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Hamlet And Laertes - A Revenge Tragedy

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Hamlet and Laertes – A Revenge Tragedy
Everyone’s personality can be changed through encountering different situations. In Hamlet, playwright William Shakespeare presents two characters, Hamlet and Laertes, who love their fathers, King Hamlet and Polonius respectively. Once their fathers are murdered, Hamlet and Laertes become mentally insane committed acts of reprisal. In particular, Hamlet wants to kill Claudius and Laertes wants to kill Hamlet. While Hamlet and Laertes share similar experiences when avenging their fathers’ death, they seek vengeance in a disparate manner. The reason they wanted to revenge their father, the way they seek revenge, and the flaws they developed when revenging their father are dissimilar. Hamlet and Laertes both lose their father in a similar manner, but the purpose for their revenge is different. Hamlet wants revenge because he loves his father. After King Hamlet dies, Hamlet is extremely depressed and says he would commit suicide if “Everlasting had not fixedHis canon 'gainst self-slaughter! …” (1.2.131-132). For Hamlet to be so devastated that he would take his own life, shows that Hamlet clearly loves his father. When he meets the ghost that looks like King Hamlet, Hamlet learns that his dad is actually murdered by Claudius. As a result, Hamlet promises to seek revenge by saying, ”thoughts of love,/ May sweep to my revenge…” (1.5.30-31), explicitly conveying that he is taking revenge for the love of his father. On the other hand,

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