48 pages • 1 hour read
William ShakespeareHamlet
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Death and the Unknown
Hamlet grapples with the inevitability and the mystery of death. Death’s complex interweaving of what is certain and what can’t be known is at the heart of the play’s concerns. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet lays the point out neatly: If it weren’t for the chance of suffering in the afterlife, people would choose to end suffering in this life—to end it all and rest.
The afterlife, of course, rises up and walks in the form of Hamlet’s dead father. The ghost suggests that there is indeed an afterlife, and not necessarily a restful one; his stories of Purgatorial flames are anything but peaceful. Hamlet’s agonizing doubt over this apparition’s veracity plays back into his general difficulty. Though he knows what he saw, he can’t be sure that he interpreted it correctly.
Hamlet is perpetually troubled by the ambiguities and untruths around him, but he takes a grotesque and conflicted pleasure in images of decay. He envisions his father’s tomb opening like jaws to belch his corpse out and Polonius’s body being devoured by worms, and he spends some quality time chatting with the stinking skull of the exhumed Yorick. He does not, however, view the tragic corpse of Ophelia at so philosophical a distance.
Language and Lies
When, early in Hamlet’s performance of madness, Polonius asks him what he’s reading in the book he carries, Hamlet replies, “Words, words, words!” (2.2.200). This truthful yet evasive reply sets the scene for the play’s interest in the trickiness of language.
In Hamlet, puns and wordplay take on a sometimes sinister significance. Hamlet is disturbed by how easy it is to say one thing and mean another, even in the most innocent context. His banter with the gravediggers shows that even a word as simple as “my” is not so straightforward as it might seem. The gravedigger’s claim that the grave he’s digging is his own, as he’s the one digging it, is not false, but it also isn’t a fully truthful answer to Hamlet’s question.
Equivocation—the use of ambiguous language or half-truths to conceal a deeper truth—was a hot topic when Hamlet was written, a time of deep divisions between religious and political factions in England. A priest named Henry Garnet became famous at the time for arguing that it could sometimes be just for a persecuted Catholic to tell a half-truth in order to save a life. Hamlet tells lies throughout the play—ostensibly to uncover the truth of his father’s murder—but it isn’t clear that his actions are the right ones. Of course, Hamlet isn’t the only one who lies. Claudius is a liar, too, and he knows it. Even in his prayers, he admits that his words do not match his thoughts. He is honest only in admitting to himself he cannot or will not relinquish his gains in exchange for forgiveness.
Much of Hamlet’s performance of madness centers on his ability to express his sense of truth through falsehood. When he identifies Polonius as a “fishmonger”—a word that could also mean “pimp”—he is speaking from an honest (if unfair) anxiety about Ophelia’s chastity. Part of Hamlet’s difficulty is in his sense that, in language, there is forever a gap between what is meant and what can be said. Even in the honest Horatio’s concluding speeches, when he says he will tell the truth about what has happened, we are reminded that he is telling that truth on a stage. In the deceptive, quicksilver nature of language, perhaps one cannot speak without performing and departing in some way from the truth.
Faithfulness and Chastity
Hamlet’s preoccupation with truth and falsity finds a good part of its expression in sexual anxiety. There’s hardly a man in the play who doesn’t have a nervous fascination with the purity (or, more often, the impurity) of the women around him. Hamlet, in particular, seems obsessed with the perceived fickleness, faithlessness, and lust of both Ophelia and his mother.
Ophelia must also weather overbearing concern about her sex life from both Laertes and Polonius. She does playfully resist, warning Laertes against sexual hypocrisy: “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven / Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads / And recks not his own rede” (1.3.47-51). In the end, Ophelia bows to societal pressure and agrees to distance herself from Hamlet; to lose her virginity to him would leave him unscathed and her with few options. Hamlet’s eventual outbursts against Ophelia play on exactly this anxiety. He accuses her of being inherently false, like all women.
Renaissance-era fears about womanhood were quite different from contemporary ones, though similarly sexist. Women were imagined to be the more lustful of the sexes, and their sexuality had to be restrained to maintain societal order. These deep-rooted cultural fears are evident in Hamlet’s simultaneous fascination and disgust with his mother’s sexuality. Gertrude herself is not altogether at ease with her choice to marry her brother-in-law, calling her marriage to Claudius “o’erhasty” (2.2.1145). Hamlet is not just bothered by the incestuous undertones of her choice; he is disturbed, though fascinated, by the idea of Gertrude as a sexual at all. His detailed imagination of her lovemaking with Claudius—“Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty! (3.4.92-95)—suggests a deep anxiety about her sexuality.
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By William Shakespeare
