essay titles for hamlet

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Acts III-IV

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Discussion Questions

Hamlet is deeply concerned with questions of truth and falsehood. What role does truthfulness play in the events of the story, and how is truthfulness shown to be more complex than it might at first seem? 

In the middle of Hamlet, we watch a play within a play, “The Mousetrap.” But first, we hear Hamlet’s opinions on theater: The stage should hold up a mirror to nature. What role does “The Mousetrap” play in Hamlet ’s examination of the nature of reality?

Hamlet’s lines, particularly when he is pretending to be mad, are riddled with puns and wordplay. What does the play have to say about the slipperiness of language?

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Hamlet Essay Topics: 40+ Interesting Ideas to Explore

by  Antony W

December 8, 2023

The Tragedy of Hamlet by William Shakespeare may be an over 500 years old work of literature. But it covers fundamental and equally interesting themes that touch the very lives of humankind 5+ decades on. So there are literally tens of essay topics to explore in this area.

You can focus your essay on themes such as moral decay, revenge, existential crises, relationship complexities, mortality, character analysis, political commentary, or even human’s struggles. Your essay can be short or long depending on the theme that you’ve decided to explore. Just make sure you pick the best topic and write based on the assignment brief.

Key Takeaways

• Hamlet has multiple themes that you can explore to demonstrate a clear understanding of famous work of literature despite being so old.
• Because you have the freedom to choose what area to explore, your goal should be to write an impressive essay that draws in the attention of your professor and glues them to the essay from start to finish.

Best Hamlet Essay Topics

The following is a list of good essay topics to explore based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare:

Essay Topics on Themes and Motif

• How Hamlet navigate the intricate pathways of vengeance
• Comprehensive insights into mortality and death Hamlet offer through its holistic exploration
• Ways Hamlet progressively reveals and explores the multifaceted nature of madness within its narrative
• How Hamlet portrays the themes of decay and corruption through the motif of disease
• Depths of human betrayal plumbed within the context of Hamlet
• How Hamlet repeatedly confronts the taboo of incest and the significance this motif holds within the narrative
• How is hesitation and procrastination portrayed within Hamlet?
• What revelations about fate and destiny emerge from Hamlet’s thematic exploration of these existential elements?
• How does Hamlet scrutinize the consequences and complexities associated with inaction versus action?

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Hamlet Essay Topics on Character Analysis

• How Hamlet’s character embodies the essence of an anti-hero
• Paradoxes and contradictions within Hamlet’s character that contribute to a multifaceted understanding of his persona
• Layers of complexity that define Gertrude’s character within the Hamlet narrative
• How Polonius’ character navigate the thin line between folly and wisdom
• The role Laertes plays in the exploration of themes such revenge, honor, and his contrast with Hamlet’s character within the play
• How Horatio embody the themes of friendship and unwavering loyalty 
• The significance that lies beyond King Hamlet’s ghostly appearance and how this character transcend its supernatural nature
• How Rosencrantz and Guildenstern contribute to the broader narrative of Hamlet
• How humor interplays with the tragic circumstances in Hamlet through the characters of the gravediggers
• The role Marcellus and Bernardo play as guardians of the supernatural realm within the context of Hamlet’s narrative

Easy Hamlet Essay Topics

• Unveiling the Spectral Layers: Derrida’s Deconstructive Exploration of Ghostly Presence in Hamlet
• Explore Hamlet’s depths through Lacan’s psychoanalytic insights
• Rorschach test-like exploration of madness in Hamlet
• Delve into Ophelia’s role as a potential feminist icon or victim of patriarchy
• Explore Hamlet’s characters through Carl Jung’s archetypal lens interest you
• Explore Hamlet’s dichotomy between intellect and impulsive emotions
• Freudian analysis of Gertrude and Hamlet’s relationship in the closet scene
• Postmodern exploration of justice and retribution in Hamlet
• Gender performativity in Hamlet through Judith Butler’s lens
• Examine Hamlet’s existential crisis from a Nietzschean perspective
• Explore Hamlet’s political landscape in terms of divine right and kingship
• Look at the contextual aspects of ‘delay’ in Hamlet’s actions within the Elizabethan era
• Do a comparative analysis of absurdist in Hamlet and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
• Write about the environmental themes explored in Shakespeare’s Hamlet from an eco-critical perspective

Best Hamlet Topics

• Examine Hamlet’s inaction, its causative factors and ramifications
• Write about artistic symbolism within Hamlet’s the mousetrap play
• Focus on the modern perspectives on Hamlet’s existential turmoil
• Examine Polonius’ role as a catalyst in Hamlet’s tragedy
• Write about the significance of Ophelia’s tragic demise
• The vengeful ethos: Deconstructing revenge in Hamlet
• Comparative analysis with the Elizabethan era in Hamlet in context:
• Laertes and Hamlet: A difference in characterization
• Exploring misogyny and power dynamics within hamlet
• Unveiling the symbolism in Yorick’s skull metaphor
• Supernatural elements as narrative devices in Hamlet
• Claudius’ machinations for power consolidation
• Authenticity versus pretense of the madness in Hamlet

Theme of Modern Society in Hamlet

• How Hamlet’s decision-making approach reflect the psychological phenomenon of analysis paralysis in contemporary cognitive studies
• In what ways does Hamlet’s existential crisis resonate with and contribute to modern-day philosophical discourse?
• What parallels exist between the themes of surveillance in Hamlet and their reverberations within today’s societal structures?
• How does the interpretation of Hamlet’s perceived madness shed light on the persistent stigma surrounding mental health in contemporary society?
• To what extent can the duplicity and deceit in Hamlet illuminate present-day political landscapes?
• The connections drawn between Hamlet’s narrative of revenge and its implications for resolving modern conflicts
• In what ways does Hamlet’s narrative expose and prompt dialogue regarding ongoing gender inequalities in society?
• Does a contemporary perspective shed new light on the pervasive theme of mortality in Hamlet?
• How corruption within Hamlet’s political system mirror and contrast with today’s governance structures
• What Ophelia’s descent into madness offer regarding attitudes toward women’s mental health
• How Hamlet’s conscience resonates with and influence modern moral landscapes
• How do the dynamics of father-son relationships in Hamlet transform when viewed through the lens of modern family structures?
• What insights do Hamlet’s soliloquies offer into the individualistic ideals prevalent in the 21st century?
• Ways in which instances of corruption in Hamlet’s Denmark mirror present societal anomalies
• How the concept of honor has evolved from Hamlet’s time to the modern era
• How does Hamlet’s enigmatic paradox resonate in an era inundated with overwhelming information?

