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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Read more: What Is a Theme in Literature?
The Impossibility of Certainty
What sets Hamlet apart from other plays—revenge plays by Shakespeare including Othello and The Merchant of Venice as well as plays by anyone that came before it generally—is the extent to which the character Hamlet contemplates, vexes over, and considers his actions from multiple angles before he takes them. Throughout the play, actions that we expect to see are continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certainty about what he is doing. The title character’s doubt creates a world where very little is known for sure. Hamlet poses many questions that the protagonists in other plays would simply take for granted.
One example of Hamlet’s doubts is that he thinks, but isn’t entirely sure, that his uncle killed his father. He believes he sees his father’s Ghost, but he isn’t sure he should believe in the Ghost or listen to what the Ghost tells him—hence, his Act 2, Scene 2 comment, “I’ll have grounds / More relative than this.” Later, in his famous Act 3, Scene 1 “to be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet suspects he should probably just kill himself, but his uncertainty about what lies beyond the grave prevents him from acting.
Hamlet is so wracked with doubt that he infects other characters with his lack of certainty, as when he tells Ophelia (also in Act 3, Scene 1) “you should not have believed me” when he told her he loved her. As a result, the audience doubts Hamlet’s reliability as a protagonist. We are left with many doubts about the action: whether Gertrude was having an affair with Claudius before he killed Hamlet’s father; whether Hamlet is sane or mad; and what Hamlet’s true feelings for Ophelia are.
As a result of the atmosphere of doubt that pervades it, many people have seen Hamlet as a play about indecisiveness, and thus about Hamlet’s failure to act appropriately. However, rather than accepting this somewhat limited analysis, we would do well to consider what the play shows us about how many uncertainties our lives are built upon. We might also want to think about how many unknown quantities are taken for granted when people act, or when they evaluate and judge one another’s actions.
The Complexity of Action
Directly related to the lead theme of uncertainty in Hamlet is the theme of action, which frames the critical question of how it is possible to take reasonable, effective, purposeful action. In Hamlet, the question of how to act is affected not only by rational considerations, such as the need for certainty, but also by emotional, ethical, and psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the idea that it is even possible to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When Hamlet does act, he prefers to do it blindly, recklessly, and violently.
Other characters in the play obviously think far less about “action” in the abstract than Hamlet does and are therefore less troubled about the possibility of acting effectively. They simply act as they feel is appropriate. But in a sense, they prove that Hamlet is right to contemplate before acting, because all their rash actions miscarry. Claudius possesses himself of queen and crown through bold action, only to find that his conscience torments him, and he is beset by threats to his authority (and, of course, he dies). Laertes resolves that nothing will distract him from acting out his revenge, but he is easily influenced and manipulated into serving Claudius’s ends, and his poisoned rapier is turned back upon himself.
Madness versus Cunning
Another theme of Hamlet that is directly related to the main theme of the role of uncertainty relates to the central question of whether the main character has lost his mind or is only pretending to be mad—much like a fox will behave erratically to confuse its adversaries. Hamlet’s irregular acts and nonsensical speech can be interpreted as a ruse to convince the other characters that he has lost the ability to reason and thus poses no threat to them. The alternative explanation for his behavior is that he is not acting and that the difficult and complex situation he finds himself in— namely, that his father has been murdered by his uncle, who is now his stepfather— has rendered him mentally incapacitated. There is a subtle variation of this interpretation, which that his behavior is a natural and logical response to his innately “mad” situation.
The evidence for which explanation is correct from the play is mixed. Initially, Hamlet himself seems to believe he is sane; he describes his plans to “put an antic disposition on” and tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he is only mad when the wind blows “north-north-west” (in other words, saying that his madness is something he can turn on and off at will). By the end of the play, however, Hamlet seems to doubt his own sanity. Referring to himself in the third person, he says “And when he’s not himself does harm Laertes,” suggesting Hamlet has become estranged from his former, sane self. Referring to his murder of Polonius, he says, “Who does it then? His madness.” At the same time, Hamlet’s excuse of madness absolves him of murder, so it can also be read as the workings of a sane and cunning mind.
