Shakespeare Hamlet Research Paper

Shakespeare is known throughout literature for his plays and poems, most consisting of tragedy, death, love, or all three. In his pieces, Hamlet especially, a major theme at work is death, how it plays into a characters actions, personalities, etc. This paper will explore how death and several other things play into Hamlet and may be connected to the aforementioned work of Shakespeare.
During the Shakespearian time period, death was a common occurrence. Lives were short due to the constant spread of disease1, and it wasn’t that death was welcomed but so much as it wasn’t dreaded as it is today. Disease was a major downside to the reality of the world in his time period, as was it tragic. This, disease, plays into Shakespeare’s writing, as he portrays the ignorance of the public concerning medical issues in the play Hamlet. This is done by his ability to allow Old Hamlet, the main character’s deceased father, to be assumed bitten by a serpent, when in reality he was poisoned and murdered.2 The public knew very little of what was actually happening, and their unknowingness causes misdiagnosis all the time. This is apparent in the play, as the death of a king is written off as a natural occurrence in an orchard. No one thought anymore or any less of …show more content…
Shakespeare allows Hamlet to touch on certain important outlooks on morality. One of which, as stated before, is about how in the end we are all the same. A second outlook that Hamlet ponders is whether or not that life after death diminishes based off the sin one has committed, as he has pondered this several times within the play in reference to his father's restless soul and what would happen if he killed Claudius, the present king, his uncle, and the murderer of his father4. This, in fact, is a reason for the delay of his death- the fact that Hamlet wished he would go to a purgatory rather than