goes on to discover a quite different kind of political interest in his plot—one that may help to explain the paranoiac anxieties it was apparently capable of arousing in a dictator like Stalin.

Turning away from the framework of ethical debate, Shakespeare used Saxo’s story of Hamlet’s pretended madness and delayed revenge to explore the brutal facts about survival in an authoritarian state. Here too the play could speak to Elizabethan experience, for we should not forget that the glorified monarchy of Queen Elizabeth I was sustained by a vigorous network of spies and informers. Indeed, one portrait of Elizabeth shows her dressed in a costume allegorically embroidered with eyes and ears, partly to advertise that her watchers and listeners were everywhere. Shakespeare’s Elsinore, too—the castle governed by Claudius and home to Hamlet—is full of eyes and ears; and behind the public charade of warmth, magnanimity, and open government that King Claudius so carefully constructs, the lives of the King’s subjects are exposed to merciless inquisition.

It is symbolically appropriate that the play should begin with a group of anxious watchers on the battlemented walls of the castle, for nothing and no one in Claudius’s Denmark is allowed to go “unwatched”: every appearance must be “sifted” or “sounded,” and every secret “opened.” The King himself does not hesitate to eavesdrop on the heir apparent; and his chief minister, Polonius, will meet his death lurking behind a curtain in the same squalid occupation. But they are not alone in this: the wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare’s chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. Denmark, Hamlet informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accurately enough, is “a prison” ( 2.2.262 ); and the treachery of these former school friends of Hamlet illustrates how much, behind the mask of uncle Claudius’s concern, his court is ruled by the prison-house customs of the stool pigeon and the informer. How readily first Ophelia and then Gertrude allow themselves to become passive instruments of Polonius’s and Claudius’s spying upon the Prince; how easily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are persuaded to put their friendship with Hamlet at the disposal of the state. Even Laertes’s affectionate relationship with his sister is tainted by a desire to install himself as a kind of censor, a “watchman” to the fortress of her heart ( 1.3.50 ). In this he is all too like his father, Polonius, who makes himself an interiorized Big Brother, engraving his cautious precepts on Laertes’s memory ( 1.3.65 ff.) and telling Ophelia precisely what she is permitted to think and feel:

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby. . . .

( 1.3.113 –14)

Polonius is the perfect inhabitant of this court: busily policing his children’s sexuality, he has no scruple about prostituting his daughter in the interests of state security, for beneath his air of senile wordiness and fatherly anxiousness lies an ingrained cynicism that allows him both to spy on his son’s imagined “drabbing” in Paris and to “loose” his daughter as a sexual decoy to entrap the Prince.

Hamlet’s role as hero at once sets him apart from this prison-house world and yet leads him to become increasingly entangled in its web of surveillance. To the admiring Ophelia, Hamlet remains “Th’ observed of all observers” ( 3.1.168 ), but his obvious alienation has resulted in his being “observed” in a much more sinister sense. He is introduced in Act 1, scene 2, as a mysteriously taciturn watcher and listener whose glowering silence calls into question the pomp and bustle of the King’s wordy show, just as his mourning blacks cast suspicion on the showy costumes of the court. Yet he himself, we are quickly made to realize, is the object of a dangerously inquisitive stare—what the King smoothly calls “the cheer and comfort of our eye” ( 1.2.120 ).

The full meaning of that silky phrase will be disclosed on Claudius’s next appearance, when, after Hamlet has met the Ghost and has begun to appear mad, Claudius engages Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to probe his nephew’s threatening transformation ( 2.2.1 –18). “Madness in great ones,” the King insists, “must not unwatched go” ( 3.1.203 ):

         There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger.                  ( 3.1.178 –81)

But of course Hamlet’s madness is as much disguise as it is revelation; and while the Prince is the most ruthlessly observed character in the play, he is also its most unremitting observer. Forced to master his opponent’s craft of smiling villainy, he becomes not merely an actor but also a dramatist, ingeniously using a troupe of traveling players, with their “murder in jest,” to unmask the King’s own hypocritical “show.”

The scene in which the Players present The Murder of Gonzago , the play that Hamlet calls “The Mousetrap,” brings the drama of surveillance to its climax. We in the audience become participants in the drama’s claustrophobic economy of watching and listening, as our attention moves to and fro among the various groups on the stage, gauging the significance of every word, action, and reaction, sharing the obsessional gaze that Hamlet describes to Horatio:

Observe my uncle. . . . Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,

And, after, we will both our judgments join

In censure of his seeming.             ( 3.2.85 –92)

“The Mousetrap” twice reenacts Claudius’s murder of his brother—first in the dumb show and then in the play proper—drawing out the effect so exquisitely that the King’s enraged interruption produces an extraordinary discharge of tension. An audience caught up in Hamlet’s wild excitement is easily blinded to the fact that this seeming climax is, in terms of the revenge plot, at least, a violent anticlimax. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had developed the play-within-the-play as a perfect vehicle for the ironies of revenge, allowing the hero to take his actual revenge in the very act of staging the villain’s original crime. Hamlet’s play, however, does not even make public Claudius’s forbidden story. Indeed, while it serves to confirm the truth of what the Ghost has said, the only practical effect of the Prince’s theatrical triumph is to hand the initiative decisively to Claudius. In the scenes that follow, Hamlet shows himself capable of both instinctive violence and of cold-blooded calculation, but his behavior is purely reactive. Otherwise he seems oddly paralyzed by his success—a condition displayed in the prayer scene ( 3.3.77 –101) where he stands behind the kneeling Claudius with drawn sword, “neutral to his will and matter,” uncannily resembling the frozen revenger described in the First Player’s speech about Pyrrhus standing over old Priam ( 2.2.493 ff.). All Hamlet can do is attempt to duplicate the triumph of “The Mousetrap” in his confrontation with Gertrude by holding up to her yet another verbal mirror, in which she is forced to gaze in horror on her “inmost part” ( 3.4.25 ).

