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Theme Of Waste In Hamlet

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William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play written in the early 1600’s that illustrates the life and eventual downfall of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark. This play is a tragedy that involves Hamlet going against his closest friends and family to reveal his uncle’s evil actions to the public, avenge his father’s murder at the same time. Naturally, in this tragedy, one of the most powerful underlying ideas is of waste. In a traditional Shakespearean tragedy, most characters die off near the denouement of the play. This is regardless of whether they are good hearted and innocent individuals, or whether they are evil. The more innocent the people that are negatively affected by the tragedy, the more the wastage is felt by the reader. This waste regards not only human lives, but also human qualities, ideas, relationships and even potential. Since everything is tied to one another in this play, the loss of these aspects in one point of the play will affect each and every other character in every scene that follows. In Hamlet, the feeling of waste is interpreted through the destruction of family life represented through Hamlet’s family, the loss of innocence in Ophelia and the destruction of love between Hamlet and Ophelia.
The dilemma within the royal family is the integral plot line in Hamlet and incorporates ideas of mistrust, betrayal and speculations that ultimately lead to the demise of the whole relationship. There is essentially a conflict between Claudius and Hamlet over the

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