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About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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207 Hamlet Essay Topics

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• Appearance vs Reality: Hamlet Theme Analysis
• The Seven Soliloquies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a Tragedy
• Shakespearean Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s Relationship
• Oedipus Rex & Hamlet: Compare & Contrast Essay
• Hamlet and Gertrude Relationship Analysis – Research Paper
• Hamlet and Oedipus: Resilience Compared
• Similarities and Character Differences of Hamlet and Laertes Although Hamlet and Laertes display similar qualities, they vary in that Hamlet is wise, and motivated by reason while Laertes is impulsive, and passionate.
• The Revenge Theme in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” The theme of revenge, its morality, and how it affects the characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents itself as a complex subject.
• The Complex Character: Hamlet From “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare Hamlet’s deeply observant and reflective nature is shown to be the central defining feature that enables the progression of the plot in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare.
• Oedipus Versus Hamlet: Resilience in Characters Resilience as the ability to hold onto one’s beliefs despite the odds that the world may throw at a person is one of the traits that appeal particularly strongly to readers.
• Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare Both Oedipus and Hamlet have difficulties accepting horrible truths about themselves and their families; however, Hamlet seems to be more resilient.
• Ophelia in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare Lack of maternal guidance, possession of a naïve spirit, and lack of exposure are the main reasons for Ophelia’s unhealthy love to Hamlet and her subsequent tragedy in the Shakespeare ‘s play.
• Love in “Hamlet” Play by William Shakespeare Hamlet written by William Shakespeare is a play-tragedy disclosing a lot of aspects of the social and personal lives of its characters.
• Hamlet’s Costume Design Scenic design is a vital element in every play. This study looks at the costume design in Hamlet with reference to the characters in act 3 scenes.
• Hamlet’s Internal Conflict in Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet’s indecision presents the central pillar of the internal conflict. The distinction between illusion and reality presents another internal conflict within Hamlet.
• Analysis of Hamlet’s Second Soliloquy Soliloquies are widely used in the play, as Hamlet cannot freely express his emotions and share the thoughts that are rooted in his inner drama.
• The Role of Conflicts in Hamlet by William Shakespeare A number of conflicts come out in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare: internal conflict of Hamlet, the conflict between Hamlet and King Claudia and others.
• How the Renaissance Affected Hamlet The Renaissance period was one in which many creative writers, artists, and songwriters worked together to create and produce magnificent works of art.
• Hamlet’s Vision and Candide’s Consideration of Love Hamlet considers the reality in which he is forced to live as extremely hostile. Under the pressure of dangerous events he lost his faith in people’s honesty.
• Who Showed Greater Resilience: Oedipus or Hamlet? Both Oedipus and Hamlet are determined individuals; however, from this review, it is clear that Hamlet shows greater resilience than Oedipus.
• Crisis of Masculinity in Hamlet Through the main character, Shakespeare translates and critiques the ideas about masculinity and femininity that were prevalent at the time.
• A Comparison of “Hamlet” by Shakespeare and “Wuthering Heights” by Bronte Literature has a way of continuing to explore many of the same themes that seem to plague mankind throughout history.
• Power and Powerlessness in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet This paper explores how characters in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet have power in one situation and are powerless in another through the Marxist theory.
• An Analysis of “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare Hamlet and the other characters do not really know who they are and this is a theme subtly brought to light here and more so, it echoes throughout the whole play.
• Claudius as Hamlet’s Foil in Shakespeare’s Play In Hamlet, Shakespeare utilizes several foil characters to help readers better comprehend Hamlet’s character. One such foil is Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle.
• Why Shakespeare’s Hamlet Is Still Relevant Today and 400 years ago people care about personal feelings. Regardless of their social status and cultural background, Hamlet is deeply rooted in the hearts of readers.
• Hamlet’s Letter to a Friend This document contains a letter from the first person of Hamlet to Cornelius from the famous play by William Shakespeare “Hamlet”.
• Stylistic and Literary Devices of “Hamlet” Stylistic devices and the tone of “Hamlet” establish the atmosphere of the play and navigate the reader through the most dramatic parts of the tragedy.
• Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Through the Historical Lens The paper states that it is vital to analyze the historical period in which William Shakespeare worked as well as the origin of the Hamlet story.
• Why Hamlet by Shakespeare Delays Revenge Shakespeare gives Hamlet an essential sense of reflection and compassion, giving him time to reflect on the need for revenge.
• Resilience: Oedipus and Hamlet Ancient Greek plots and motives are commonly reflected in the European literature of the New Age, which makes the heritage of different epochs comparable.
• Importance of Female Characters in Hamlet In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there are two major female characters, whose relationships with Hamlet play a role in understanding the ambiguous position of women.
• Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras: The Theme of Vendetta Hamlet is an outstanding tragedy by William Shakespeare, which is considered an example of skillful language and complicated plot.
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet and His Self-Destructive Temper This essay discusses Hamlet’s temperament as his problem and shows how such a temper is not only self-destructive but how it affects society at large.
• The Role and Impact of Gertrude in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” The paper discusses Gertrude. She is the mother of the protagonist of the play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. She is the widow of King Hamlet of Denmark.
• Loyalty as a Source of Tragedy in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Being a thematically intricate and unbelievably nuanced work, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” incorporates a plethora of ideas.
• Women Role in Shakespeare’s Othello and Hamlet The villain role of women in the Shakespeare’s plays Othello and Hamlet seems to have inspired the themes in both literary works.
• Analysis of “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Hamlet has attracted abiding interest due to its aesthetics and the exceptional complexity of the author’s masterpiece.
• Father-Son Relationship in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Play The paper states that Hamlet’s struggle emanates from the death of his father. Although he becomes a villain at some point, he remained steadfast.
