Shakespeare’s Tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is the most famous play by the English playwright. This tragedy has been recognized for several centuries, and this is due to its precise love lines and political situations. The philosophical component of the work – deep reflections on life and death-always attracts attention. It allows each reader to think, reflect and draw their conclusions. In the context of the main topic – crimes for the sake of power, other essential issues such as treason and love are also revealed.
The motives of treason, crime, and love have always been common in literature. William Shakespeare was able to notice the internal fluctuations of people and vividly convey them with the help of words, so he could not stay away from the listed problems. Shakespeare’s language, which is used to write his dramas, forms the themes of the work, the emotions of the audience and readers, and sets the tone and character (Mays 1337). The central theme of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a crime committed for the sake of wealth and power. The work develops the idea that every lie is revealed sooner or later. The main idea is that human life is too short, so they should not waste time entangling it with lies and intrigues.
The true tragedy of Hamlet is that he, a man of the most beautiful spiritual qualities, broke down when he saw the terrible sides of life — betrayal, treason, the murder of loved ones. He has lost faith in people, love, and life has lost its value for him. Pretending to be mad, he is actually on the verge of madness from the consciousness of how monstrous people are-traitors, perjurers, murderers, flatterers, and hypocrites. Mays states: “And though Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, like most tragedies, focuses primarily on mortality, violence, and time’s destructive force, it also shows us the comic side of the human condition” (1336). He gains the courage to fight, but he can only look at life with sorrow.
The tragedy of Hamlet is the tragedy of man’s knowledge of evil. For the time being, the existence of the Danish prince was serene: he lived in a family illuminated by the mutual love of his parents, he fell in love and enjoyed the interchange of a charming girl, had pleasant friends, was enthusiastically engaged in science, loved the theater, wrote poetry; he had a great future ahead of him — to become a sovereign and rule an entire nation. Suddenly, everything began to collapse: at the dawn of his years, his father died. No sooner had Hamlet survived the grief than a second blow struck him: the mother, who seemed to love his father so much, married the deceased’s brother less than two months later and shared the throne with him. The third blow: Hamlet learned that his brother had killed his father to take possession of the crown and his wife.
In conclusion, the differences of the ideal in the external world are complemented by the struggle of conflicting feelings in the soul of Hamlet. Good and evil, truth and untruth, humanity and cruelty are shown in his behavior. It is tragic that Hamlet eventually dies, but the essence of the tragedy is not that the hero will suffer death, but what life is like, and significantly – in the impotence of the best intentions to correct the world. Hamlet’s weakness, his tendency to think, is one of the main advantages of Hamlet.
Work Cited
Mays, Kelly. The Norton Introduction To Literature. W.W.Norton & Company, 2018.