Hamlet’s sudden loss of direction after the “Mousetrap” scene lasts through the fourth act of the play until he returns from his sea voyage in that mysteriously altered mood on which most commentators remark—a kind of fatalism that makes him the largely passive servant of a plot that he now does little to advance or impede. It is as if the springing of the “Mousetrap” leaves Hamlet with nowhere to go—primarily because it leaves him with nothing to say. But from the very beginning, his struggle with Claudius has been conceived as a struggle for the control of language—a battle to determine what can and cannot be uttered.

Speaking the Unspeakable: Hamlet and Memory

If surveillance is one prop of the authoritarian state, the other is its militant regulation of speech. As Claudius flatters the court into mute complicity with his theft of both the throne and his dead brother’s wife, he genially insists “You cannot speak of reason to the Dane / And lose your voice” ( 1.2.44 –45); but an iron wall of silence encloses the inhabitants of his courtly prison. While the flow of royal eloquence muffles inconvenient truths, ears here are “fortified” against dangerous stories ( 1.1.38 ) and lips sealed against careless confession: “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” Polonius advises Laertes, “. . . Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice . . . reserve thy judgment” ( 1.3.65 –75). Hamlet’s insistent warnings to his fellow watchers on the battlements “Never to speak of this that you have seen” ( 1.5.174 ) urge the same caution: “Let it be tenable in your silence still . . . Give it an understanding but no tongue” ( 1.2.269 –71). What for them is merely common prudence, however, is for the hero an absolute prohibition and an intolerable burden: “. . . break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” ( 1.2.164 ).

Hamlet has only two ways of rupturing this enforced silence. The “pregnant” wordplay of his “mad” satire, as Polonius uneasily recognizes ( 2.2.226 –27), is one way, but it amounts to no more than inconclusive verbal fencing. Soliloquy is a more powerful resource because, since it is heard by no one (except the audience), its impenetrable privacy defines Hamlet’s independence from the corrupt public world. From his first big speech in the play, he has made such hiddenness the badge of his resistance to the King and Queen: “I have that within which passes show” ( 1.2.88 ), he announces. What is at issue here is not simply a contrast between hypocrisy and true grief over the loss of his king and father: rather, Hamlet grounds his very claim to integrity upon a notion that true feeling can never be expressed: it is only “that . . . which passes show ” that can escape the taint of hypocrisy, of “acting.” It is as if, in this world of remorseless observation, the self can survive only as a ferociously defended secret, something treasured for the very fact of its hiddenness and impenetrability. Unlike Gertrude, unlike Ophelia, unlike those absorbent “sponges” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet must insist he is not made of “penetrable stuff.”

If Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is the guardian of his rebellious inwardness, soliloquy is where this inwardness lives, a domain which (if we except Claudius’s occasional flickers of conscience) no other character is allowed to inhabit. Hamlet’s soliloquies bulk so large in our response to the play because they not only guarantee the existence of the hero’s secret inner life; they also, by their relentless self-questioning, imply the presence of still more profoundly secret truths “hid . . . within the center” ( 2.2.170 –71): “I do not know / Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do ’t” ( 4.4.46 –49). The soliloquies are the focus of the play’s preoccupation with speaking and silence. Hamlet is set apart from those around him by his access to this region of private utterance: in it he can, as it were, “be bounded in a nutshell and count [himself] a king of infinite space” ( 2.2.273 –74).

Yet there is a paradox here: the isolation of soliloquy is at once his special strength and the source of peculiar anguish. It saves him from the fate of Ophelia, who becomes “Divided from herself and her fair judgment” ( 4.5.92 ) by her grief at Polonius’s death and hasty burial; accustomed to speak only in the voice that others allow her, dutifully resolved to “think nothing, my lord” ( 3.2.124 ), she is left with no language other than the disconnected fragments of her madness to express outrage at a murder which authority seems determined to conceal. Hamlet, by contrast, finds in soliloquy an arena where the unspeakable can be uttered. But the very fact that these are words that others do not hear also makes soliloquy a realm of noncommunication, of frustrating silence—a prison as well as a fortress in which the speaker beats his head unavailingly against the walls of his own cell. Thus the soliloquy that ends Act 2 reproaches itself for a kind of speechlessness—the mute ineffectuality of a “John-a-dreams,” who, unlike the Player, “can say nothing”—and at the same time mocks itself as a torrent of empty language, a mere unpacking of the heart with words ( 2.2.593 –616). For all their eloquence, the soliloquies serve in the end only to increase the tension generated by the pressure of forbidden utterance.

It is from this pressure that the first three acts of the play derive most of their extraordinary energy; and the energy is given a concrete dramatic presence in the form of the Ghost. The appearance of a ghost demanding vengeance was a stock device borrowed from the Roman playwright Seneca; and the Ur- Hamlet had been notorious for its ghost, shrieking like an oysterwife, “Hamlet, revenge!” But the strikingly unconventional thing about Shakespeare’s Ghost is its melancholy preoccupation with the silenced past and its plangent cry of “Remember me” ( 1.5.98 ), which makes remembrance seem more important than revenge. “The struggle of humanity against power,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written, “is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness”; and this Ghost, which stands for all that has been erased by the bland narratives of King Claudius, is consumed by the longing to speak that which power has rendered unspeakable. The effect of the Ghost’s narrative upon Hamlet is to infuse him with the same desire; indeed, once he has formally inscribed its watchword—“Remember me”—on the tables of his memory, he is as if possessed by the Ghost, seeming to mime its speechless torment when he appears to Ophelia, looking “As if he had been loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors” ( 2.1.93 –94).

