Looking at Literary Motifs In Hamlet

TL;DR: Literary motifs in Hamlet include 1. Rot and decay, 2. Ears and hearing, and 3. Actors and theater.

One of the major literary motifs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is directly related to what is perhaps among the most famous quotes from the play: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Act 1, Scene 4). The quote speaks for itself: Rot and decay feature prominently as a motif in the play.

This motif of rot is linked to the moral decay and corruption of the Danish royal house. King Claudius has murdered the former king — his own brother — and has committed the additional crime of incest by bedding the former king’s wife. The motif of rot is also related to the second motif of ears and hearing. 

There is suspicion throughout the land that there was foul play involved in the death of the king. This is what is meant by the phrase about something in Denmark being rotten. Such a phrase suggests that there are rumors and allegations whispered through the ears of citizens that perhaps King Claudius has something to do with the killing of the former king. 

More than that, King Claudius runs a police state, which means that his spies and agents are all about, and citizens have to be wary about what they say or what the agents of the king may hear them say. Lastly, Hamlet is torn in what role he has to play as a son, a nephew, and prince. How does he avenge his father when it means moving against his own uncle or even his mom, who has allied herself to King Claudius and even marries him. 

This brings up the question of our third motif — actors and theater. Hamlet has to play the role of loyal citizen and subject to King Claudius while harboring thoughts of killing him to avenge his father. He is also conflicted between fulfilling his role as a son who has to avenge his father and how he should behave toward his own mother, whom he sees as allied with his rival or antagonist, King Claudius. 

Actors and theater are also related to the theme of appearances versus reality. Several characters in Hamlet have to pretend that they are not what they are to hide their ulterior motives. The most obvious example being King Claudius, who pretends to be a righteous king when he ascended the throne through regicide and fratricide. 

An illustration of Hamlet and his mother.

How the themes in Hamlet relate to its motifs

Hamlet is a story about a reluctant prince who hesitates to avenge his father after suspecting that he was killed by his own uncle or his father’s brother, Claudius, who is now the current king. The major themes in Hamlet include moral corruption, revenge, appearance versus reality, and action versus inaction.

Hamlet after being visited by the ghost of his father who informs him that he was poisoned through the ear. He resolves to avenge his father. However, he overthinks it to the point of paralysis and takes no action. His overthink even extends toward even his own mother. He grosses himself out thinking about his mother betraying his father and sharing the same bed with his father’s own brother. He does this despite being warned by the ghost to not blame his mother. 

A good example of Hamlet’s indecisiveness is when he stumbles across the opportunity to kill King Claudius as the king prays. Hamlet reasons himself out of doing so because Claudius being killed while praying would mean that he would go to heaven as he has cleansed his soul through prayer. As far as Hamlet is concerned, King Claudius is not worthy of heaven.

Instead of killing him then and there, he decides to wait for when the king is committing some type of sin. In his own words: 

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed,

At game, a-swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in ’t—

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damned and black

As hell, whereto it goes. (Act 3, Scene 3)

This opportunity never presents itself. Hamlet comes up with a convoluted plan to gain more evidence and observe the behavior of King Claudius and his agents at court. This plan involves playing mad and putting on a play where he hires actors to carry out a play depicting how his father died in front of Claudius and his court. These plots lead to Hamlet alienating everyone around him and becoming isolated. 

The motif of rot and decay is directly related to the moral corruption that the royal court suffers from. The former king was literally poisoned through the ear by his own brother King Claudius. Hamlet himself is poisoned by the ghost of his father or at least the ghost that bears his father’s face with the news that it was his uncle who killed the former king. 

This is a metaphorical poisoning. Hamlet’s mind and soul are corrupted with this information. It drives him to overthinking, suicidal ideation, and madness. Lastly, Hamlet’s indecisiveness is not simply explained away  by his tendency toward inaction. He is not simply the protagonist who becomes his own antagonist through his inability to decide and take action. 

Hamlet is faced with a genuine dilemma. He is caught between a myriad of contradictory roles: 

1. the son who has the moral obligation to avenge his father by killing his own uncle; 

2. the son who has to be loyal and gentle to a mother who is married to the man who killed his father; 

3. the scholar or student who could avoid politics and focus on his studies and become a “responsible” and harmless private citizen; and 

4. the prince with a moral obligation to rid the land or body politic of the rot of moral corruption that it is infected with. 

Hamlet also has to pretend. In fact, the whole court of King Claudius is paying a game of pretend. Claudius pretends to be the righteous king worried about Hamlet’s health while he plots to kill the prince. Hamlet pretends not to know that Claudius kills his father while plotting to take revenge. He also pretends to be in love with Ophelia when he has no interest in marrying her. These conflicting roles and games of false pretense tie into the motifs of actors and theater and appearance versus reality.  

1. Rot and decay as motifs in Hamlet

The rot in Denmark mentioned in the first act of the play relates to moral corruption, and this moral corruption lies at the heart of the royal court. It is similar to the motif of the unnatural that occurs throughout Macbeth, which also stems from Macbeth killing the Scottish king for the throne. In a previous article, I argued that Hamlet was the sacrificial hero, who has to be sacrificed in the name of healing the country from the rot that it suffers from.

