Summary
Summary Hamlet: Thematic and Character Analysis
- Module
- Drama and poetry pre-1900
- Institution
- OCR
In depth thematic analysis of the play and detailed analysis of each character in relation to the themes of the play. Quotes used.
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THEMESAction and Inaction
The key action in all revenge tragedies is that the protagonist must take revenge against those who’ve
wronged him. Hamlet’s overarching plot, however, focuses on how Hamlet cannot bring himself to
actually take action and physically seek vengeance by killing Claudius. The play’s plot follows
Hamlet through his struggle between whether he should kill his uncle and avenge his father, or if this
would be pointless, cruel and even self-destructive.
Hamlet pontificates a significant amount about this internal battle.
To kill Claudius and avenge his father:
After the encounter with the ghost, Hamlet is determined to avenge his father yet misses opportunity
after opportunity to do so. He starts to wonder what this inability says about him - is he weak? Is he as
mad as he’s led everyone to believe?
Hamlet’s decision to fake madness as a cover for his investigations into Claudius conclude to be a
smaller action he’s taken to avoid the larger task of killing the man.
To kill himself to avoid making a decision:
Every aspect of his plan seems terrifying now, from faking madness to killing Claudius. Hamlet
battles with the prospect of killing himself to avoid undertaking such a burden as murder, and yet even
here he remains indecisive.
To take his own life is to betray his father’s wishes.
To stay alive means to reckon with his own inaction day after day.
Claudius and Laertes put together a plan to kill Hamlet to avenge the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia.
This plan concludes with Hamlet successfully killing Claudius but not without the cost of his own
peril by Laertes’ poisoned rapier.
Hamlet’s inaction goes against everything familiar about the revenge tragedy genre. His madness
doesn’t stem from his action but instead his inaction, also serving as a distraction, a mere ploy.
This theme’s relevance is to show that whether or not you take action or not, death remains
humanity’s great equaliser. Death has come for all the major players, some killed by Hamlet’s action
and others subsequently by his inaction. Shakespeare shows us through employing this theme that
death doesn't discriminate between the valiant, motivated, good (action takers) and the cowardly,
fearful, bad (lack of action).
Hamlet is a play of thought as opposed to action. Much of the ‘action’ we see is merely characters in
dialogue, thinking aloud to one another and discussing things as opposed to doing them. The most
action is seen in the killing of Polonius and in the final scene.
THEME SEEN MOST IN:
3.4, 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, 4.7, 5.2 (so the latter half of the play, essentially - it is teased in the beginning but
takes flight as the play progresses)
, Appearance vs Reality (performance)
There is a wide range of examples of this in the play, from Hamlet’s performative madness to
Claudiuis’s schemes to the stability of Denmark’s political system. The characters all strive to make
sense of what is real and what’s not, driving them to walk paths of deception, cruelty and madness.
In acting mad, Hamlet drives himself so. In pretending to reject Hamlet’s affections for Claudius and
Polonius, Ophelia drives a rift between them. In ignoring the truths facing her, Gertrude abandons her
moral compass in favour of political stability. These circumstances with characters that aim to
determine which aspects are real or calculated poses the metaphysical argument that, perhaps,
sometimes there is no difference between what is real and what is perceived. Sometimes, the identities
that people perform in and the choices they make become their realities.
‘Hamlet’ as a play doesn’t focus on these two ideas as separate, rather exploring the gulf of ambiguity
between them. Shakespeare also shows us how easily blurred the line between the two can get.
Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to confuse the court of Elsinore, making them believe he’s gone
mad to make it easier for him to sneak around and investigate his uncle to conclude whether he really
did kill his father. In doing so, Hamlet: denigrates, repudiates and verbally harasses Ophelia (criticises
her and by proxy all women for wearing makeup, presenting themselves as other than what they are -
note the deeper meaning here) ; sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on unknowingly to their deaths
(calls them out as players in his mother and uncle’s plot even though he knows they’re at the mercy of
the royals) ; and openly berates and condemns his mother for her new marriage to Claudius as he tries
to ascertain the extent to her complicity. His constant anxiety about being lied to is the subject of
much of his soliloquies but this endless inquiry into the morality of structured appearances leads
nowhere. At the end of the play, he is complicit in his own fears, and dies regardless.
Hamlet has reservations about the ghost’s true nature and the audience maybe only also has these
when Gertrude claims to not be able to see the ghost. The ghost may be a figment of Hamlet’s
imagination or it may be that his mother is pretending to not see the ghost out of fear of admitting her
complicity in his murder (or even just her marriage to Claudius for political security over morality).
The ghost inspires awe and fear in Horatio, Marcellus and the other watchmen, tampering with
Elsinore’s ideas about ‘reality’.
Gertrud appears innocent and blissfully ignorant of her husband’s murder, however in reality she may
be performing just as much as her son is. At the play’s close, she becomes the thing she pretends to
be: an innocent victim, when she unknowingly drinks the poisoned wine intended for Hamlet.
Polonius advises his son: ‘to thine own self be true’, and yet throughout the play continues to go
against this. He acts as a loyal courtier for his own long-term gain and claims ‘brevity is the soul of
wit’ before embarking on long-winded monologues. He sacrifices his moral compass in service to a
corrupt crown and in his death is revered and mourned by the king - so he achieved his goal at last.
Polonius is more of a comedic character, though there is some sincerity to his attributes and arc.
Ophelia claims to be pure, honest and undesiring of Hamlet’s attention, though their interactions have
a sense that their history makes it hard for Hamlet to fully believe this and he soon comes to
understand she’s being used by her father and the corrupted king. She is buried a virgin, not tied
romantically to anyone, just the way she pretended to be for Polonius and Claudius.
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