Theme Of Fear In Hamlet

    Fear plays an important role in Shakespeare's tragic play, Hamlet. Within the play, the main character, Hamlet, attempts to overcome his fear and fulfill his father's revenge. Hamlet's apprehension toward death prevents him from carrying out the murder of Claudius. Although confrontation with death is avoided for as long as possible, Hamlet comes to recognize his weakness, and faces this anxiety.

Hamlet is a suspenseful play that introduces the topic of tragedy. Throughout the play, Hamlet displays anger, uncertainty, and obsession with death. Although Hamlet is unaware of it, these emotions cause the mishaps that occur throughout the play. These emotions combined with his unawareness are the leading basis for the tragic hero’s flaws. These flaws lead Hamlet not to be a bad man, but a regular form of imperfection that comes along with being human.

Hamlet is as much a story of emotional conflict, paranoia, and self-doubt as it is one of revenge and tragedy. The protagonist, Prince Hamlet of Denmark, is instructed by his slain father’s ghost to enact vengeance upon his uncle Claudius, whose treacherous murder of Hamlet’s father gave way to his rise to power. Overcome by anguish and obligation to avenge his father’s death, Hamlet ultimately commits a number of killings throughout the story. However, we are not to view the character Hamlet as a sick individual, but rather one who has been victimized by his own circumstances.

In act 3 scene 1 of William Shakespeare “Hamlet” the main protagonist, Hamlet, recites a soliloquy “To be, or not to be.” Throughout his lines Hamlet explains the concept of suicide and why people choose to live long lives instead of ending their suffering. The main point he speaks on is the mystery of one’s afterlife, they never know for sure what happens when they die. For this reason, his speech does a good job highlighting the plays underlying themes of pervasiveness of death, and tragic dilemma, and tragic flaws.

Next, in one of the most famous soliloquies in the English language, Hamlet again contemplates the subject of suicide, but he does not do so on impulses of emotion. Instead, his contemplation is based on reason. “To be or not to be, that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer outrageous fortune…or end them. To die, to sleep- no more- and by a sleep to say we end the heartache…’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler

Hamlet, the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s greatest work, descends swiftly into madness and paranoia after the murder of his father and the realization of his mother’s true, morally reprehensible, nature. As a result of these new responsibilities and extreme circumstances, Hamlet diverges from his usual, logical thinking into paranoia and over analysis, a condition that prevents him from trusting anyone. Hamlet, having been born a prince, is, for the first time, forced to make his own decisions after he learns of the true means of his father’s death. Another contributing factor to his madness is the constant probing of others into Hamlet’s sanity. These factors all contribute to Hamlets delay, and that delay contributes to the tragic

In great literature, or in literature in general, no scene of violence exists, or should exist for its own sake. Every scene of violence should contribute and reinforce to the plot of the work and to what is yet to come of the work. William Shakespeare successfully merges the acts of violence into a rational and coherent meaning and the audience can evidence that through the violence of act three, scene four in which the prince Hamlet of Denmark stabs and kills Polonius. Hamlet’s act of violence not only serves to illuminate important aspects of the play but also accentuates and forces certain themes into play and adds great meaning to the work as a whole.

Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1 provides the context for several of the characters' actions. It is a soliloquy about fearing the unknown that lies waiting on the other side of the grave (are we punished and/or rewarded according to our actions on earth?) and as Hamlet reasons, "Conscience does make cowards of us all" (3.1.2). In other words, Hamlet feels that he is unable to act because of the haunting voice of doubt inside him. He doubts that he would find peace in the afterlife should he kill himself. He doubts the events he sees before his very eyes and so cannot exact revenge as the spirit of his father urges him to do. Yet, as Hamlet begins to unravel, other characters expose their doubts as well, revealing how they too are troubled by the unknown. King Claudius reveals his troubled conscience after witnessing the play and wonders what he has done; Hamlet's mother tries to block out the reality of the situation she has entered into when Hamlet attacks her with what he knows (not knowing is better than knowing, she feels). This paper will examine the ways in which the unknown affects the actions of the characters in Hamlet and show that at the heart of each character is an unwillingness to confront the unknown (which is oftentimes themselves).