For all its pathos of silenced longing, the Ghost remains profoundly ambivalent, and not just because Elizabethans held such contradictory beliefs about ghosts. 7 The ambivalence is dramatized in a particularly disturbing detail: as the Ghost pours his story into Hamlet’s ear (the gesture highlighted by the Ghost’s incantatory repetition of “hear” and “ear”), we become aware of an uncanny parallel between the Ghost’s act of narration and the murder the Ghost tells about:

’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forgèd process of my death

Rankly abused. . . .

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leprous distilment. . . .               ( 1.5.42 –71)

If Claudius’s propaganda has abused “the whole ear of Denmark” like a second poisoning, the Ghost’s own story enters Hamlet’s “ears of flesh and blood” (line 28) like yet another corrosive. The fact that it is a story that demands telling, and that its narrator is “an honest ghost,” cannot alter the fact that it will work away in Hamlet’s being like secret venom until he in turn can vent it in revenge.

The “Mousetrap” play is at once a fulfillment and an escape from that compulsion. It gives, in a sense, a public voice to the Ghost’s silenced story. But it is only a metaphoric revenge. Speaking daggers and poison but using none, Hamlet turns out only to have written his own inability to bring matters to an end. It is no coincidence, then, that he should foresee the conclusion of his own tragedy as being the product of someone else’s script: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” ( 5.2.11 –12).

“To Tell My Story”: Unfinished Hamlet

In the last scene of the play, the sense that Hamlet’s story has been shaped by Providence—or by a playwright other than Hamlet—is very strong: the swordplay with Laertes is a theatrical imitation of dueling that becomes the real thing, sweetly knitting up the paralyzing disjunction between action and acting; at the same time, revenge is symmetrically perfected in the spectacle of Claudius choking on “a poison tempered by himself,” Laertes “justly killed with his own treachery,” and the Queen destroyed in the vicious pun that has her poisoned by Claudius’s “union.” Yet Hamlet’s consoling fatalism does not survive the final slaughter. Instead, he faces his end tormented by a sense of incompleteness, of a story still remaining to be told:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act,

Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,

Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you—

But let it be.                                     ( 5.2.366 –70)

Within a few lines Hamlet’s distinctive voice, which has dominated his own tragedy like that of no other Shakespearean hero, will be cut off in midsentence by the arrest of death—and “the rest is silence” ( 5.2.395 ).

The play is full of such unfinished, untold, or perhaps even untellable tales, from Barnardo’s interrupted story of the Ghost’s first appearance to the Player’s unfinished rendition of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido” and the violently curtailed performance of The Murder of Gonzago. In the opening scene the Ghost itself is cut off, before it can speak, by the crowing of a cock; and when it returns and speaks to Hamlet, it speaks first about a story it cannot tell:

                 But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy

 young blood . . .                   ( 1.5.18 –21)

Even the tale it is permitted to unfold is, ironically, one of murderous interruption and terrible incompleteness:

Cut off , even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

( 1.5.83 –86)

Act 5 at last produces the formal reckoning of this imperfect account, yet it leaves Hamlet once again echoing the Ghost’s agony of frustrated utterance.

But what, we might ask, can there be left to tell, beyond what we have already seen and heard? It seems to be part of the point, a last reminder of Hamlet’s elusive “mystery,” that we shall never know. The Prince has, of course, insisted that Horatio remain behind “to tell my story”; but the inadequacy of Horatio’s response only intensifies the sense of incompleteness. All that his stolid imagination can offer is that bald plot summary of “accidental judgments [and] casual slaughters,” which, as Anne Barton protests, leaves out “everything that seems important” about the play and its protagonist. 8 Nor is Fortinbras’s attempt to make “The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for [Hamlet]” ( 5.2.445 –46) any more satisfactory, for the military strongman’s cannon are no better tuned to speak for Hamlet than the player’s pipe.

It would be a mistake, of course, to underestimate the dramatic significance of Horatio’s story or of the “music and the rite of war”—these last gestures of ritual consolation—especially in a play where, beginning with the obscene confusion of Claudius’s “mirth in funeral” and including Polonius’s “hugger-mugger” interment and Ophelia’s “maimed rites,” we have seen the dead repeatedly degraded by the slighting of their funeral pomps. In this context it matters profoundly that Hamlet alone is accorded the full dignity of obsequies suited to his rank, for it signals his triumph over the oblivion to which Claudius is fittingly consigned, and, in its gesture back toward Hamlet’s story as Shakespeare has told it (so much better than Horatio does), it brings Hamlet’s story to a heroic end.

“The Undiscovered Country”: Hamlet and the Secrets of Death

How we respond to the ending of Hamlet —both as revenge drama and as psychological study—depends in part on how we respond to yet a third level of the play—that is, to Hamlet as a prolonged meditation on death. The play is virtually framed by two encounters with the dead: at one end is the Ghost, at the other a pile of freshly excavated skulls. The skulls (all but one) are nameless and silent; the Ghost has an identity (though a “questionable” one) and a voice; yet they are more alike than might at first seem. For this ghost, though invulnerable “as the air,” is described as a “dead corse,” a “ghost . . . come from the grave,” its appearance suggesting a grotesque disinterment of the buried king ( 1.4.52 –57; 1.5.139 ). The skulls for their part may be silent, but Hamlet plays upon each to draw out its own “excellent voice” (“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once”; 5.1.77 –78), just as he engineered that “miraculous organ” of the Ghost’s utterance, the “Mousetrap.”

