Hamlet | Themes, Character Analysis, & Symbolism
- Melchior Antoine
- Sep 22
- 15 min read
Updated: Sep 23
Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most famous play, deals mainly with themes of appearance vs reality, action vs. inaction, and rot, mortality, and decay. These themes are closely intertwined with the symbolism and motifs of the play. The most famous quote in the play is “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Act 1, Scene 4).
This quote does a good job of touching upon several of the play’s major themes and the character of Hamlet. Hamlet’s father has fallen victim to regicide, killed by his own brother King Claudius, who quickly marries his mother. The sins of regicide, adultery, and incest represent a moral rot at the heart of the body politic.
This corruption is all covered up, with Claudius pretending to be a righteous king, while he and his court have Hamlet under surveillance. This is related to the theme of appearance versus reality, with Hamlet having to feign madness to uncover or prove the plot concerning his father’s murder.
We eventually get to see the madness that Hamlet feigns may well be a real mental illness. Lastly, the whole play revolves around the inability of Hamlet to act and carry out vengeance or justice for his father by killing King Claudius and healing the rot that the body politic suffers from.
This is essential to the character of Hamlet who can be described as being indisposed to action. While he understands that his father needs to be avenged and that he has the moral obligation and the right to do so, he overthinks and cannot bring himself to take action.
1. Themes in Hamlet
Themes in Hamlet, as mentioned earlier, are related to rot and decay. This rot and decay extends from the evil action of King Claudius who kills his own brother. There is some similarity with Macbeth, where the killing of King Duncan leads to chaos and anarchy and a disruption of God’s natural and moral order. In the case of Hamlet, the chaos and anarchy are not as obvious as in Macbeth. There are no open rebellions or massacres (except for the ending of the play); instead, we witness how Hamlet suffers mentally and psychologically from the pressure of how he should react to his father's death while the court of Claudius pretends to be righteous and upright.
i. Rot, mortality, and decay
Rot, mortality, and decay are major themes closely related to the motifs in Hamlet. This rot begins off stage with the killing of King Hamlet, the father of Prince Hamlet, and it spreads to Hamlet’s brain (making him go insane) and the entire body politic. The ghost of Hamlet’s father describes how he was killed, namely by being poisoned through the ear:
Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leprous distilment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigor it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine,
And a most instant tetter barked about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust
All my smooth body. (Act 1, Scene 5)
The ghost here is describing the metaphorical pollution of the body politic. This is why the poisoning of the king’s body is described in such lurid detail. The ghost of King Hamlet describes “the royal bed of Denmark” as “a couch for luxury and damned incest,” referring to his brother marrying his former queen. He also makes a pun on the method of poisoning through his ear with an ear of corn to highlight the theme of corruption and rot spreading through the whole kingdom:
Now, Hamlet, hear.
’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forgèd process of my death
Rankly abused.
This pun describes the process of a single grain of corn being infected and spreading the disease to the whole ear of corn. Note that the word “rank” used here, in Shakespeare’s time, meant “putrid or stinking.” The core of the corruption lies in the royal court. King Claudius now runs a police state, and his tentacles are everywhere. Hamlet is among those most affected by this state.
His lover or finance Ophelia is forced by her father, Polonius, to be a spy to monitor Hamlet after Claudius suspects that Hamlet knows of the conspiracy to murder the former king. He realizes this and breaks up with her. His relationship with his mother is strained now that he suspects her of adultery and even worse. However, more importantly, the mind of Hamlet is affected by this rot and corruption.
We could even say that the ghost of King Hamlet has infected the mind of his son Prince Hamlet with this rot. This knowledge drives Hamlet insane because Hamlet, before and above everything else, is a scholar, not a soldier. He isn’t a man of action. Knowing about the conspiracy that kills his father traps him as he understands intellectually that he as the son of King Hamlet is obligated to kill King Claudius, but he doesn’t have the disposition to take this decisive action.