People are under immense societal pressures when making decisions; friends, coworkers, and family members input their opinions on what they believe is best. This external force exerts pressure on them to conform to their ideas. In addition to others imposing their opinions, people can impact others through tragic events such as a death in the family. These can test their core values and cause them to re-evaluate their ideologies. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Hamlet’s father dies and his mother, Gertrude, remarries soon after the death. Hamlet is initially bothered not only by the death of his father, but by his mother’s quick remarriage, because he felt as though Gertrude did not fully pay her respects and honor his death. However, after meeting and speaking with the ghost of his father, he learns the terrible truth. Hamlet’s father was killed at the hands of Claudius, his uncle and now stepfather, with the intent to obtain the throne. In a plea for vengeance, Hamlet’s father tries to convince him to kill Claudius. Claudius, on the other hand, presses Hamlet from the opposite side to fulfil his own visions for him. In Hamlet, society, as exemplified by his father and Claudius, causes Hamlet much distress as he’s torn between two versions of who he could be. This leads him to explore the act of suicide as an option to escape the new realities of his problematic existence. Ultimately, Hamlet’s realization and acceptance that it is impossible to meet society’s expectations

The "dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will" (3, 1, 78-80) and keeps people from choosing death due to the fear of the unknown. His entire monologue compares the two extremes: life and death. He analyzes both situations and thinks very much about the consequences of either action. This occurs not only in this speech, but also later in the play, and demonstrates that Hamlet’s indecisive personality is his fatal flaw. Hamlet does not only have a hard time choosing between life and death. He also can not choose between murdering Claudius or not. Even though Hamlet wanted to kill his uncle, he was terrified of the possible consequences and could not make a concrete decision. Consequently, he ended up procrastinating greatly with the murder.

One of the most common fears is that of death. This fear does not often stem from the process itself, but rather the question of what occurs after. Do we begin living another life? Will that life be better or worse than the one we previously led? These questions are filled with uncertainty, and the impossibility of answering them produces distress. In Hamlet, Hamlet struggles with the challenge of answering such questions himself when he laments, “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause. There’s the respect / That makes calamity of so long life” (3.1.66-70). Within Shakespeare’s tragedy, the text signifies the fear of the unknown by exploring Hamlet’s uneasy contemplation of life after death.

Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, begins with the appearance of a ghost, an apparition, possibly a hallucination. Thus, from the beginning, Shakespeare presents the air of uncertainty, of the unnatural, which drives the action of the play and develops in the protagonist as a struggle to clarify what only seems to be absolute and what is actually reality. Hamlet's mind, therefore, becomes the central force of the play, choosing the direction of the conflict by his decisions regarding his revenge and defining the outcome.

It is clear that the death of his father and his mother 's remarriage has taken an enormous mental toll on him and that he desires death to free himself of the burden laid upon him by the ghost. He romanticizes it, saying that suicide is the brave and courageous option akin to “[taking] arms” against troubles. However, he can’t commit to the idea of death, saying “To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” (III, i, 66-67). He craves death, which would allow him to escape all the “natural shock / that flesh is heir to” (III, i, 63-64) but the more he ponders it, the further he is from reaching a decision. Ironically, the argument within his mind about how he should free himself of the ghostly burden — murder, or death — is impeding him from carrying out any action on it. At the end of his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet hasn’t made any decisive choice and therefore is in limbo regarding death due to his overarching rationale. His inaction proves “[his] endless reasoning and hesitation and the way in which the energy of his resolutions evaporates in self-reproaches” (Morgan 259). Moreover, Hamlet tackles the decision of interpreting what is real and what is false when he questions the ghost’s true nature. At first, Hamlet is certain

Hamlet says, “[death is] the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns” (III, I, 79-80). Hamlet saying no one returns from death is what adds to the elusiveness of it, Fundamentally, Hamlet is saying that nobody avidly takes their own life because nobody knows what comes after death, since nobody has ever returned. Also, since nobody is informed on the experience of the after life, it allows people to make assumptions that it must be terrible since people choose to live through all the pain and suffering they face. These factors combined create a large unknown that is unnerving to Hamlet and make him believe that that is why people continue to live. Suicide may just be too risky of an action and especially for those like Hamlet, who are meticulous and rational, the risk just might not be worth it.

Hamlet is an intensely cerebral character marked by a desire to think things through and pick situations apart. As such, for the first three and a half scenes of Hamlet, Hamlet broods over his father’s death instead of taking action against Claudius, his father’s murderer. Hamlet finally acts because he experiences three intense emotional jolts that allow him to view his situation from a new perspective and spur him to action. Together, these emotional experiences alter his personal philosophy about the nature of death and God’s relationship with creation, and compel him to finally take decisive action.