Hamlet's Revenge, by Melanie Walker
William Shakespeare reveals many of life’s greatest motifs in his brilliant works during the 1500’s. The themes he reveals through his crafted and innovated literature relate to all readers as well as the human race to this present day. Examples include Romeo and Juliet, where readers explore the theme of living when there is not love and the dangers of lustful ambition leading to human destruction in Macbeth. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, readers can gain an interesting perspective to yet another one of Shakespeare’s prodigies. Hamlet is a work of about the drive for revenge, which is a common characteristic all people experience in mortality. Through Shakespeare’s novel Hamlet, he manifests to all readers that revenge is the strongest poison on earth, revenge can drive a person to insanity, and revenge eventually results in a spiritual or physical death.
Shakespeare uses a lot of symbolism in his writing but the greatest symbolism of all is the substance of poison and how it is used in the drama. The most capacious conflict young Hamlet faces is coping with loss when no one else seems to mourn for his father’s death. In the story, Hamlet is visited with the ghost of his father King Hamlet, who manifests that he was murdered by his brother Claudius who married Hamlet’s mother two months after he was killed. Claudius murdered King Hamlet by poison and proceeded to become king. This knowledge seeped into young Hamlet’s conscience figuratively poisoning him slowly as he sought to avenge his father. At the very end of the story, Hamlet is challenged in a duel against Laeretes, after killing his father Polonius accidentally in attempt to murder his Uncle Claudius. Laeretes seeks to avenge his own father by intending to murder Hamlet by poisoning the tip of his sword in their duel. In this duel, Hamlet is stabbed and becomes poisoned as well as Laeretes his stabbed by poison. Hamlet’s mother also becomes poisoned in Claudius’s attempt to poison Hamlet by wine during the duel. Hamlet finally kills Claudius, Laeretes dies, and Hamlet eventually dies himself. Revenge drove all these great men and women to destruction by physical poison, but also the spiritual poison of vengeance. Readers can compare poison to revenge that it spreads through one’s entire being; it blackens morals and reason for living and eventually resulting in a tragic death or loss of all light found in a person.
Readers are faced with another great question in this drama: is Hamlet insane from this drive for revenge? Shakespeare left this door open for inquirers to form their own opinion based on what they think through context or their beliefs. From what is assumed from the effects of revenge, it is fair to believe that Hamlet is legitimately insane and that the hunger to kill drove him to insanity. In the beginning of the drama, Hamlet is only troubled by the loss of his father, the facts about it unknown. But when he learns of his father’s murder from the ghost, he progressively becomes more mad and strange in what he says to the other characters in the story. He becomes obsessed with killing Claudius, which obsession is found to be another characteristic of insanity. It could be believed that Hamlet pretended to be insane at first to mask his attempts of murder, but he was trying to hide that he was genuinely becoming more insane as this poison of revenge seeped into his soul. Or possibly, he was insane from the beginning from the instinctual desire to avenge the death of his father.
Nearly all the characters in Hamlet resulted in death caused by revenge, whether readers would like to view it as physical or spiritual. Revenge drove Hamlet to death in the end, resulting in the death of Laeretes, Queen Gertrude, Claudias, and even Hamlet’s lover Ophelia. His starting revenge caused a chain reaction resulting in the loss of all the characters in this tragedy. Revenge, envy, and hatred can drive a human soul into a sort of spiritual death, which is symbolized as actual physical death in this play. The drive of revenge can weaken any sort of light or life in the human spirit, leading to some sort of death. In Hamlet’s famous monologue “To be or not to be”, Hamlet struggles to find a reason to physically live because of the blackened state of his soul and hatred he felt. Eventually these poisons of the human condition can change a person and the minute revenge seeps into one’s conscience, slowly they progress into death or a symbolic spiritual death.
Reading Hamlet teaches readers the danger revenge has on mortality. Revenge has the characteristics of poison and can drive the noblest person to insanity or spiritual death. To escape the fate Shakespeare’s characters faced in this drama, a vengeful individual must escape the poisons of revenge and take into introspective the corruption revenge can thrust upon someone. “To be or not to be”, is a question to be asked frequently, and if the consequences of our choice will bring one down to corruption and result in a tragedy like Prince Hamlet.
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