• Imagery Blindness of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Sophocle’s “Oedipus” Illustrating blindness as imagery, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocle’s Oedipus reflect the confrontation of appearance and reality in the society and in the souls of these characters.
• Oedipus and Hamlet – Resilience in Tragedy Although Oedipus is a Sophocles’ personality in Oedipus rex, Hamlet is the male protagonist in the play Hamlet by Shakespeare; both are tragic personalities in search of reality.
• Character Analysis of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet Hamlet is Charismatic because of Ophelia’s and Horatio’s admiration of him. Lastly, Hamlet shows the reader his loyalty by meeting his dad’s ghost and agreeing to revenge.
• The Theme of Loneliness in “Hamlet” and “Odysseus” The theme of loneliness has been explored countless times in numerous works of literature, yet the ones that address the specified issue most authentically are “Hamlet” and “Odysseus”.
• An Analysis of Hamlet by Shakespeare Hamlet is a play that everyone has to read at least once in their life to see how the feeling of grief can affect a person’s behavior.
• Shakespear’s Hamlet: Conflict Between Seeming and Being This is an analysis of the characters such as Hamlet, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern clarifies the play’s obsession with the theme of the conflict between seeming and being.
• Revenge in the Play “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” Hamlet is a character used in the play, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, to depict the theme of revenge. The paper argues that Hamlet avenges for the murder of his father.
• The Power Concept in Hamlet by Shakespeare In the dramatic tragedy Hamlet by William Shakespeare, power can be portrayed as the theme that drives the play.
• Rewriting Hamlet by Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an eternal classic played in theaters worldwide and adapted in movies by multiple screenwriters and directors.
• Interpersonal & Internal Conflict in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Conflicts are integral parts of our lives, and knowing how to resolve them is one of the essential skills to learn.
• What Do Hamlet and Oedipus Have in Common? Hamlet by Shakespeare has similar elements in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. This essay aims to show the common features of Oedipus and Hamlet, the main characters of eponymous plays.
• Literature Analysis of Hamlet’s Soliloquies This paper will analyze Hamlet’s beliefs,and fears, wants, talents, and flaws solely based on his soliloquies.
• Madness of Ophelia in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare The paper states that in the tragedy “Hamlet,” Ophelia is a special character who causes much admiration and compassion, yet is a very controversial figure.
• The Plays “Oedipus Tyrannus” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare This essay discusses the characters development techniques in the plays “Oedipus Tyrannus” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare.
• Is Shakespearean Hamlet’s Madness Feigned? Hamlet is a tragedy play written by Williams Shakespeare; it is set in Denmark during unsettled times. It was revealed to the young prince.
• Hamlet’s Vulnerability in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare This paper discusses the vulnerability of Hamlet, the protagonist of Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet” and explores the reasons behind Hamlet’s vulnerability.
• Laura Bohannan vs. the Tiv on the “Hamlet” Meaning Laura Bohannan believed that the universality of Shakespeare would be clear to everyone but she realized that cultural differences could provide new insights.
• The Justification of Hamlet’s Revenge on Claudius The author provides a brief overview of Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and reflects on the ethical issues raised in the play.
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Summary of the Play The play begins with Prince Hamlet going back home for his father’s funeral. Hamlet swears to avenge his father’s death.
• The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Analysis Despite the fact that the motive of revenge is the basis for the plot, the theme of mortality, fear of death, and afterlife questions is more revealed in the play.
• Claudius as the Main Antagonist in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Even though Claudius is introduced as the main antagonist in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, he possesses several strong qualities.
• Interplay of Literary Elements in Shakespeare’s Hamlet The goal of this essay is to identify and promote a philosophical interpretation of Hamlet through the prism of metaphors, similes, allusions, and other literary elements.
• The Nature of Revenge Prior to and After the Creation of Hamlet This proposal will compare and contrast human understanding of the nature of revenge prior to and after the creation of Hamlet.
• Dilemmas in Hamlet and The Fall of the House of Usher This paper will explore the character of Hamlet and compare Hamlet’s dilemma to the predicament of the unknown narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher”.
• Resilience in Oedipus and Hamlet’s Characters Both Oedipus and Hamlet struggle to accept terrible realities about themselves and their family, but Hamlet seems to be more resilient.
• Oedipus and Hamlet: To Be Resilient, or Not to Be? Hamlet and Oedipus have low resilience, unable to respond quickly and flexibly to the vicissitudes of fate, which leads both to a tragic end.
• Comparison of Hamlet’s Procrastination and Personal Results: Shakespeare Hamlet by William Shakespeare can be considered a literary character whose procrastination leads to gruesome consequences.
• Imitation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” This paper attempts to imitate the format of soliloquies from William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke” rewrite the story from real life.
• Oedipus and Hamlet: Review The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast Oedipus and Hamlet. The King of Thebes and the Prince of Denmark have several common features, the first one being their descent.
• Hamlet’s Universality and Contemporary Cultural Discourse Despite the possible arguments surrounding Hamlet, a number of reasons that make it essential for syllabi around the world, particularly in occidental countries, exist.
• Oedipus and Hamlet Characters’ Comparison This paper discusses two similarities between Oedipus and Hamlet – they are both consumed with vengeance and suffer from hubris, which leads to their ultimate downfall.
• The Character of Hamlet’s Mother This paper discusses the Heirbruns and Maxwell’s articles about Gertrud and two different outlooks on the character traits of Gertrud in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
• Art of Drama Through the Shakespear’s ‘Hamlet’ This writing provides information about the theme of drama in the Shakespear’s ‘Hamlet’, discusses a well-structured plot, characterization of Hamlet and Laertes.
• Modern Film Version of “Hamlet” by Shakespeare Various attempts are made to create a modern version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, it is also important to retain the original emotional and moral conflicts explored by the author.
• The Play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, presents an enthralling view on lunacy and the individual mind. It presents a sharp contrast when comparing two characters, Hamlet and Ophelia.
