Hamlet: The Bewildering Human Condition Essay

1433 words - 6 pages

Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is a complex and ambiguous public exploration of key human experiences surrounding the aspects of revenge, betrayal and corruption. The Elizabethan play is focused centrally on the ghost’s reoccurring appearance as a symbol of death and disruption to the chain of being in the state of Denmark. The imagery of death and uncertainty has a direct impact on Hamlet’s state of mind as he struggles to search for the truth on his quest for revenge as he switches between his two incompatible values of his Christian codes of honour and humanist beliefs which come into direct conflict. The deterioration of the diseased state is aligned with his detached relationship with all women as a result of Gertrude’s betrayal to King Hamlet which makes Hamlet question his very existence and the need to restore the natural order of kings. Hamlet has endured the test of time as it still identifies with a modern audience through the dramatized issues concerning every human’s critical self and is a representation of their own experience of the bewildering human condition, as Hamlet struggles to pursuit justice as a result of an unwise desire for revenge.

Death threads its way through the entirety of Hamlet, from the opening scene’s confrontation with a dead man’s ghost to the blood bath of the final scene, which occurs as a result of the disruption of the natural order of Denmark. Hamlet is a man with suicidal tendencies which goes against his Christian beliefs as he is focused on the past rather than the future, which causes him to fall into the trap of inaction on his path of revenge. Hamlet’s moral dilemma stems from the ghost’s appearance as “a spirit of health or a goblin damned”, making Hamlet decide whether it brings with it pure air from heaven or contagion from hell, has intentions that are “wicked and charitable”. The long moment of suspense generated by the use of antithesis language registers in the audience’s consciousness the idea of the ambiguous status of the Ghost. Hamlet explores the progression of an individual’s self-destruction in the quest to restore order to a corrupted state reinforced by the reoccurring motif of the ghost as a sign to reconcile his incompatible value system, thus inadvertently changing the dynamics of Hamlet’s relationship with women. The Ghost talks like a Christian, telling his son there is judgment after death as he is suffering in purgatory. However his demands contradict Christian values as to “sweep to my revenge” would send his son to hell if obeyed. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy, ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’, his suicidal and melancholy thoughts are immediately revealed to the audience. He feels his flesh is ‘too solid’, the repetition demonstrating his frustration, and his wish to disintegrate and metaphorically “melt” into the substance of water. Hamlet even regrets that his Christian religion and god had not “fixed/his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter”, a heretical thought in the...

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