The Psychology Of Revenge In William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Many times, a person will probably find himself in a situation where he has to perform some action which he truly does not want to do or finds very difficult. For instance, say a person was faced with the task of having to take the life of another person when the former is not a violent person by nature. Surely, the psychology of someone like that would be quite interesting to study. Well, one can see an example of such a scenario in William Shakespeare 's Hamlet, in which Hamlet carries out the revenge for his father 's murder in an interesting, yet humanly believable way. In the story of Hamlet, the young titular prince of Denmark is in a bad mood, as not only has his father, King Hamlet, is dead, but his uncle, King Claudius, has now taken his mother, Gertrude as wife, much to Hamlet 's dismay (I, 2, 129-168). However, Hamlet 's life takes a turn for the disturbing, as his father 's ghost starts appearing, clearly with some form of message for the prince (I, 2, 189-217). Finally, Hamlet manages to speak with the ghost one night, and learns a startling truth: that Claudius is responsible for the death of King Hamlet, and that the prince now needs to seek revenge (I, 4, 25). Though Hamlet is undoubtedly deeply disturbed by these words, he makes it his personal mission to …show more content…
To find out whether Claudius was truly guilty, Hamlet had the idea of staging a play in which a murder identical to the one carried out by Claudius would be shown, and Claudius reaction would tell the true story of what happened when King Hamlet died. Supposedly, if a perpetrator of a crime realizes that people know what he has done, his reaction will give him away, and he will easily be found guilty. Before the play, Hamlet also puts on a dumb-show, and this can