• Hamlet, a World-Renowned Literary Classic by William Shakespeare Hamlet, a world-renowned literary classic by William Shakespeare, depicts an acute vision of a man struggling with his indecisiveness in the face of constant external pressure.
• The Novel “Don Quixote” by de Cervantes and the Play “Hamlet” by Shakespeare This paper presents the comparative analysis of the novel “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes and the play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare.
• Sunjata’s vs. Hamlet’s Literary Works Comparison By comparing and contrasting the major characters of Sunjata and Hamlet, this paper will demonstrate how these works explore themes of power, fate, and revenge in unique ways.
• Thematic Significance of the Image in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” The variety of well-known images that Shakespeare presents in Hamlet reflects the genius of the playwright and the demand for his play in the modern world.
• Concept of Power in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry IV Plays The current essay discusses the concept of power in Hamlet and Henry IV, Part 2, demonstrating that wielding power requires notable character and a vigorous heart.
• “Hamlet” Play and “The Mad Gardener’s Song”: Comparison Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Lewis Carroll’s The Mad Gardener’s Song are two works that have had a significant literary impact.
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet vs. Sophocles’ Oedipus The aim of this paper is to compare Hamlet’s and Oedipus’s resilience in the plays “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare and “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles.
• Adaptations of “Hamlet”: Zeffirelli’s and Doran’s Renditions Studying the film adaptations of “Hamlet” can be engaging for potential future discourse, and for this particular piece, Zeffirelli’s and Doran’s renditions of Hamlet are chosen.
• Images of Oedipus, Socrates, and Hamlet in the Interpretation of Tragic Heroes Oedipus, Hamlet, and Socrates are united by firmness, steadfastness of the spirit, thirst for knowledge, and a tragic fate due to predestination and a ‘special destiny.’
• The Play “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” by Shakespeare “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” is Shakespeare’s revenge play, that may be defined as one of the most well-known tragedies in world literature.
• Hamlet’s Relationship With Gertrude Hamlet’s conflict with Gertrude, his mother, reflects the difference in views between them and the young prince’s desire for imaginary ideals amid royal intrigue.
• Hamlet’s Monologue: A Rhetorical Analysis The rhetorical devices used by Shakespeare in the monologue of Hamlet help readers better understand the main character’s uncertainty about his life, death, and revenge.
• Monologue of Hamlet by William Shakespeare The vital claim of the world-famous monologue in Hamlet is, in concentrated form, that our state is so miserable that entire non-existence would be definitely preferable to it.
• “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: Character of the Ghost Character of the Ghost helps to identify such themes as mortality and revenge and promotes the reader’s tracing of the evolution of other heroes’ attitude toward these concepts.
• Oedipus, the King and Hamlet: Analysis Belonging to entirely different cultures and addressing quite different social and psychological issues, “Oedipus, the King” and “Hamlet” might seem quite distant from each other.
• Oedipus Rex and Hamlet: Compare and Contrast Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, both show outstanding resilience in their desire to help others and disclose the truth that is hidden.
• “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”: Combination of Conflicting Qualities in the Characters The existence of conflicting characters in “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” helps to understand how good and evil qualities are combined within human beings.
• Finding Strength While Searching for the Truth: Hamlet and Oedipus Hamlet and Oedipus’s characters serve as an example of what a quest for truth can lead to and how differently the process of discovering a secret story might be.
• Shakesperian Literature: Hamlet’s Character in Act 2 Shakespeare uses Hamlet to demonstrate the primordial link between stage performance of plays and real-life scenarios.
• The Tragedy “Hamlet” by Shakespeare: Evidence of Religious Beliefs This paper aims at proving that the characters of the tragedy “Hamlet” by Shakespeare are believers and that they evaluate their actions based on their faith.
• Analysis of Hamlet Passage by William Shakespeare A passage from the second scene of the second act reveals essential facts about Hamlet’s character and has impressive diction, syntax, and imagery.
• William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Gertrude William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the most known tragedies in the English literature, while Hamlet himself is an illustrative example of a turbulent mind.
• Hamlet as an Enjoyable and Exuberant Play William Shakespeare was a renowned English writer, poet, and dramatist. Shakespeare had a number of plays to his credit.
• Love vs Fear: The Song of Roland and Hamlet Being loved is better than being feared since love-based actions result in healthier things; being happy, peace and security are some of the consequences of love.
• “Hamlet” by Shakespeare: Scenes Analysis of the Play Critical analysis of the “Ghost Hamlet “ in the play Hamlet by Shakespeare. The most critical criticism is in the nature of the ghost, of the main character’s father.
• William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Is He Insane? Hamlet looks like a completely sane and rational although upset young man, there is little doubt that Hamlet is as the sound of mind as most of the rest of the characters.
• Character Comparison: “Odyssey”, “Scarlett Latter,” “Troy,” “Hamlet” The paper compares the heroes from Homer’s “Odyssey”, Hawthorne’s “Scarlett Latter” and characters from Hollywood movies “Troy” and “Hamlet”.
• The Tragedy of Revenge in the “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare One of the most famous plays created by William Shakespeare is Hamlet. The play deals with multiple themes. The issue of revenge is questioned from the point of view of violence.
• Modern Take on Hamlet: King Cornelius’s Monologue In a dimly lit room, a dark figure of King Claudius occupies a large sofa. He occasionally stands up and walks across the room, his appearance disheveled, and they look exhausted.
• Themes in Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Hamlet” Hamlet is one of the most significant works by Shakespeare. The author considers various important issues and this makes the play so influential.
• Actor’s Character Development in “Hamlet” Play As the play Hamlet is based on conflicts, it is necessary to show how the main character faces difficulties and different challenges created by the fortune.
• The Relevance of “Hamlet” to Contemporary Readers The purpose is to analyze the famous excerpt from “Hamlet”, which begins with the words “To be or not to be” and to dwell upon the way readers can relate to its message.
• The Murder in the Play “Hamlet” Hamlet is a play with a strong focus on interpersonal relationships. Most of the pivotal events revolve around the friends and family of Hamlet, specifically, their involvement in the murder.
• Ethical Dilemmas in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s tragedy play that was written in the late 14th century. The imagery in this play is both entertaining and creative.
