How Does Hamlet Deal With the Revengers RôLe?

Authors Avatar

How does Hamlet deal with the revengers rôle?

        Revenge is defined as “retaliation for an offence or injury”; Hamlet has two main reasons for needing revenge, political and moral.  Politically he has to kill Claudius for the offence of denying Hamlet, the heir to the Danish kingdom, his usurped crown.  He also has a moral reason, as the “son of a dear father murdered”(II. ii. 581); he has a duty to extract revenge for the injury; and filially to protect his mother by ridding her of an incestuous and immoral marriage to a murderer.  He has no doubt even to himself that he does have this dutiful role to perform,” I know my course” (II.ii.596).

        To seek this revenge he would have to kill Claudius and his mother, for they are both guilty of having impure souls.  But one of the very first internal conflicts Hamlet has is when the Ghost tells him

“nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught.  Leave her to heaven…”  (I. iv. 85).

This leaves him in great turmoil, as he can justify to himself the killing of Claudius, but not letting his mother live.  He is so overcome with a sense of purity and morality, especially with concern to women, it does not seem right to him that something so tainted should be allowed to carry on in the world.  He wants his perfect revenge, one that would satisfy his meticulously accomplished conscience, but he can not carry it out, so instead he declines it altogether, or at least puts it off in stages, until he can prove it to himself and can put it off no longer.  He is willing to taint his own soul and so go to hell and enter a damnation possibly even worse than that in which the Ghost resides, which he tells Hamlet just to know about would,

“harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,

thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,

and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine”  (I. iv. 16).

Join now!

Yet he is willing to suffer all this for the sake of revenge in killing Claudius, to avenge his father, so to save his mother, to “leave her to heaven” (I. v. 86), when even he is not allowed this blessing.  What he is giving up to be the dutiful son and revenge his fathers murder in comparison to what Gertrude is giving up leaves his worse off than her, even though she has been an adulterous wife.  Therefore her being allowed to live on in sin is as wrong not only on her part, but also on Hamlets for ...

This is a preview of the whole essay