However, that would not be wholly accurate. In the very beginning of the play, we see hints that Hamlet is affected by an almost existential cynicism, hopelessness, and melancholy even before his encounter with the ghost:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead!—nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,—
Let me not think on’t,—Frailty, thy name is woman!— (Act 1, Scene 2)
This is the first soliloquy of Hamlet, and it is not as famous as the “to be or not to be” speech, but it has many of the same themes. Here, Hamlet is describing how sick he is of the world because of what he perceives to be his mother’s betrayal of her father. He begins by wishing to die rather dramatically by wishing that his “flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” After all, he is a Christian, and suicide is not an option as God or “the Everlasting” has “fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.”
The rot that has spread from the killing of his father is suggested in the lines where he says of the world:
tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Again, we see the word “rank” being used. His sense of disgust is not based on the knowledge of how his father is killed but on the fact that his mother married so soon after his father’s death. This poisons the mind of Hamlet, who becomes depressed, bitter, and angry at the world.
This rot in addition to manifesting in the form of mental and emotional illness in Hamlet also results in death. And there are many deaths. King Hamlet is poisoned by Claudius and dies. This in turn poisons the mind of Hamlet, who mistreats Ophelia and kills her father Polonius, as he spies on behalf of King Cladius. Ophelia goes insane and kills herself in turn.
King Claudius strikes again and comes up with an assassination plot against Prince Hamlet, which backfires horribly wrong. This plot sees Prince Hamlet, his mother Gertrude, Laertes, and King Claudius himself all either killed by the sword or poisoned to death.
The death theme is highlighted in the cemetery scene in Act 5, Scene 1 where Hamlet encounters the skull of the jester Yorick, whom he knew and converses with the skull in his hand:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen.
He then asks his friend Horatio whether Caesar or Alexander the Great also looked like this skull after they were buried. This shows Hamlet contemplating his own death as the social distance between him and Yorick is as wide as the gap between him and Caesar or Alexander the Great. The conversation with the skull shows that Hamlet’s imagination and mind have been wholly infected by ideas of rot, death, and suicide. He is simultaneously obsessed, repulsed, disgusted, and attracted to the ideas of morbidity and death.
And this is crucial as during this conversation, Ophelia’s body is being brought to the cemetery. In short, Hamlet is caught up in the train and cycle of rot and death: He holds up the skull of a decomposed body, while a freshly dead one is being brought to be buried, and one scene later, we witness Hamlet’s death, alongside those of King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, and Laertes.
ii. Appearance vs. reality
Appearance vs reality in the play is a theme closely tied to acting. In the very first act of the play when King Claudius and Queen Gertrude chide Hamlet for remaining sullen some time after his father’s death in Act 1, Scene 2. King Claudius asks him, “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” Hamlet answers: “Not so, my lord. I am too much i’ the sun.” This is a pun between the words “sun” and “son.” Hamlet remains despondent because he is playing the part of a son mourning his father, while suppressing disgust at his mother and uncle betraying his father.
This gets to the heart of the play. King Claudius himself is playing the part of the righteous king who takes the place of his brother who dies through natural causes when we know that King Hamlet was killed by Claudius, who coveted both his wife and throne. Ophelia, as well, is trapped between playing the dutiful and loyal daughter to her father and spy on Hamlet and being honest and faithful to Hamlet.
The same thing can be said of Gertrude who is caught between the roles of wife to her dead husband, wife to her former brother-in-law and now husband King Claudius who killed her former husband, and mother to her son who is tormented by the necessity to avenge his father. While these characters give the impression of dignity and normalcy in their performances, every now and then, the cracks become visible.
We see this in the insanity of Hamlet, which the entire court witnesses as well as that of Ophelia, which is even more obvious and tragic than that of Hamlet. We should also point out the irony of Hamlet using a troop of travelling actors to play out a scene imitating the likely manner in which his father was murdered to force Claudius to reveal his guilt. In short, we see a farce or something fake being used to reveal reality and truth.
