Essay on Hamlet Shakespeare

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Shakespeare’s Hamlet elicits the human psyche as an abstract and irreconcilable entity that changes with one’s surroundings. [Q] .This exploration is facilitated by the composer’s subversion of ‘unity of place’, as the varied settings create an evolving dialectic between the characters’ interior, psychological identities and the physicality of their exterior environments. Such tension is imbued within the Graveyard Scene, as the memento mori of Yorick’s skull expounds the pre-determinist worldview that characterises Hamlet’s psyche throughout the closing scenes. Indeed, his nihilistic tricolon of “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust” embodies the tragic hero’s Existential disillusionment that ultimately results from his futile being in a “disjoint” and “rotten” milieu. This is affirmed by Hamlet’s recurringly melancholic soliloquies, which are underscored by the decay imagery in labelling Denmark “an unweeded garden… rank and gross in nature”. However, the evolving nature of the human psyche is intimated through Hamlet’s earlier encounter with Gertrude in the Closet Scene, wherein the stage setting of “A private room” spurs the hero’s hostile assertion that “Heaven’s face… is thought-sick at [your] act”. In this scene, Hamlet resembles for me Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘Dionysian man’; a complex and chaotic creature that acts upon impulse and transcends rational thought. Ultimately, it is this contrast between Hamlet’s deeply ruminative self and instinctive being that cements the transformative effect of one’s surroundings on their individual psyche. 

Set during the schismatic Protestant Reformation, the play also explores how one’s conflict between filial and Christian duties can result in a tragic lack of action. Such is illuminated in the Prayer Scene, as Hamlet’s rhetorical question “Am I… to take [Claudius] in the purging of his soul?” foregrounds the contextual tension between Renaissance Humanist value systems and the Christian moral framework. The cognitive dissonance caused by these opposing forces culminates in the peripeteiac deus-ex-machina of Hamlet leaving Claudius at the chapel, which elicits his moral quandary that, as Masefield contends, is “to not become like the murderer he is to punish”. Such tension between the interiority of thought and the exigent physicality of revenge is furthered through the Senecan theatrical device of the Ghost. Indeed, its encounter with Hamlet in Act I invokes his filial devotion and thereby coerces him into dull revenge, as underscored by the imperative “If thou didst thy father love, revenge his foul and most unnatural murder”. Whilst Freudian insights delineate Hamlet’s fervent admiration for his father as misplaced guilt for the oedipal attraction to Gertrude, I assert that Hamlet deifies his father purely as a palimpsest of righteous order within a morally corrupt state. This is elucidated in the Closet Scene through his mythological epithets for Old Hamlet as “the herald Mercury” with an “eye like Mars to threaten and command”, contrasting with the violent imagery capturing Claudius as a “mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother”. As such, Shakespeare unites language, form and construction to explore the titular character’s entrapment between filial obligation and Christian morality, thereby highlighting the inherent uncertainty during