• Upsetting the Social Order During “Hamlet” Created Disruption
• What Makes Hamlet Such a Complex Character?
• How the Play “Hamlet” Portrays Shakespeare’s Ingenuity as a Literary Artist
• Manipulation and the Use of the Art of Acting in “Hamlet”, a Play by William Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Its Classical Tragedy Elements
• William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and the Mental Changes Ophelia Undergoes
• The Inner Conflicts and Introspective Attitude in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• “Hamlet”: Character Analysis and Outstanding Features of the Author’s Style
• Church Corruption and Lutheranism in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• How Does Shakespeare Use Linguistic and Dramatic Devices to Introduce the Character of Hamlet?
• Prince “Hamlet” and Ophelia: Intricate and Often Confusing Relationship
• “Hamlet”: Does Shakespeare Have a Profound Dislike of Women?
• Hamlet’s Transformation From Good to Evil in Shakespeare’s Ham
• Reality, Illusion, Appearance, and Deception in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• Dysfunctional Families and the Inadequate Role Played by Parents in “Hamlet”
• Hamlet Comparing the Dissimilar Characters of Gertrude and Ophelia
• Differences Between Hamlet’s Mental and Emotional Conflicts
• Hamlet’s Interaction With Other Characters of the Play as a Path to Better Understanding of His Character
• Hamlet’s Depression and Its Impact in Decision-Making in “Hamlet”, a Play by William Shakespeare
• How Does Shakespeare Present Women and Sex in “Hamlet”?
• Death, Illness, and Decay in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• Classical and Renaissance Paradigms of Heroism in “Hamlet”
• “Hamlet”, Moral Truths, Redemption, and a Just Society
• How Does Hamlet React to His Momentous Decision and What Does He Risk to Save Himself From His Ideas
• “Hamlet”, His Psychological Estrangement Fueled This Tragedy
• The Human Condition and Ideologies in “Hamlet” by Willliam Shakespeare
• Hamlet’s Capacity for Self-Sacrifice in the Face of Compelling Circumstances
• How Does Shakespeare Present Issues About Revenge and Madness in “Hamlet”
• Does Hamlet Fabricate the Conversation With the Ghost?
• The Reasons for the Delayed Revenge of Hamlet in the Tragedy of “Hamlet”, a Play by William Shakespeare
• The Reasoning and Decisions of Hamlet in the Tragedy of “Hamlet” a Play by William Shakespeare
• Did HamletCommit Suicide or Was He Murdered in William Shakespeare’s Tragedy
• Analysis of Shakespeare’s Use of Soliloquy in Presenting the Developing Character of “Hamlet”
• Elizabethan’s Laws Against Perpetrators of Suicide in “Hamlet” by William
• Betrayal, Vengeance, and Procrastination in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
• Means and Ends: How “Hamlet’s Supposed Insanity Justifies and Masks His True Goal of Revenge
• Disease, Sickness, Death, and Decay in “Hamlet”
• How Does Hamlet and Ophelia’s Relationship Evolves Throughout the Play of “Hamlet”?
• Body Politic and the Final Scene of “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
• The Sexist Attitude and Characterization of Women in “Hamlet”, a Play by William Shakespeare
• Deception, Murder and Love in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
• The Ideas and Themes Indicated in the First Three Scenes of “Hamlet” That You Find Particularly Interesting
• Hamlet and His Madness as a Psychoanalytical Depiction
• Cultural and Religious Beliefs Driving the Action in “Hamlet”
• Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Perceptions of Human Behavior
• Darkest Sins and Heavenly Shows: The Nature of Iago’s Villainy in Shakespear’s “Hamlet”
• Hamlet’s and Laertes’ Revenge: Which One Seems More Justified
• Christian Morals Versus Barbaric Customs in “Hamlet”
• How Does Shakespeare Use Conflict in “Hamlet” as a Way of Exploring Ideas?
• William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Deadly Character Flaws
• Hamlet’s Antic Disposition and Its Impact in Shakespeare’s Play “Hamlet”
• Gender Roles and Attitudes Toward Love in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• Contrasting William Shakespeare’s Play “Hamlet” With Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Film
• Why Did “Hamlet” Wait Too Long to Avenge His Father’s Death?
• Hamlet, the Machiavellian Prince: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s Use of Machiavellian Politics
• “Hamlet”: Hamlet’s Greatest Crime Was His Inherent Goodness
• Evil for Evil’s Sake: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• The Mysterious Murder Case in the Play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
• Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet: Various Perspectives of Death
• Hamlet and Trifles: Aspects of the Past Relevant to the Present
• Examining Queen Gertrude’s Innocence in Shakespeare’s Play, “Hamlet”
• William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Deception, Poison, and Disease
• King Claudius’s Character Development and Transformation in “Hamlet”
• Disillusionment, Depression, and Despair in the Play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
• How Ophelia Was Manipulated by the Men in Her Life in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
• Why Does Hamlet Use His Madness to Confuse People?
• “Everyman” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” – Comparing the Medieval World View to the Modern
• Does Hamlet’s Attitude Towards His Mother in General Solely Contribute to the Tragedy of the Play, or Is It Just on of Many Contributing Factors
• Love and Hate Within the Family in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• Claudius’ Role and Personality in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• The Relationship Between the Main and the Lesser Characters in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• The Three Issues That Caused the Internal Struggle and Passive Response of Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
• Hamlet Discloses His True Feelings in a Play by William Shakespeare
• What Is the Main Topic of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” Soliloquy?
• Why Is “Hamlet” Considered Shakespeare’s Best Play?
• Is the Madness of Hamlet Real or Feigned?
• What Is the Moral of “Hamlet”?
• What Is the Meaning of ‘Can Tell a Hawk From a Handsaw’ in “Hamlet”?
• What Makes Hamlet Such a Compelling Character?
• What Are Some Important Themes From Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”?
• What Are Some Examples of Corruption and Decay in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”?
• Would Hamlet Have Been an Effective Ruler and a Good King?
• How Does “Hamlet” Relate to the Elizabethan Era?
• Why Is Play “Hamlet” Still Relevant and Popular Today?
• What Central Question Does “Hamlet” Raise?
• What Does “Hamlet” Teach Us About Humanity?
• Why Hamlet Would Be Considered a Depressed King?
• What Are Dramatic Structures and Themes of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”?
• How Duality and Appearance vs Reality Themes Are Imaged in “Hamlet”?
• What Role Does Religion Play in “Hamlet”?
• How Important Is the Theme of Having a Clear Conscience in “Hamlet”?
• How Shakespeare Presents the Female Characters in “Hamlet”?
• What Are the External and Internal Conflicts in “Hamlet”?
• Why Does Hamlet Delay So Long in Following the Ghosts?
• Why “Hamlet” Would Have Been Loved by Aristotle?
• How Does “Hamlet” Represent the Human Condition?
• What Does It Mean to Be a Complex Human Being in “Hamlet”?
• What Are Some Historical Events That Influenced Shakespeare to Write “Hamlet”?