The fall of Hamlet’s mind also reveals the same. Ophelia, commenting on the decline of Hamlet after he rejects and insults her and shows signs of madness, says:
Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!—
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. Oh, woe is me,
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! (Act 3, Scene 1)
She is describing how far Hamlet has fallen from what he initially appeared to be, namely, “Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state.” But was that ever the case? Even the mismatch of organs and instruments for soldier (tongue where it should be sword) and scholar (sword where it should be tongue) suggests that Hamlet may have never been the ideal for at least two of these roles.
Hamlet as a scholar, we can accept. Hamlet as a model for a courtier or soldier, rather unlikely. He is too melancholy and lives too much within himself to participate in the vain and artificial politics of courtly life. Throughout the entire play, he is disgusted by the charade of pretense everyone at the court is putting on.
He knows how to fight, at least tactically. We see that in the last fight with Laertes. However, he lacks the mind of a soldier in that he refuses to take action when given the chance, for example the opportunity to kill Claudius while the king is praying. This goes to show that the outwardly appearance of the complete man — scholar, soldier, and courtier — that Hamlet presented may have been a farce and that he was always just a scholar and thinker who would break under the pressure of having to act or navigate the thorny politics of the Danish court.
iii. Inaction vs. action
It would be useful to compare Hamlet’s behavior with that of other characters in terms of action and inaction. We can begin by comparing him to his main antagonist, his uncle King Claudius. He may be immoral and evil, but he is certainly a man of action. He puts to mind the lines in Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming” (published in 1920):
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is an apt description of the contrast between Hamlet and Claudius. While Hamlet engages in beautiful and lengthy soliloquies contemplating suicide and the moral rot of the world, Claudius plots, watches, listens, and takes action. He plots to murder his own brother, marry the queen, and gain the Danish throne, all of which succeed. He also plots to murder Hamlet, which also succeeds, although at the cost of his own life.
We can also compare Hamlet to his foil character — Laertes. Laertes, just like Hamlet, loses his father at the hands of someone else. In this case, it was Hamlet himself who killed Laertes' father, Polonius. Laertes wastes no time in plotting and attempting to carry out his revenge. Hamlet, on the other hand, after learning that King Claudius has killed his dad, thinks, and plots, and waits, and does nothing. He only acts in the last few minutes before his death to avenge his father. The play shows that the consequences of inaction can be as deadly as the consequences of action.
2. Hamlet character analysis: The reluctant prince?
Our protagonist Hamlet is one of the more interesting character analyses in the history of literature. His internal conflict and the core of his tragedy is typically characterized as a man predisposed to inaction, who is forced or thrown into a situation where he has to act and buckles under that pressure.
In that view, Hamlet is portrayed as a scholar, who over intellectualizes his predicament, leading to paralysis. Coleridge in his “Lecture on Hamlet” (delivered in 1818) explained that position quite well, pointing out the imbalance between Hamlet’s imagination and contemplative capacity and his ability to consider the world objectively:
In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities.
There is much evidence in the text to support such an argument. For instance, when he talks to his mother about marrying Claudius, he goes into vivid detail that grosses him out instead of acknowledging that his mother would have had little choice but to marry Claudius after the sudden death of her husband. He describes it as being “In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love” (Act 3, Scene 4).
Another example that is typically used to point this out is Hamlet being presented with an opportunity to kill King Claudius as he prays and changing his mind last minute:
Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying,
And now I’ll do ’t. (He draws his sword.)
And so he goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged. That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
In short, Hamlet resolves to kill Claudius while he prays. However, he quickly reasons himself out of such resolve, arguing that if he kills King Claudius as he prays, then the king’s soul would gain heaven, which he believes Claudius isn’t good enough for. Instead, he feels it would be best to catch Claudius while in sin, such as “When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage / Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed.”
Fredson Bowers presents an alternative perspective in his article “Dramatic Structure and Criticism: Plot in Hamlet.” If we are to believe his argument, then we should see Hamlet as an unreliable narrator here. His reason for not killing King Claudius isn’t because he didn’t want the king to go to heaven, but instead, it is because he is constrained by Christian virtue and morals.
