Hamlet Themes

Hamlet is part of a literary tradition called the revenge play, in which a person—most often a man—must take revenge against those who have wronged him. Hamlet, however, turns the genre on its head in an ingenious way: Hamlet, the person seeking vengeance, can't actually bring himself to take his revenge. As Hamlet struggles throughout the play with the logistical difficulties and moral burdens of vengeance, waffling between whether he should kill Claudius…

Hamlet is full of references to the wide gulf that often exists between how things appear and how they really are. From Hamlet’s own “craft[ed]” madness to Claudius’s many schemes and plots involving Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern to the very foundation of Denmark’s political stability (or lack thereof), things within Elsinore castle are hardly ever as they seem. Hamlet’s characters’ collective desire to make sense of the difference between…

Every society is defined by its codes of conduct—its rules about how to act and behave. In Hamlet, the codes of conduct are largely defined by religion and an aristocratic code that demands honor—and revenge if honor has been soiled. As the play unfolds and Hamlet (in keeping with his country’s spoken and unspoken) rules) seeks revenge for his father’s murder, he begins to realize just how complicated vengeance, justice, and honor all truly…

When the sentinel Marcellus speaks the line “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” after seeing the ghost of the former King Hamlet, he is speaking to a broadly-held societal superstition. In medieval times and the Middle Ages—the era in which Hamlet is set—the majority of people believed that the health of a nation was connected to the legitimacy of its king.  As Hamlet endeavors to discover—and root out—the “rotten” core of Denmark, he…