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StudyCorgi. (2021, November 12). 207 Hamlet Essay Topics. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/hamlet-essay-topics/

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StudyCorgi . "207 Hamlet Essay Topics." November 12, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/hamlet-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "207 Hamlet Essay Topics." November 12, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/hamlet-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Hamlet were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on June 22, 2024 .

Hamlet William Shakespeare

Hamlet essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Hamlet Material

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Hamlet Essays

Through rose colored glasses: how the victorian age shifted the focus of hamlet rebecca rendell.

19th century critic William Hazlitt praised Hamlet by saying that, "The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken pace at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of the time fixed upon." (Hazlitt 164-169) Though...

Q to F7: Mate; Hamlet's Emotions, Actions, and Importance in the Nunnery Scene Rebecca Rendell

"Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh" Hamlet's trust is betrayed by the people who are dearest to his heart (III.i.87). The theme of betrayal takes root before the Shakespeare's tragedy begins, when Hamlet's uncle murders his father...

Before the Storm Rebecca Rendell

When Hamlet sees Fortinbras' army headed for combat in Poland he is moved to deliver a striking monologue about the battle raging in his soul. Passion and anger drive Hamlet to avenge his father's murder at any cost, while logic and reason turn...

Haunted: Hamlet's Relationship With His Dead Father Tommy Stevenson

William Shakespeare's Hamlet, a story grounded in worldly issues like morality, justice, and retribution, begins in a very otherworldly way: the appearance of a ghost desiring vengeance from beyond the grave. The supernatural confrontation between...

Heliocentric Hamlet: The Astronomy of Hamlet Theoderek Wayne

If imagination is the lifeblood of literature, then each new scientific advance which extends our scope of the universe is as fruitful to the poet as to the astronomer. External and environmental change stimulates internal and personal tropes for...

Paralytic Prince: Hamlet's "Thought" Complex Theoderek Wayne

"If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,

And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,

Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.

Who does it then? His madness. If't be so,

Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;

His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy."

"I Have Seen Nothing": Hamlet and His Home Eddie Borey

Hamlet begins at the open mouth of the Void. Barnardo and Francisco call out to each other and into darkness; they stand atop a guard platform that is naked to the open air and to the night. Every character's entrance is marked by a series of...

The Corruption in Hamlet Allison Masters

Central to the plot and the themes developed in Shakespeare's Hamlet, are the varying elements of corruption which occur during the play. This is echoed in Marcellus' famous comment of 'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' when Hamlet is...

Hamlet's Obsession With Death Marie Moulin

In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the author presents the main character of Hamlet as a man who is obsessed with death. Shakespeare uses this obsession to explore both Hamlet's desire for revenge and his need for certainty. In the...

Hamlet's Frustration with Himself: "A Rogue And Peasant Slave" David Sauvage

In order to understand Hamlet, we must understand his frustration. This frustration is most clear in his famous monologue, famously beginning with the line "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I."

This self-condemnation is contrasted by his...

"Pray God Restore Him": The Importance of the Origin of the First Quarto of Hamlet David Sauvage

Ofel: Alas, what a change is this?

Ham: But if thou wilt needes marry, marry a foole,

For wisemen know well enough,

What monsters you make of them, to a Nunnery goe.

Ofel: Pray God restore him.

Ham: Nay, I have heard of your painting too,

God hath giuen...

Hamlet's Problematic "Celestial Bed" David Sauvage

To understand Hamlet's insecurities, we must understand Ophelia's point of view. It is she who makes him most uncomfortable over the course of the play, and it is her rejection of him that drives Hamlet closer to insanity. Her reasons for this...

"He's Depressed": The Implications of Hamlet, II.ii.278-292 Alex Hoffer

In his famous speech, "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth[...]" (II.ii.280), Hamlet illustrates an Elizabethan fusion of medieval and humanist ideas, perhaps lost on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but not on E.M.W. Tillyard....

A Play of Espionage and War Joshua V. Rohe

"It is not the object of war to annihilate those who have given provocation for it, but to cause them to mend their ways; not to ruin the innocent and guilty alike, but to save both" (Polybius). From the start of man's political awareness, war has...

In Violence, the Rest is Silence Sara Liss

Location is everything. The setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the royal court, functions as more than the backdrop to the drama. On the contrary, embedded within the play is the implicit significance of its environment. Court society, with its...

The Interpretive Effects of an Affecting Interpretation Sara Liss

"For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" (2.2, 249-250)

From the start of Shakespeare's Hamlet it is clear that much of the action is cerebral. The play never escapes the confines of Hamlet's head. One is never sure if...

Hamlet's Conflict Between Play and Reality Chris Mays

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius puts forth a simple explanation of insanity, stating that "to define true madness, what is it to be nothing else but mad?" Such a diagnosis is necessary in the court of Denmark, in which the perspective of reality...

Cultural Identity In Hamlet Matt Zajic

In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, the concept of cultural identity is explored through Hamlet's isolation which is created by the conflict between his duty to his father, and his duties to the monarchy and society. Hamlet is isolated from his...

Thought as Inaction in William Shakespeare's Hamlet Megan DiGregorio

"Understanding kills action." With these three simple words, Nietzsche explains the idea behind Shakespeare's development of the acting of thought as inaction, and also the reason that Hamlet hesitates for over 3000 lines of blank verse and prose...

The Dishonest Ghost in "Hamlet" Marilyn Fu

Shakespeare has always been able to create characters richly dichotomous in nature. In "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," the portrayal of the ghost of Hamlet's father vacillates through the play from Hamlet's uncertainty of whether "it is an honest...

The Foils of Hamlet David McDevitt

Literary techniques evoke images, emotion and in the case of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" teach a lesson. The dominant literary technique ongoing throughout "Hamlet" is the presence of foils. A foil is a character who, through strong contrast and...

How All Deletions Do Inform Against Me: A Look at Hamlet's Psychological Transformation in His Final Soliloquy Jessica Hindman

Though the identity of the "editor" responsible for deleting Hamlet's final soliloquy from the 1623 Folio edition of Hamlet may be lost to history, the possible reasons for his omission of the Quarto's fifty-eight lines are as relevant and...

The Inseparability of Acting and Ruling: An Analysis of Hamlet and The First Part of Henry the Fourth Tyler Merritt

Within Hamlet and 1 Henry the Fourth are examples of Shakespeare including the trade of acting within the text as a central theme. Hamlet certainly shows us his skill as an actor throughout the play, but there is a more blatant preference to...

Wasting Away in Denmark: Of Course There's a Woman to Blame Kasey Schneider

William Shakespeare's Hamlet, says renowned pundit of literature, Harold Bloom, "is unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature" (Bloom 384). Surely, its story, style, and many famous lines have transcended time and place to such an extent...

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Essays on Hamlet

Hamlet essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the tragic hero in "hamlet": analyzing the complex character of prince hamlet.

Thesis Statement: This essay delves into the character of Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," examining his tragic flaws, internal conflicts, and the intricate web of relationships that contribute to his downfall, ultimately highlighting his status as a classic tragic hero.

