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Summary Major themes in Hamlet
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Key points for the 8 major themes in Hamlet guaranteed to help you achieve top A02 marks for an A*
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Themes in Hamlet:Uncertainty/Doubt:
- The action we expect to see (particularly revenge from Hamlet) is continually
postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge.
- Play poses many questions that other plays would simply take for granted.
Hamlet’s persistent, relentless questioning shows how many assumptions and
factors we take for granted in daily life. When we question/evaluate/look
beyond the surface – we find the corrupt? Nature of humans – is this why we
choose to ignore them?
- Hamlet’s doubtfulness and paranoia work to affect other characters within the
play too, when he tells Ophelia “you should not have believed me” when he
told her he loved her. Conflict that drives plot of Hamlet is almost entirely
internal – play’s events are a side effect of this struggle.
Religion, Honour, Revenge:
- Societies are defined by their codes of conducts. As Hamlet seeks revenge for
his father’s murder, as the aristocratic code of Elsinore demands, he begins to
realise how complicated vengeance, justice and honour all truly are.
- His existential musings lead him to adopt a nihilistic worldview towards the
end of the play; after recognising the artifice upon which all social codes are
built, he seems to surrender to the randomness of the universe and gives up
entirely in his attempt to live within the confines and rules of society, due to
their complex and often contradictory nature. His increasingly reckless choices
are driven by the realisation that the moral and social codes to which he has
clung to for so long are not only inapplicable to his specific circumstances, but
perhaps also broadly irrelevant.
- In Hamlet’s pursuit of his society’s ingrained ideals of honour, he is forced to
confront the full weight of society’s somewhat arbitrary and outdated
expectations and demands – his way of dealing with it seems to be to reject it
altogether.
- Parallels between Hamlet and Laertes, invoke comparisons and illuminate
each other decision’s, but is it ultimately meaningless because they meet the
same fate?
- Religion a key influence of Hamlet – declines to kill Claudius when he is
praying for fear of sending him to heaven instead of hell. Believes “there is a
destiny that shapes our ends”. Christian idea of making a sacrifice to achieve
healing – Hamlet allows the perpetrators to fall into their own traps (“hauled
by their own petrads”). All he has to do is be ready (“The readiness is all”) as
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