Earlier, we quoted from the soliloquy where Hamlet describes his desire to die or thaw and melt into a dew without having to commit suicide as “the Everlasting" has fixed "His cannon 'gainst self-slaughter” (Act 1, Scene 2). This suggests that Hamlet refrained from killing Claudius, as it would be a cowardly and un-Christian act to kill a man as he prays. And not because he ostensibly was upset at the idea of Claudius ascending to heaven. Surely, he knows that if he were to commit such an act, he would descend into hell as surely as Claudius would gain heaven.
According to the Shakespearean, and by extension, Elizabethan and Western European Christian view of the world at the time, it is God’s place to take vengeance, and even if earthly justice has to occur on earth, then it should happen through courts of justice ordained by God. Killing a man as he prays to God for penance would have made an absolute mockery of this principle.
That said, according to Bowers, Hamlet’s fatal flaw was not in his reluctance or overthinking but in his plunder in killing an innocent man, namely Polonius, who was spying on behalf of Claudius and whom Hamlet mistakes for the king in Act 3, Scene 4. This makes Claudius’ son, Laertes, Hamlet's enemy, a fact which King Claudius uses to his advantage by hatching a plot with Laertes to poison Hamlet.
So, in Hamlet, far from a man who suffers from analysis paralysis because of his natural disposition to inaction, we have a man who is brought down because he lapses once in walking the narrow path of moral uprightness because of the mental stress and strain of holding back his desire for vengeance in the name of his own deep-seated sense of moral virtue and integrity.
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3. Symbolism in Hamlet
The symbolism and motifs in Hamlet revolve around the archetype of the sacrificial hero. It would make a lot of sense to conceive of Hamlet using the archetypal approach to analysis. I have partially done this with an article, which can be seen here: An Analysis of Hamlet | An Archetypal Approach.
As Shakespeare writes in the play, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and this rot lies at the very heart of the royal court, of which Hamlet is a part, albeit politically estranged from. Hamlet is not responsible for the rot. Instead, he is both a symptom and a victim of it. Rot is a constant motif in Hamlet. We have seen how the word "rank" is used by Hamlet and the ghost of his father to describe the political situation in Denmark. The mind of Hamlet also suffers from this rot, leading to madness or semi-madness. Of course, the rot in question is the murder of King Hamlet by his own brother, King Claudius.
In the Medieval and pre-modern European conception of the world, the king was appointed by God to maintain order on earth. This means that the health of the country was closely related to the health of the king, both physically and spiritually. If the king is morally sick, then the land suffers.
This sickness can be seen in the disturbance of the boundary between the living and the dead when we hear reports of and see the ghost of King Hamlet appearing to the sentries of the castle battlements. The fact that men standing guard are the first to see him suggests that the internal rot in the court is even more dangerous to the body politic than foreign invaders such as Fortinbras, who eventually takes over the country after every member of the Danish royal family is killed.
We can even cite, as evidence of upsetting of the natural order, the cemetery or churchyard scene, which includes clowns digging up a grave while singing merrily and making bawdy jokes in preparation for Ophelia's burial. It's a world gone mad. Even Hamlet says, “Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?” As they dig, the earth keeps spewing out decomposed skull after decomposed skull. This perverse cycle of rot and death includes the entire gamut of the Danish royal court: Yorick, the lowly clown who served King Hamlet; King Hamlet himself; Ophelia, the noblewoman; and eventually Claudius, the current king; Queen Gertrude, and Prince Hamlet.
Prince Hamlet is the chosen one who must heal the land and restore the natural order. However, he is not Macduff, who gets revenge for the slaughter of his wife and child by Macbeth by decapitating the villain. Instead, Hamlet has to rise against his own family member, his very self. The rot in the body politic is so deep that the entire royal family has to be amputated, including Hamlet himself.
References
Bowers, F. (1964). Dramatic Structure and Criticism: Plot in Hamlet. Shakespeare Quarterly, 15(2), 207-218. https://doi.org/10.2307/2867892
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, September 22). Hamlet | Themes, Character Analysis, & Symbolism. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/hamlet |