There is a difference, however: Hamlet’s dressing up the skulls with shreds of narrative (“as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone . . . This might be the pate of a politician . . . or of a courtier . . . Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer”; 5.1.78 –101) only serves to emphasize their mocking anonymity, until the Gravedigger offers to endow one with a precise historical identity: “This same skull . . . was . . . Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” ( 5.1.186 –87). Hamlet is delighted: now memory can begin its work of loving resurrection. But how does the Gravedigger know? The answer is that of course he cannot; and try as Hamlet may to cover this bare bone with the flesh of nostalgic recollection, he cannot escape the wickedly punning reminder of “this same skull” that all skulls indeed look frightfully the same. Ironically, even Yorick’s distinctive trademark, his grin, has become indistinguishable from the mocking leer of that grand jester of the Danse Macabre , Death the Antic: “Where be your gibes now? . . . Not one now to mock your own grinning?”; so that even as he holds it, the skull’s identity appears to drain away into the anonymous memento mori sent to adorn “my lady’s” dressing table. It might as well be Alexander the Great’s; or Caesar’s; or anyone’s. It might as well be what it will one day become—a handful of clay, fit to stop a beer barrel.

It is significant that (with the trivial exception of 4.4) the graveyard scene is the only one to take place outside the confines of Claudius’s castle-prison. As the “common” place to which all stories lead, the graveyard both invites narrative and silences it. Each blank skull at once poses and confounds the question with which the tragedy itself began, “Who’s there?,” subsuming all human differences in awful likeness: “As you are now,” goes the tombstone verse, “so once was I / As I am now, so shall you be.” In the graveyard all stories collapse into one reductive history (“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust”; 5.1.216 –17). In this sense the Gravedigger is the mocking counterpart of the Player: and the houses of oblivion that gravediggers make challenge the players’ memorial art by lasting “till doomsday” ( 5.1.61 ). Hamlet shares with the Gravedigger the same easy good-fellowship he extends to the play’s other great outsider, the First Player; but the Gravedigger asserts a more sinister kind of intimacy with his claim to have begun his work “that very day that young Hamlet was born” ( 5.1.152 –53). In this moment he identifies himself as the Prince’s mortal double, the Sexton Death from the Danse Macabre who has been preparing him a grave from the moment of birth.

If there is a final secret to be revealed, then, about that “undiscovered country” on which Hamlet’s imagination broods, it is perhaps only the Gravedigger’s spade that can uncover it. For his digging lays bare the one thing we can say for certain lies hidden “within” the mortal show of the flesh—the emblems of Death himself, that Doppelgänger who shadows each of us as the mysterious Lamord ( La Mort ) shadows Laertes. If there is a better story, one that would confer on the rough matter of life the consolations of form and significance, it is, the play tells us, one that cannot finally be told; for it exists on the other side of language, to be tantalizingly glimpsed only at the point when Hamlet is about to enter the domain of the inexpressible. The great and frustrating achievement of this play, its most ingenious and tormenting trick, the source of its endlessly belabored mystery, is to persuade us that such a story might exist, while demonstrating its irreducible hiddenness. The only story Hamlet is given is that of a hoary old revenge tragedy, which he persuades himself (and us) can never denote him truly; but it is a narrative frame that nothing (not even inaction) will allow him to escape. The story of our lives, the play wryly acknowledges, is always the wrong story; but the rest, after all, is silence.

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich , as related to and edited by Solomon Volkow, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Faber, 1981), p. 84.
• See F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 1564–1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 435, 209; see also pp. 262 and 403.
• The most lucid guide to this critical labyrinth, though he deals with no work later than 1960, is probably still Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Faber, 1964).
• Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964).
• Excerpt from “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” from Poems, 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Permission for use of these lines from North by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber Limited, is also acknowledged.
• See Mack’s classic essay, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952): 502–23; Mack’s approach is significantly extended in Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
• The most balanced treatment of this and other contentious historical issues in the play is in Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
• Introduction to T. J. B. Spencer, ed., Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 52. See also James L. Calderwood’s To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Meta-drama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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8 Hamlet ’s Ethics

• Published: December 2017
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“ Hamlet ’s Ethics” argues that the critical question of delay in Hamlet has blinded readers to the play’s exploration of questions of agency and vision. The so-called indecision of Hamlet at the point of action is framed in the play, but in such a way as to expose and altogether overturn the prototype of revenge. What does it mean to be the author of one’s own acts, and what does one become in doing them? What are the ends of action? Hamlet opens out these questions of what we become by virtue of our acts. In so doing this tragedy offers us an object lesson in ethics, but not as a question of either obligation or choice, but as a question of the vision by which the world comes into focus for us at all.

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The Power of Moral Duality in Hamlet Rigby Miller

The author Izaak Walton noted, "The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping." The characters in Hamlet constantly struggle with the power of their consciences, as they are tempted to satiate their innermost desires. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is the epitome of the power of conscience in the play. Although at first he is ruled by his conscience, he only begins to carry out his father's will as he alienates himself from his sense of morality. However, the other characters in Hamlet also feel the power of conscience as they consider actions they are about to perform and as they reflect upon their past deeds. Shakespeare utilizes the struggle between morality and immorality to create characters with real depth and with whom the audience can connect. The presence and duality of conscience in Shakespeare's Hamlet illustrates the depth of Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet.