• Introduction
• Defining Tragic Heroes: Characteristics and Literary Tradition
• The Complex Psychology of Prince Hamlet: Ambiguity, Doubt, and Melancholy
• The Ghost's Revelation: Hamlet's Quest for Justice and Revenge
• The Theme of Madness: Feigned or Real?
• Hamlet's Relationships: Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, and Horatio
• The Tragic Climax: The Duel, Poisoned Foils, and Fatal Consequences

Essay Title 2: "Hamlet" as a Reflection of Political Intrigue: Power, Corruption, and the Tragedy of Denmark

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the political dimensions of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," analyzing the themes of power, corruption, and political manipulation as portrayed in the play, and their impact on the fate of the characters and the kingdom of Denmark.

• The Political Landscape of Denmark: Claudius's Ascension to the Throne
• The Machiavellian Villainy of Claudius: Murder, Deception, and Ambition
• Hamlet's Struggle for Justice: The Role of Political Morality
• The Foils of Polonius and Laertes: Pawns in Political Games
• The Fate of Denmark: Chaos, Rebellion, and the Climactic Tragedy
• Shakespeare's Political Commentary: Lessons for Society

Essay Title 3: "Hamlet" in a Contemporary Context: Adaptations, Interpretations, and the Play's Enduring Relevance

Thesis Statement: This essay examines modern adaptations and interpretations of "Hamlet," exploring how the themes, characters, and dilemmas presented in the play continue to resonate with audiences today, making "Hamlet" a timeless and relevant work of literature.

• From Stage to Screen: Iconic Film and Theater Productions of "Hamlet"
• Contemporary Readings: Gender, Race, and Identity in "Hamlet" Interpretations
• Psychological and Existential Interpretations: Hamlet's Inner Turmoil in the Modern World
• Relevance in the 21st Century: Themes of Revenge, Justice, and Moral Dilemma
• Adapting "Hamlet" for New Audiences: Outreach, Education, and Cultural Engagement
• Conclusion: The Timelessness of "Hamlet" and Its Place in Literature

The Enigmatic Antic Disposition in Hamlet: Its Meaning and Implications

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The Link Between Hamlet and Renaissance Ideals

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The Tragic Story of Hamlet

Reality and appearance: a comparison of hamlet and the revenger"s tragedy, the patriarchal power and female norms in hamlet, misogyny and female representation in hamlet, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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"Act": The Theme of "Acting" in Hamlet

The question of hamlet's madness, analysis of ophelia's story through the context of gender and madness, death and revenge in hamlet, a play by william shakespeare, existentialism as a part of hamlet, revenge and its consequences in hamlet, claudius as the master of manipulation in hamlet, the important theme of madness in hamlet by william shakespeare, trickery and deception in hamlet by william shakespeare, the role of grief in shakespeare’s hamlet, reflection on the act 2 of shakespeare’s hamlet, hamlet by william shakespeare: the impact of parents on their children, the relationship between hamlet and horatio, revenge and justice in william shakespeare’s hamlet, justice and revenge in shakespeare's hamlet, hamlet's intelligence is the factor of his procrastination nature, the dishonesty of the ghost in hamlet, king lear and hamlet: freudian interpretation of the two plays, hamlet's procrastination: a study on his unwillingness to act, shakespeare's use of machiavellian politics in hamlet.

1603, William Shakespeare

Play; Shakespearean tragedy

Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius

The play Hamlet is the most cited work in the English language and is often included in the lists of the world's greatest literature.

"Frailty, thy name is woman!" "Brevity' is the soul of wit" "To be, or not to be, that is the question" "I must be cruel to be kind" "Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison."

1. Wright, G. T. (1981). Hendiadys and Hamlet. PMLA, 96(2), 168-193. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/hendiadys-and-hamlet/B61A80FAB6569984AB68096FE483D4FB) 2. Leverenz, D. (1978). The woman in Hamlet: An interpersonal view. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4(2), 291-308. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493608?journalCode=signs) 3. Lesser, Z., & Stallybrass, P. (2008). The first literary Hamlet and the commonplacing of professional plays. Shakespeare Quarterly, 59(4), 371-420. (https://academic.oup.com/sq/article-abstract/59/4/371/5064575) 4. De Grazia, M. (2001). Hamlet before its Time. MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 62(4), 355-375. (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/22909) 5. Calderwood, J. L. (1983). To be and not to be. Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. In To Be and Not to Be. Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. Columbia University Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/cald94400/html) 6. Kastan, D. S. (1987). " His semblable is his mirror":" Hamlet" and the Imitation of Revenge. Shakespeare Studies, 19, 111. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/394df477873b27246b71f83d3939c672/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1819311) 7. Neill, M. (1983). Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest. Jonson and Shakespeare, 35-56. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-06183-9_3) 8. Gates, S. (2008). Assembling the Ophelia fragments: gender, genre, and revenge in Hamlet. Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 34(2), 229-248. (https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA208534875&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00982474&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Eebb234db)

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Pasco County’s torrid growth reaches once peaceful Shady Hills hamlet

• Siena Duncan Times staff

The chickens are dying in Shady Hills.

Dennis Kiegel and his neighbors suspect the culprits are coyotes — thieves in the night searching for their next meal.

Kiegel gets it. The coyotes have been pushed deeper and deeper into more populated areas of Pasco County. The forests where they used to hunt have been clear-cut for townhomes and industrial plants.

This kind of growth has been familiar to longtime southern Pasco County locals for decades as the Tampa Bay area, bursting at the seams, overflows north. But many residents of Shady Hills — just a 10-minute drive from the Hernando County line — put down roots amid pastureland and hay farms to escape places like Wesley Chapel and Land O’ Lakes, where suburbia is in full bloom.

They didn’t think the growth would reach an area where the closest place with a parking lot was a mom-and-pop animal feed store.

But Pasco County had other plans. Commissioners have approved several construction projects that will draw more people to live in Shady Hills and create places where they can work.

The most recent is the Del Webb project , which will add more than 400 apartments and 700 retirement community homes — and could grow the census-designated area’s population by more than 10%. It’s under construction, alongside an adjoining office complex, retail space and over 100,000 square feet for light industry.

Pasco commissioners are known for their welcoming attitude toward new construction. It raises property values not on what’s being built but on existing homes and land around it, bringing in additional taxes to pay for new roads and sheriff’s deputies.

They have also prioritized ensuring that new construction includes places where people can work. They’ve said they don’t want Pasco simply growing as a bedroom community to Tampa, with residents commuting long distances to jobs, further stressing ever-crowded roadways.

So development in Shady Hills also includes the newly completed Gary Plastic manufacturing site that received nearly $1 million in taxpayer incentive money to create jobs. And the approved expansion of the Covanta waste-to-energy power plant to go with a number of townhomes and suburban neighborhoods that were constructed during the past decade.

