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William Shakespeare 's ' Hamlet '

Decent Essays
William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet, seemingly a play about a depressed young Hamlet who comes to terms with life and strikes back at what is wrong around him with integrity and fervor, ends in what can be described as nothing less than a massacre of not only the royal family, including our supposed hero, Hamlet, but the fall of a once powerful nation. The question that becomes of this bloody sequence of events is how did it end this way? The answer is that perhaps our protagonist, Hamlet, is to blame. According to Tiffany Stern in Making Shakespeare from Stage to Page, it is the expectation of the singing angels after Hamlet’s death that never arrive that show that “perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the havoc Hamlet has wrought. Denmark…has been reduced to a client of Norway…largely as the result of Hamlet’s actions”. Throughout the play, one sees Hamlet as incapable of positive action, rash, and on the verge of madness.
One of Hamlet’s mistakes, or character flaws, evident throughout the play, is his incapability of positive action. After being approached by the ghost of his father telling him that his uncle, Claudius, the new king of Denmark, was to blame for his murder and that Hamlet should avenge him, he logically seeks proof and legitimacy of the claim through the use of a play within the play to see if the remarks were true. Although this is not the most straightforward plan, there is convincing evidence in the extreme reaction of Claudius to the murder of the
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