The depth of Laertes is evident in his struggle with his conscience on his quest to avenge the murder of his father, Polonius. When Laertes learns of his father's murder, he return from France enraged. He seeks immediate vengeance and cries, "Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!" (4.5.131) Clearly,...

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Analysis of Hamlet's Morality Essay Example

To murder or not to murder, that is the question. The morality of killing human beings (for any reason) is one of the great considerations of any system of morality. This was especially true in the Elizabethan era in which moral philosophy connected to a Christian dominated life. In William Shakespere’s play Hamlet the titular character is pulled in twain by his commitment to the moral teachings of his religion and his desire to avenge the murder of his father. Hamlet’s conflict over the morality of killing his father’s murderer illuminates the larger theme of the existence of grey areas in morality and action. 

Christian ideologies and scripture play strong roles in Hamlet’s moral compass, even before he learns of his father’s murder. Hamlet begins the play in anguish over his father’s death, contemplating suicide and only halting because Christian theology would damn him to hell for the action. Hamlet laments, “O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,/Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst (self-slaughter!)” (I; ii, 133-136) Hamlet is focused on his desire for his own demise, yet he never loses focus of the Christian scripture that has been drilled into him. Thus even in the throes of an intense depression, Hamlet’s devotion to religion is solid. In this moment, even though Hamlet has justifiable reason to commit suicide, he views this sin as unacceptable. 

Hamlet’s religiously guided moral ideology is challenged after he learns of his father’s murder. The ghost of old king Hamlet appears to Hamlet bringing knowledge that Claudius killed him. Hamlet is initially full of vengeful thoughts but later tempers them and decides to try and determine the truth of the ghost’s assertion with the help of the players “Play something like the murder of my father/Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;/I’ll tent him to the quick. If he do blench,/I know my course. The spirit that I have seen/May be a (devil,) and the (devil) hath power/T’assume a pleasing shape;” (II; ii, 624-629). As part of Hamlet’s attempt to justify his revenge in line with his religious teachings, he emphasizes that the ghost could be biblical in nature as a disguised devil intending to lead him astray. By acquiring more proof beyond just the word of his father’s ghost, Hamlet is trying to rectify the teaching that murder is sin with his specific circumstance in which he believes murder is justifiable. These reassurances reflect Hamlet’s attempt to determine his own views and beliefs over whether or not the sin of murder is justifiable in specific circumstances. 

While Hamlet spends ample time in his debates over whether or not his revenge on Claudius is sinful, he spends much less time in his grappling with his murder of Polonius, Rozencrantz, and Guildenstern. After learning of his old friends’ duplition Hamlet sentences them to death by proxy, sending them with a letter “And stand a comma ’tween their amities/And many suchlike “as’s” of great charge,/That, on the view and knowing of these contents, /Without debatement further, more or less,/He should the bearers put to sudden death,/Not shriving time allowed.” (V; ii, 49-51). While Hamlet would have been at the mercy of the same treatment as he eventually sent his peers into, he still murders them by proxy with seemingly no qualms. In fact he giddily shares these details with Horatio. This is mirrored by his murder of Polonius in which he shows only a small amount of remorse. While Hamlet’s lack of consideration about his murder of Polonius might be justified as he had already prepared himself to kill someone (Claudius) in that moment, his lack of consideration about Rozencrantz and Guildenstern is less so. Hamlet allows himself to be so caught up in his thirst for revenge, and thus his justification process for that specific revenge he loses sight of the larger moral quandaries that he ought to be addressing. 

Hamlet’s final moments are filled with both vindication and tragedy as he finally realizes the lack of an absolute morality. Hamlet is poisoned by a fencing blade and in turn uses the same blade to finally kill Claudius and avenge the death of his father. As Hamlet lay dying he knows that while he has killed several people he felt justified in his actions. He also knows that to any outsider his actions are not so clear cut and thus he charges the steadfast Horatio with disseminating the truth of what has befallen Denmark, saying “But let it be. -Horatio, I am dead./Thou livest; report me and my cause aright/To the unsatisfied.” (V; ii, 370-372). In this line Hamlet charges Horatio to assert what Hamlet has learned to the rest of the world–killing can be justified, morality is not black and white.

Hamlet, in William Shakespere’s Hamlet grapples with his desire to stay true to his Christian morality, while also avenging the murder of his father. This conflict reflects the greater theme of when killing a human being is morally justifiable, and the existence of grey areas of morality. While Hamlet’s view of others' murderous deeds is stalwart, his view of his own is dependent on his own ability to justify his killings as without sin. This fallacy of Hamlet reflects that of society. Humans hold rigid rules for others, but allow those same rules to bend and stretch when applied to the self.

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Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus” Essay (Review)

The problem of interrelation between such two phenomena as human nature and human morality has always been very important for mankind and always interested people no matter what age group or social group they belonged to. This fact can be easily explained because since the time religion came into people’s lives there was no other question that troubled humans so much as morality. People always tried to combine the two above-mentioned things – natural instincts and morality – and make their lives harmonical.

People of art also took their time to deal with the above-stated issue in their works. The branch of arts that made a great contribution to the development of morality was literature. Literary creators, especially writers of fiction, playwrights, and others contributed greatly to the development of the here considered point in human thought. They speculated in their works on such important points of existence as of right and wrong, faithfulness and betrayal, life and death.

These are the problems we are going to discuss in the current essay, and we are going to address for help with it such masterpieces of literature as the play “Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark” by William Shakespeare and the play “Dr. Faustus” by Christopher Marlowe. These plays address directly and indirectly the problem of human morality and the aspect of it which concerns the phenomena of relations between morality and nature as an integral part of human existence.

