Themes in Hamlet

Themes, Motifs & Symbols in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Impossibility of Certainty

What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays (and maybe from every
play written before it) is that the action we expect to see, particularly from
Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain
more certain knowledge about what he is doing. This play poses many
questions that other plays would simply take for granted. Can we have
certain knowledge about ghosts? Is the ghost what it appears to be, or is it
really a misleading fiend? Does the ghost have reliable knowledge about its
own death, or is the ghost itself deluded? Moving to more earthly matters:
How can we know for certain the facts about a crime that has no witnesses?
Can Hamlet know the state of Claudius’s soul by watching his behavior? If
so, can he know the facts of what Claudius did by observing the state of his
soul? Can Claudius (or the audience) know the state of Hamlet’s mind by
observing his behavior and listening to his speech? Can we know whether
our actions will have the consequences we want them to have? Can we
know anything about the afterlife?
Many people have seen Hamlet as a play about indecisiveness, and thus
about Hamlet’s failure to act appropriately. It might be more interesting to
consider that the play shows us how many uncertainties our lives are built
upon, how many unknown quantities are taken for granted when people
act or when they evaluate one another’s actions.
The Complexity of Action

Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. How is it
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’s even possible
to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act, he prefers to do it
blindly, recklessly, and violently. The other characters obviously think
much 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 some sense they prove that
Hamlet is right, because all of their actions miscarry. Claudius possesses
himself of queen and crown through bold action, but 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.
The Mystery of Death

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 a great
many 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, the
idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and
uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest
questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth
in an ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the
consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the theme 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 or not 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 (III.i), 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 Nation as a Diseased Body

Everything is connected in Hamlet, including the welfare of the royal family
and the health of the state as a whole. The play’s early scenes explore the
sense of anxiety and dread that surrounds the transfer of power from one
ruler to the next. 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 “[s]omething
is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I.iv.67). The dead 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.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to
develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Incest and Incestuous Desire

The motif of incest runs throughout the play and is frequently alluded to
by Hamlet and the ghost, most obviously in conversations about Gertrude
and Claudius, the former brother-in-law and sister-in-law who are now
married. A subtle motif of incestuous desire can be found in the
relationship of Laertes and Ophelia, as Laertes sometimes speaks to his
sister in suggestively sexual terms and, at her funeral, leaps into her grave
to hold her in his arms. However, the strongest overtones of incestuous
desire arise in the relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude, in Hamlet’s
fixation on Gertrude’s sex life with Claudius and his preoccupation with
her in general.
Misogyny
Shattered by his mother’s decision to marry Claudius so soon after her
husband’s death, Hamlet becomes cynical about women in general,
showing a particular obsession with what he perceives to be a connection
between female sexuality and moral corruption. This motif of misogyny, or
hatred of women, occurs sporadically throughout the play, but it is an
important inhibiting factor in Hamlet’s relationships with Ophelia and
Gertrude. He urges Ophelia to go to a nunnery rather than experience the
corruptions of sexuality and exclaims of Gertrude, “Frailty, thy name is
woman” (I.ii.146).
Ears and Hearing

One facet of Hamlet’s exploration of the difficulty of attaining true
knowledge is slipperiness of language. Words are used to communicate
ideas, but they can also be used to distort the truth, manipulate other
people, and serve as tools in corrupt quests for power. Claudius, the
shrewd politician, is the most obvious example of a man who manipulates
words to enhance his own power. The sinister uses of words are
represented by images of ears and hearing, from Claudius’s murder of the
king by pouring poison into his ear to Hamlet’s claim to Horatio that “I
have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb” (IV.vi.21). The
poison poured in the king’s ear by Claudius is used by the ghost to
symbolize the corrosive effect of Claudius’s dishonesty on the health of
Denmark. Declaring that the story that he was killed by a snake is a lie, he
says that “the whole ear of Denmark” is “Rankly abused. . . .” (I.v.36–38).
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas
or concepts.
Yorick’s Skull
In Hamlet, physical objects are rarely used to represent thematic ideas. One
important exception is Yorick’s skull, which Hamlet discovers in the
graveyard in the first scene of Act V. As Hamlet speaks to the skull and
about the skull of the king’s former jester, he fixates on death’s inevitability
and the disintegration of the body. He urges the skull to “get you to my
lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she
must come”—no one can avoid death (V.i.178–179). He traces the skull’s
mouth and says, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how
oft,” indicating his fascination with the physical consequences of death
(V.i.174–175). This latter idea is an important motif throughout the play, as
Hamlet frequently makes comments referring to every human body’s
eventual decay, noting that Polonius will be eaten by worms, that even
kings are eaten by worms, and that dust from the decayed body of
Alexander the Great might be used to stop a hole in a beer barrel.

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Themes, Motifs & Symbols in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

The Impossibility of Certainty

The Complexity of Action

The Mystery of Death

The Nation as a Diseased Body

Incest and Incestuous Desire

Ears and Hearing

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