The landscape has changed significantly, especially during the past five years, Kiegel said. “I feel like most people that you speak to that live out here are very, very unhappy.”

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Pasco County’s overall population has grown by nearly a third since 2010, faster than all the counties that border it, including Hillsborough County and Pinellas County.

Wesley Chapel, now the largest population center in the county, has nearly doubled in size. Other communities are set to experience the same level of growth in coming years, including county seat Dade City , where officials approved a massive development. Zephyrhills , Pasco County’s largest city and home to the Zephyrhills Water company, put a halt to development last year after facing possible water shortages due to growth.

There are more than 600 ongoing construction projects across the county, and over 100 in the pipeline for approval, according to the Pasco County government website . Ninety percent of them are private industrial, commercial or residential construction, as opposed to local government infrastructure projects.

For a place where citrus groves used to make up a majority of the land use, it’s a shift, said Jon Moody, a member of the Pasco County Planning Commission.

But with several freezes in the 1980s, droves of Mediterranean fruit flies and disease outbreaks, the citrus-growing industry is a fraction of what it used to be when Moody was a child in the 1970s. The county needs a new source of work — and light industry, which has taken root in Shady Hills and the rest of the county, is an easy thing to turn to, he said.

Metropolitan areas grow. And growth will come to Shady Hills, and the rest of the county, too, Moody said.

“I don’t like having my neighbor 10 feet from me, and I live in an area where my neighbors are better than 100 feet from me,” Moody said. “But the population is forced to move into areas that become developable, whether I like them or I don’t.”

Some longtime residents fall firmly in the “don’t like it” camp, Kiegel included.

He’s 48 and has lived in Shady Hills all his life. He remembers when Shady Hills Road, the namesake of the community, used to be a sleepy back-country drive. His in-laws put on an annual truck and car show in the late 1980s where they would close the road for an hour or two. They would drive the cars up and down, parade-style, for residents who would sit on the curb.

Now the road is a main thoroughfare — closing it would be chaos these days, Kiegel said. There are too many semitrucks roaring to the manufacturing plants.

Kiegel hasn’t considered leaving Shady Hills. The majority of his family still lives there, and many others are returning after working in other Florida cities. He loves it for its lingering rural feel. The thick canopy of trees between each house. The wildlife that used to tread across his backyard: gopher tortoises, foxes, white-tailed deer. He listens to choirs of birdsong drown out the far-off noise of the Suncoast Parkway.

“It really is peaceful,” Kiegel said. “Just to be able to go outside and sit in your yard and not hear engines and fire trucks and ambulances. Unfortunately, now all I’m seeing are dead animals on Shady Hills Road because they’re being pushed out.”

He’s especially worried about the Del Webb development’s effect on Crews Lake, he said. It used to be a popular Shady Hills boating spot, deep enough to water-ski across when he was a child. Now the water is choked with weeds and muddied with sludge, and often the waterline isn’t high enough for boats, Kiegel said.

There is a general sense of unrest among his family and friends every time a development is approved by the County Commission, Kiegel said.

Linda Farmer, who lives near the Hernando-Pasco county line, takes Shady Hills Road to work in Land O’ Lakes. Over the course of 35 years in the area, she said she’s never seen an alligator in the road — until now.

There were three over the past few weeks near the Del Webb development. They were hit by cars and had to be relocated by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, she said. She’s also seen cranes and turtles lying dead in the same area.

“It hurts my heart to leave my house and drive down Shady Hills Road,” Farmer said. “I get angry by the time I get to work.”

Farmer thinks the environmental disruption in Shady Hills is a symptom of a larger problem across Pasco County: overdevelopment.

Farmer has moved from Wesley Chapel to Land O’ Lakes to Spring Hill to get away from it. She understands that grocery stores and gas stations are needed for the people moving into Pasco County, but she thinks the rate of development is far beyond reasonable progress.

“It’s like, who can make the most money and destroy their county the quickest?” Farmer said.

Some outspoken Shady Hills residents have tried to get the Pasco County Commission to listen to their concerns. Jen Kerouac, a pastor at Shady Hills Mission Chapel, frequents meetings that alternate between Dade City and New Port Richey. She’s dedicated hours of driving time to speak her three minutes during public comment, she said.

She shares concerns about overdevelopment, about the uprooting of live oak trees and clear-cutting of old-growth forests. She reminds them of the dangers of a two-lane main thoroughfare where cars veer off the road to pass slow traffic.

Often it feels futile, Kerouac said. She has a life too: a congregation to care for and a job in real estate. Her passionate neighbors usually don’t have the same flexibility to back her up at the meetings every month. And she said sometimes it feels like the elected officials have stopped listening.

“Every time we went to a meeting,” Kerouac said. “It was like, thanks for playing. Take a Pasco County pen home with you and have a nice day.”

Moody, who has served on the planning commission on and off since 2007, is a proponent of landscape buffers like walls and hedges to protect rural properties, he said. At the same time, he said the growth is coming. He doesn’t think the county should try to stem it, he said.

Kiegel has seen some of his old Pasco County neighbors head north again. They have moved to Hernando County, and sometimes as far as Citrus County and Sumter County, to try to preserve their rural lifestyle.

In their place, he sees an influx of residents from out of state settling into brand-new townhomes along Shady Hills Road. And where he never did before, he spots coyotes.

Siena Duncan covers local government. She can be reached at [email protected].

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At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.

By A.J. Goldmann

Reviewing from Bochum, Duisburg and Essen, Germany.

“ I Want Absolute Beauty ,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.

The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.

This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove . His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller , presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.

Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.

The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde , is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.

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Title: the ai scientist: towards fully automated open-ended scientific discovery.

Abstract: One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. While frontier models have already been used as aides to human scientists, e.g. for brainstorming ideas, writing code, or prediction tasks, they still conduct only a small part of the scientific process. This paper presents the first comprehensive framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, enabling frontier large language models to perform research independently and communicate their findings. We introduce The AI Scientist, which generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments, visualizes results, describes its findings by writing a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process for evaluation. In principle, this process can be repeated to iteratively develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper. To evaluate the generated papers, we design and validate an automated reviewer, which we show achieves near-human performance in evaluating paper scores. The AI Scientist can produce papers that exceed the acceptance threshold at a top machine learning conference as judged by our automated reviewer. This approach signifies the beginning of a new era in scientific discovery in machine learning: bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the entire research process of AI itself, and taking us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world's most challenging problems. Our code is open-sourced at this https URL

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