The author of the first play, “Hamlet”, William Shakespeare, is the most famous English writer, poet, and playwright of all time. His works touch upon all the most important and burning issues of human life and no one since Shakespeare’s times managed to describe all sides of human existence. Shakespeare lived and worked in the 16 – 17 th centuries and depicted the society contemporary to him, but his works are still popular and actual nowadays. This allows us to conclude that only the setting changed and the human is still the same as he/she was several centuries ago, with all the virtues and sins.

Another author mentioned in this essay, Christopher Marlowe, was also a very well-known English poet and playwright, who lived in the same epoch that Shakespeare did but was forgotten unfairly, although his works were considered real masterpieces before Shakespeare came to spotlight. Marlowe was famous for his blank verse in poetry and plays, and for addressing universal philosophical questions in his works.

The works under consideration are chosen among the whole plenty of the two authors’ creations because they concern topics that display certain similarities. “Hamlet” is a philosophical work concerned with the issue of betrayal and revenge, as well as with the point of living and dying. The play by Christopher Marlowe titled “Dr. Faustus” describes the same topic – betrayal and the consequences it had, life and death, and the price of human life. Examining the plays, we can clearly observe the state of things with the moral principles in the 16 – 17 th centuries and relate this information to what we have nowadays. So, let us now start the comparative analysis of the two plays on the basis of the above-stated reasons and factors.

To start the brief review of the play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare we should take a look at the plot of this play. The action takes place in Medieval Denmark, where the King was poisoned by his brother who took the throne and married his wife. The son of the killed monarch, Hamlet, returns from studying in England, and the spirit of his father asks him to take revenge for his death upon the new king – Claudius, and his wife – Gertrude, who did not mourn her dead husband long and married his killer.

Hamlet suffers from hesitation, as he wants to take revenge for his father on the one hand, but on the other hand, he is not ready to kill. This inner conflict of a personality combined with the notions of Claudius and Gertrude’s betrayal constitute the main idea of the play and the end of it leads to the deaths of all the main characters which is a natural consequence of the situation when the principles of morality are confused with something else and are to serve somebody’s personal interests (Shakespeare, 1992). From here we can see that the issue of morality – nature relations has always been important and is vividly described in the play by William Shakespeare.

The plot of the second play under consideration, “Dr. Faustus”, takes place in a different setting but touches the same moral problems. A young doctor busy with divinity realizes that it is not enough for him and decides to take up black magic. The angels sent by God can not persuade him not to make such a mistake and soon Dr. Faustus signs a deal with Lucifer, according to which he gives his soul to the Devil after 24 years of using all the advantages of this deal. Dr. Faustus regrets what he has done more and more but can not change the situation and finally dies and goes to Hell after those 24 years expire. In this story, we face the issue of the Christian moral values that are betrayed and the issue of the personal values of the main character of the play (Marlowe, 2004).

The first point which allows comparing these two plays in respect of the issue of morality is the choice between right and wrong, moral and immoral, made by the main characters of the stories. What is right and what is wrong? Who sets these standards? How to make the right choice of the way to go in this life? All these questions did not let the heroes live quietly, they, like all geniuses, were bothered by the philosophical issues.

Hamlet could not live with the knowledge of his being a killer, although he revenged for his father (Shakespeare, 1992). This moral issue is a leitmotif of Shakespeare’s play:” Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain!” (Shakespeare, 1992). This Hamlet’s words show all the pain he felt inside while making the choice for or against evil. He did not want to take the side of the Evil but he had to if he wanted to punish the killers of his father.

That is why he called himself a “Bloody, bawdy villain”. The conflict of Dr. Faustus has a lot of similarities with the one experienced by Hamlet. He did not saw any sense in dealing with divinity anymore as he was too gifted to study it for so long. But, at the same time, Dr. Faustus realized that taking the side of the Evil would mean for him the betrayal of his own and the universal values (Marlowe, 2004).

Faustus could not resist the fixed idea to start dealing with black magic because Lucifer offered him such a seductive perspective of having everything he could wish in exchange for his soul. With the flow of time he regretted often what he had done but it was too late: “My heart’s so hardened I cannot repent. Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven, but fearful echoes thunder in mine ears, ‘Faustus, thou art damn’d!’” (Marlowe, 2004).

Another important point that demands consideration and that is connected with the previous point, is the issue of faithfulness and betrayal of people or values. It is so significant because both plays considered in this essay are built on the grounds of this issue. King Claudius, the man who killed his own brother in order to take his kingdom and his wife, is the brightest example of the point of betrayal in this Shakespeare’s play. The conflict between Claudius and Hamlet is one of the main lines of the plot of the play: “My father’s brother, but no more like my father

than I to Hercules.” (Shakespeare, 1992). But the betrayal committed by Hamlet himself, betrayal towards his mother, left a trace in the Prince’s soul: “I am justly killed with my own treachery.” (Shakespeare, 1992). Dr. Faustus was also concerned with the issue of betrayal.

He betrayed what made him famous and successful – his science and the Good on the whole – to change it for the Evil and leave all that he believed in: “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the Devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d. O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? See, see where Christ’s bloodstreams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul-Half a drop: ah, my Christ! Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ! Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer!” (Marlowe, 2004).

The final point of this comparative analysis of moral issues in the two above-mentioned plays is the question of living and dying. Its relation to the phenomenon of morality is displayed by the fact that the characters of “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus” lived in the conflict with themselves and morality and died as a result of this conflict as if punished for the betrayal of the Truth. Hamlet revenged for his father by killing Claudius but was himself killed at the end of the play, though we can not judge what is moral and what is not: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (Shakespeare, 1992).

