Themes

Hamlet is not only a tragedy of revenge, it is a play of life and death and of man’s ambiguous relation to them both. It is also about melancholy and doubt. It is through Hamlet’s struggle to act, and to act wisely, that the concept of "man’s complex nature" is illustrated.

A major question for man is the relation between "appearance and reality": how does one separate what appears to be real or absolute from what actually is so? During the Elizabethan Age the question was most compelling because the certainties of the past were being disproved or at least modified. In Hamlet the way in which appearance is taken for reality is underscored by the acting of Polonius and Hamlet, by the "play- within-the-play" and the discussion on plays and actors. Truth seems to reside in the "existential idea": all that individual man knows is that he exists. The essence of truth is thus divorced from substance and from the means through which substance appears.

Another important theme is "honour" and honourable action. The theme of honour makes clear that any action to correct a wrong should be reasoned, not emotional. Justice is accomplished through the various deaths and the ascent of Fortinbras to the throne. Even Hamlet’s death is ennobled by his final honourable actions tending to destroy the sources of rottenness within the state whose "infection" is insistently referred to through the image of poison. Finally in Hamlet, unlike the other tragedies, the theme of "love" is developed as charity or brotherly love.

A play within the play

Hamlet can be regarded as the first great tragedy conceived in a modern way since it questions an entire system of references typical of classical tragedy and of the Elizabethan theatre in general. In the third act there is a play-within-the-play which, paradoxically, is the only true thing in the play, since it is wanted by Hamlet to expose his father’s murderer. Furthermore, it is a most interesting expedient because it turns the actors into audience: there is a real audience, then there is an audience on the stage composed of the actors of the play, who see a play, Tbe Murder of Gonzago, dealing with the background to the tragedy. Where, it may suddenly occur to us to ask, does the play end?

Hamlet deals with the crisis of the human conscience, but also with loss of faith in the effectiveness of man’s action. Hamlet paves the way to a theatre of the mind embodied by Hamlet’s being prisoner of his existential doubts.

(Spiazzi, Tavella, Only Connect, Module B, Bologna, Zanichelli, 2000, pp.B80-B81)