You can check it out here: An Analysis of Hamlet | An Archetypal Approach. There are various aspects to the rot. Hamlet declares the rot that the world suffers from in the beginning of the play with the following words: 

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on ’t, ah fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this. (Act 1, Scene 2)

He is driven to suicidal ideation because of it. He wishes that his “too sullied flesh would melt” and refrains from killing himself because “the Everlasting” has fixed “his cannon against self-slaughter.” Hamlet has been accused of suffering from the Oedipal complex. This is partly due to how strongly he is affected by his mother getting married to King Claudius, immediately after his father, her ex-husband has died: 

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!

He is overthinking his mother sleeping with his uncle, and it grosses him out. In Act 3, Scene 3, he claims in a soliloquy about the incest: “In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and

making love / Over the nasty sty.” This aspect of rot and decay can be said to be personal to Hamlet. It emanates from his mind and overthinking his mother’s supposed infidelity. However, there is another public aspect of the rot. 

The former king was killed by his own brother. This is a crime of fratricide and regicide, especially heinous crimes in a medieval Christian context, which is the setting of the play. Even the ghost of the king claims “the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forgèd process of my death / Rankly abused” (Act 1, Scene 5). By referencing the “whole ear of Denmark,” the king is making a metaphor between him and the land and an infected grain of corn affecting the whole ear of corn.  

In short, the wrong done against the king has infected the whole land with moral corruption. Now, the land has to be purged for this rot to be removed. The massacre that occurs at the end of the play sees Hamlet, his mother Gertrude, and King Claudius all dead. In short, the whole royal family dies as a requirement for the body politic to be cleansed. 

2. Ears and hearing 

The rot in Hamlet is closely associated with poison and hearing. The king is poisoned through the ear. His ghost after asking Hamlet to “List [or listen], list, O, list! / If thou didst ever thy dear father love” says the following to Hamlet: 

                              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. But know, thou noble youth,

The serpent that did sting thy father’s life

Now wears his crown.

The ghost, in describing the method of poisoning, uses vivid imagery when he says: 

Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always of the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilment

Therefore, we can say that the reference to the “ear of Denmark” was being used as a pun by Shakespeare. Ear of corn is linked to the human ear through which he was poisoned. This is an apt metaphor. The power of words to poison through the ear is a major motif that defines the play. 

As mentioned earlier, we can say that Hamlet’s mind was unwittingly poisoned by the ghost of his father. The knowledge of his father’s death drives him almost crazy, and he comes up with confused plots that alienate and even kill those around him. A good example of one of his victims is Ophelia. He insults her with rude words that question her virtue, which makes her depressed and even insane, leading eventually to her suicide. 

Ophelia also dies partly because of grief over her father, Polonius, who was killed by Hamlet. And how does Polonius die? He dies after Hamlet mistakes him for Claudius as Polonius spies on Hamlet's conversation with his mother under orders from Claudius. This emphasizes that King Claudius is running a police state where one’s own words could condemn them to death if what the kings and his agents hear is deemed a threat to the king’s power. 

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3. Actors and theater and appearance versus reality 

Because King Claudius runs a police state, nothing is as it seems. Everyone has to act as something they are not. King Claudius pretends to be the righteous king who rules justly wisely when he murdered his own brother to gain the throne. Polonius pretends to be civil to Hamlet when he has every intention of spying on him to gather intelligence for the king. 

Even Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, acts as the loyal wife to her former husband only to quickly marry the man who murders him. And of course, there is Hamlet himself, who has to pretend to be a loyal citizen when he harbors the desire for revenge against King Claudius. As a result, appearance doesn’t match reality in the play.

Ironically, often in Hamlet, it is the non-real or fake that end up being more convincing than the real. We see this with the appearance of the ghost in the first act of the play. It is the ghost of Hamlet’s father that reveals the truth to Hamlet while the corporeal humans around him try to lie to him or keep the truth away from him.  

This is mirrored in Hamlet’s plot to reveal the guilt of King Claudius in murdering his father. He hires actors to put on a farce that resembles the manner of his father’s death as told by the ghost in front of King Claudius and his court. The play deeply disturbs King Claudius, who after viewing it, now fully suspects that Hamlet is aware that he killed the former king. Here is Hamlet advising the hired actors how to pull it off: 

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to

you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as

many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier

spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with

your hand thus, but use all gently, for in the very

torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of

passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that

may give it smoothness.

Shakespeare was likely being tongue-in-cheek and using the opportunity to criticize actors in his era. However, it would be fitting for Hamlet to be so astute in judging an actor’s performance. He should know. Hamlet, throughout the play, is caught between acting the role of the son and prince who has to avenge his father and the stoic who should “suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” in the mind (Act 3, Scene 1). 

One could even go so far as to say that, in the play, King Claudius is less of an opponent to the reluctant prince than Hamlet is to himself. In short, Hamlet is so divided and conflicted in his roles as the son and prince that he becomes the protagonist who is his own antagonist.

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, August 08). Looking at Literary Motifs In Hamlet. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/literary-motifs-in-hamlet