Faustus also paid for his betrayal, although he sought for the ways of escaping his fate: “Accursed Faustus, wretch, what hast thou done? I do repent, and yet I do despair. Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast. What shall I do to shun the snares of death?” Here we can clearly see how the issue of living and dying is represented in the play by Marlowe. Dr. Faustus had to make the choice between living with God and dying after 24 years of serving the Devil. He chose the second alternative, he regretted it but did not repent: “To God?-He loves thee not. The God thou serv’st is thine own appetite…” (Marlowe, 2004).

All the above said draws us to the conclusion that the issue of morality is rather important. In this essay, we examined its reflections in the masterpieces of world literature – “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”. We saw clearly the consequences of the conflict between human morality and nature. The characters of the two plays experienced the hardness of choice between right and wrong were faithful in some aspects and sometimes betrayed their own ideals or other people, and finally, Hamlet and Dr. Faustus’ examples demonstrate the issue of living and dying of a human being.

One can choose to live a pious life and get to Heavens after death, another can prefer to enjoy the life on Earth and not to think of morality. The heroes of the plays considered here chose the latter. Although Hamlet made the choice not willingly, he was forced by the circumstances. Dr. Faustus made his choice consciously, and despite his regret, he never really take any effort in trying to change something.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. (1992). Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. Washington Square Press.

Marlowe, Christopher. (2004). Doctor Faustus. Kessinger Publishing.

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IvyPanda. (2022, September 4). Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-morality-in-hamlet-and-dr-faustus/

"Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”." IvyPanda , 4 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-morality-in-hamlet-and-dr-faustus/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”'. 4 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”." September 4, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-morality-in-hamlet-and-dr-faustus/.

1. IvyPanda . "Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”." September 4, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-morality-in-hamlet-and-dr-faustus/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus”." September 4, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-morality-in-hamlet-and-dr-faustus/.

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Moral Duality in Shakespeare's Hamlet

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Hamlet’s Moral Dilemma

Hamlet, the son of King Hamlet and Queen Gertrude, is faced with a difficult decision early in the play. Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, has killed Hamlet’s father and married Gertrude, making Hamlet the heir to the throne. Hamlet is consumed with thoughts of revenge and struggles with whether to act on them. This internal dilemma creates a great deal of tension within Hamlet and leads to much of the drama in the play.

Hamlet eventually decides to take action, but his plan backfires and leads to his own death. Hamlet’s dilemma is a classic example of the human struggle between our internal impulses and our rational thoughts. Hamlet’s story is timeless and continues to resonate with audiences today.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet approach has given rise to many diverse interpretations of meaning, but it is through hamlets struggle with his internal conflict, deciding when to avenge his father’s death, that the reader becomes aware of one of the most frequent meanings in Hamlet: the notion that Shakespeare is attempting to comment on the power that one’s mental state can have on their life choices. As the play goes on, Shakespeare employs encounters hamlet must deal with to demonstrate how one’s perspective might influence how one thinks.

Hamlet is forced to question his belief system, and the legitimacy of the ghost that has visited him. Hamlet must also confront the idea that Gertrude may have been complicit in his fathers death, a betrayal that would challenge everything he believes. Hamlet’s internal struggle becomes evident as he vacillates between different courses of action, often unable to make a decision due to the magnitude of the choices he faces.

Hamlets indecision is not solely due to the external factors he confronts, but is also reflective of Hamlets internal conflict. Hamlet must come to terms with his own feelings about what is right and wrong, and what revenge means to him. This is most clearly illustrated in Hamlet’s soliloquies, where he pours out his innermost thoughts and feelings. Hamlet’s internal dilemma is further complicated by the fact that he is a prince, and must take into account the potential political ramifications of his actions. In the end, Hamlet’s internal struggle leads him to make a decision that has disastrous consequences for all involved.

While Shakespeare does not provide a clear answer to Hamlet’s dilemma, he does raise important questions about the role that morality plays in decision making. Hamlet’s story provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of inaction, and the importance of being mindful of the choices we make in life.

In Act 1, Scene 5 of Hamlet, Shakespeare sets the stage for Hamlet’s internal conflict when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and demands that he avenge his “violently and most unnatural” killing (1. 5. 24). It is from this point on that Hamlet must struggle with the question of whether or not to kill Claudius, his uncle, and if so when to carry out the deed.

While the play progresses, Hamlet does not seek his revenge when the opportunity arises, and it is Hamlet’s logic that explains why he has delayed.

Hamlet’s internal conflict and the actions that he takes, or does not take, as a result provide evidence for the understanding that it is Hamlet’s mindset, more than anything else, that leads to his downfall.

When Hamlet is first faced with the responsibility of revenge, he is quick to accept it. Hamlet tells his father’s ghost that he will “sweep to my revenge” (1. 5. 36). Hamlet is eager for revenge and willing to kill Claudius in order to avenge his father’s death; however, Hamlet soon begins to question whether or not killing Claudius is the right thing to do.

Hamlet wonders if killing Claudius while he is praying, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father has instructed Hamlet to do, would be considered an act of mercy. Hamlet also questions whether or not taking revenge will actually make him feel better. Hamlet comes to the conclusion that killing Claudius is not the answer and decides to put off his revenge in order to figure out a better way to handle the situation.

Hamlet’s internal conflict arises from his need for justice balanced against his doubt about whether or not he is doing the right thing. Hamlet’s hesitation to kill Claudius, even though it goes against what the ghost of Hamlet’s father has asked him to do, can be seen as an indication that Hamlet is aware of the moral implications of his actions. Hamlet is not simply looking for revenge; he is looking for justice.