Performance versus Reality
Hamlet includes multiple references to performance of all kinds—both theatrical performance and the way people perform in daily life. In his first appearance in Act 1, Scene 2, Hamlet draws a distinction between outward behavior (“actions that a man might play”) and real feelings (“that within which passeth show”). However, the more we see of Hamlet, the more difficult it becomes to tell what he is really feeling and what he is performing. He announces in Act 1, Scene 5 that he is going to pretend to be mad (“put an antic disposition on”.) In Act 2, Scene 1, Ophelia describes Hamlet’s mad behavior as a comical performance. However, when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “I have lost all my mirth,” he seems genuinely depressed.
Generations of readers have argued about whether Hamlet is truly mad or just performing as though he were as an act of subterfuge. It’s possible that the answer to this question lies somewhere in between madness and sanity. By the end of the play, even Hamlet himself doesn’t seem to know the difference between performance and reality. Hamlet amplifies the idea of performance by regularly reminding the audience that we are watching a play. When Polonius says that at university he “did enact Julius Caesar” (in Act 3, Scene 2, contemporary audiences would have thought of Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar, which was written shortly before Hamlet. (The actor who initially played Polonius may have played Julius Caesar as well.)
Shakespeare’s device of “the play within the play” gives Hamlet further opportunities to comment on the nature of theater. By continually reminding the audience that what we are observing is a performance, Hamlet invites us to think about the fact that something fake can feel real (and vice versa) as it makes us question what “reality” actually is. Hamlet himself points out that acting is powerful because it’s indistinguishable from reality. In Act 3, Scene 2 he says, “The purpose of playing […] is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature,” which is why he believes that the players can “catch the conscience of the King.”
Death as Mystery and Solution
In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the course of the play he considers death from multiple perspectives. He ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the Ghost, and the physical remainders of the dead, such as by Yorick’s skull and the decaying corpses in the cemetery. Throughout Hamlet, death is closely tied to the ideas of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty by the possibility that death may bring resolution to Hamlet’s deepest uncertainties, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in a world that is riddled with doubt. Also, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the notions of revenge and justice—Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet initiates Hamlet’s quest for revenge, and Claudius’s death is the end of that quest.
The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world. Hamlet’s grief and misery is such that he frequently longs for death to end his suffering, but he fears that if he commits suicide, he will be consigned to eternal suffering in hell because of the Christian religion’s prohibition of suicide. In his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1, Hamlet philosophically concludes that no one would choose to endure the pain of life if he or she were not afraid of what will come after death, and that it is this fear which causes complex moral considerations to interfere with the capacity for action.
The Ill Health of the State
Many of Shakespeare’s plays are seen as containing indirect commentaries on political matters contemporary to when he was writing. One issue that was of intense interest in speculation at the time Hamlet was likely written and first published was the transition of England’s monarchy from the House of Tutor to the House of Stuart, which occurred in 1603. This makes it probably not a coincidence that one of the inherent messages of Hamlet is that welfare of the nation is dependent on the fitness of the royal family.
The play’s early scenes explore the sense of anxiety that surrounds the transfer of power from one ruler to the next—something that Shakespeare’s audience in 1603 would have felt deeply as well. The play explores what the consequences are for the state when that anxiety turns to dread. Throughout the play, characters draw explicit connections between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of the nation.
Denmark is frequently described as a physical body made ill by the moral corruption of Claudius and Gertrude, and many observers interpret the presence of the Ghost as a supernatural omen indicating that (as is expressed directly in Act 1, Scene 4), that “[s]omething is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The murdered King Hamlet is portrayed as a strong, forthright ruler under whose guard the state was in good health, while Claudius, a wicked politician, has corrupted and compromised Denmark to satisfy his own appetites. At the end of the play, the rise to power of the upright Fortinbras suggests that Denmark will be strengthened once again.
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