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Corruption In Julius Caesar Research Paper

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Corruption: A Moral Disease of the Mind, Spirit and the Body Politic– Topic 5 In Shakespeare’s era, the act of regicide was something so unfathomable, ungodly and morally unsound that it could only be indicative of the decay of an entire nation. According to Elizabethan Englanders, the murder of the King—the closest man to God—would certainly spell doom for the entire country, and throw the chain of being out of balance. In other words, the death of the King at the hands of one corrupt murderer leads to the death and disease of the entire body politic itself. Ironically, Shakespeare lived in arguably the most unclean, disease-ridden and morally bankrupt country possible, England. The virulent black plague ravaged the sinful London, throwing …show more content…

For example, Horatio compares the current conditions of Denmark to those of Rome just before its collapse by saying the moon “was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse” (I.i.20). First, Shakespeare’s classical allusion to Rome likens itself to Brutus’s betrayal of Julius Caesar, thereby foreshadowing Claudius’s betrayal of Old Hamlet. This reference acts as a portent that Denmark faces signs of an internal collapse—a fact augmented by the description of the moon as “sick”. Not coincidentally, Rome and Denmark were “sick” with hysteria after their leaders were betrayed and murdered, a clear sign that the “doomsday” facing Denmark is due to Claudius’s murder of the King and the corresponding disruption to the chain of being. When Old Hamlet visits his son as a ghost, he describes the poison that Claudius used to kill him with as a “leprous distilment”, and how it turned his skin “most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust” (I.iv.71-79). Shakespeare’s particularly revolting illustration of the King’s diseased and scabbed flesh as if he had leprosy accentuates the tense, frightening tone of the monologue, but also parallels Hamlet’s earlier soliloquy where he characterizes Denmark as diseased as if it were “an unweeded garden” (I.ii.139). Indeed, Claudius’s evil and wicked poisoning of the King …show more content…

For example, Claudius says that his sins are “rank” and that they “smell to heaven” (III.iii.36). Shakespeare uses the odorous and foul connotation of the word “rank” to highlight Claudius’s corruption, showing how the stench of his moral disease upsets even God above. The repugnant fumes of moral disease most likely comes from sinfulness, as the word “rank” reoccurs intermittently throughout Shakespeare’s images of wickedness and disease. For example, Hamlet berates his mother by exclaiming that she is sleeping in the “rank sweat of an enseamed bed/stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love” (III.iv.92-94). Shakespeare attributes qualities of moral and spiritual corruption to more than just Claudius, which signifies that few throughout the play are free of sin. This represents the innate prevalence of sinning in the human condition. Gertrude’s incestuous sins of sleeping with (both literally and sexually) her late husband’s murderer corrupts her spiritual conscience, something that she is later punished with by her eventual demise. Ironically, she drinks the poison intended for Hamlet, perhaps obliviously, or perhaps because she only then becomes aware of her sins. Regardless, Shakespeare uses the death of a largely unaware character to show how simply being incognizant of one’s sins is no excuse. In fact, the poison that kills

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