The conflict that Hamlet feels internally is evident in his soliloquies. Hamlet’s first soliloquy, which occurs in Act 1, Scene 2, reveals Hamlet’s initial thoughts about revenge. Hamlet is angry and wants revenge, but he is also hesitant. Hamlet wonders if it would be better to just kill himself rather than go through with the act of revenge. Hamlet’s second soliloquy, which takes place in Act 3, Scene 1, shows Hamlet wrestling with his internal conflict once again.

Hamlet is still angry and wants revenge, but he is also worried that he will not be able to go through with it. Hamlet wonders if he is really doing the right thing by waiting to take his revenge. Hamlet’s third soliloquy, which occurs in Act 4, Scene 4, shows Hamlet coming to terms with his internal conflict. Hamlet has finally realized that he needs to take action and that he cannot continue to delay his revenge. Hamlet’s soliloquies show the progression of his internal conflict and how it eventually leads him to take action.

Hamlet’s internal conflict is evident in his interactions with other characters as well. Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia is strained from the beginning of the play. Hamlet is clearly not interested in Ophelia and he tells her to “get thee to a nunnery” (3. 1. 121). Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia is due to his internal conflict. Hamlet is worried that he will not be able to take revenge if he gets too close to someone. Hamlet is also worried that he will end up hurting Ophelia if he gets too close to her. As a result, Hamlet pushes Ophelia away in order to protect himself and her.

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Guest Essay

Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable

By Jen Silverman

Mx. Silverman is a playwright and the author, most recently, of the novel “There’s Going to Be Trouble.”

When I was in college, I came across “The Sea and Poison,” a 1950s novel by Shusaku Endo. It tells the story of a doctor in postwar Japan who, as an intern years earlier, participated in a vivisection experiment on an American prisoner. Endo’s lens on the story is not the easiest one, ethically speaking; he doesn’t dwell on the suffering of the victim. Instead, he chooses to explore a more unsettling element: the humanity of the perpetrators.

When I say “humanity” I mean their confusion, self-justifications and willingness to lie to themselves. Atrocity doesn’t just come out of evil, Endo was saying, it emerges from self-interest, timidity, apathy and the desire for status. His novel showed me how, in the right crucible of social pressures, I, too, might delude myself into making a choice from which an atrocity results. Perhaps this is why the book has haunted me for nearly two decades, such that I’ve read it multiple times.

I was reminded of that novel at 2 o’clock in the morning recently as I scrolled through a social media account dedicated to collecting angry reader reviews. My attention was caught by someone named Nathan, whose take on “Paradise Lost” was: “Milton was a fascist turd.” But it was another reader, Ryan, who reeled me in with his response to John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run”: “This book made me oppose free speech.” From there, I hit the bank of “Lolita” reviews: Readers were appalled, frustrated, infuriated. What a disgusting man! How could Vladimir Nabokov have been permitted to write this book? Who let authors write such immoral, perverse characters anyway?

I was cackling as I scrolled but soon a realization struck me. Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.

As someone who was born in the States but partially raised in a series of other countries, I’ve always found the sheer uncompromising force of American morality to be mesmerizing and terrifying. Despite our plurality of influences and beliefs, our national character seems inescapably informed by an Old Testament relationship to the notions of good and evil. This powerful construct infuses everything from our advertising campaigns to our political ones — and has now filtered into, and shifted, the function of our artistic works.

Maybe it’s because our political discourse swings between deranged and abhorrent on a daily basis and we would like to combat our feelings of powerlessness by insisting on moral simplicity in the stories we tell and receive. Or maybe it’s because many of the transgressions that flew under the radar in previous generations — acts of misogyny, racism and homophobia; abuses of power both macro and micro — are now being called out directly. We’re so intoxicated by openly naming these ills that we have begun operating under the misconception that to acknowledge each other’s complexity, in our communities as well as in our art, is to condone each other’s cruelties.

When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.

While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold. The result is that, in a moment in which our world has never felt so fast-changing and bewildering, our stories are getting simpler, less nuanced and less able to engage with the realities through which we’re living.

I can’t blame younger writers for believing that it is their job to convey a strenuously correct public morality. This same expectation filters into all the modes in which I work: novels, theater, TV and film. The demands of Internet Nathan and Internet Ryan — and the anxieties of my mentees — are not so different from those of the industry gatekeepers who work in the no-man’s land between art and money and whose job it is to strip stories of anything that could be ethically murky.

I have worked in TV writers’ rooms where “likability notes” came from on high as soon as a complex character was on the page — particularly when the character was female. Concern about her likability was most often a concern about her morals: Could she be perceived as promiscuous? Selfish? Aggressive? Was she a bad girlfriend or a bad wife? How quickly could she be rehabilitated into a model citizen for the viewers?

TV is not alone in this. A director I’m working with recently pitched our screenplay to a studio. When the executives passed, they told our team it was because the characters were too morally ambiguous and they’d been tasked with seeking material wherein the lesson was clear, so as not to unsettle their customer base. What they did not say, but did not need to, is that in the absence of adequate federal arts funding, American art is tied to the marketplace. Money is tight, and many corporations do not want to pay for stories that viewers might object to if they can buy something that plays blandly in the background of our lives.

But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.

We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them. After all, our experience of living in communities with one another is often much more fluid and changeable than it is rigidly black and white. We have the audiences that we cultivate, and the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity. In our hair-trigger world of condemnation, division and isolation, art — not moralizing — has never been more crucial.

Jen Silverman is a playwright and the author of the novels “We Play Ourselves” and “There’s Going to Be Trouble.”

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