"O Villain, Villain, Smiling Damned Villain!" Hamlet's opinion of his uncle is quite clear, but for a large part of the play it is not a view, which is shared by an audience. To what extent do you agree with the above

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        English Coursework         Amit Patel UVD

“O Villain, Villain, Smiling Damned Villain!”

Hamlet’s opinion of his uncle is quite clear, but for a large part of the play it is not a view, which is shared by an audience.

To what extent do you agree with the above?

Hamlet’s opinion of his uncle is very clear: he hates Claudius as Hamlet thinks that he had murdered his father.  But everything becomes equally clear at the end of the play when it is very evident that Claudius has killed his father.  So the audience will naturally dislike Claudius as well.   An Elizabethan audience, who would have actually watched the play, would have seen Claudius as a bad character from the start of the play.  Mainly because he married his recently dead brother’s wife; this marriage would have been seen as “incestuous”.  But to the other type of audience, which would be that of today, the marriage would not have been seen as incestuous.

 Hamlet was enlightened by the presence of his father as a ghost; he was told that the new King, Claudius, his own brother, had murdered him.  Hamlet was not in a clear state of mind and was very angry after this because he found out that his father was murdered and did not die a natural death as he had believed.  He is irrational and emotional and he wants to pin the blame on Claudius so he calls him a “smiling damned villain”.  What Hamlet means when he says “Smiling Damned Villain” is that Claudius is jovial, deceptive but must be damned to hell and that he is without redemption.  His anger is greatened when the ghost tells him that he is in purgatory and hence the Catholic faith suggests that he has to be remembered if he is to go to heaven.  Hamlet blames Claudius that his mother has forgotten about his father and their marriage.  

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Hamlet’s anger towards the king is shown in his first words to the king “a little more than kin and less than kind”.  But he is very unwise to completely trust the ghost, as it might be the devil, trying to cause trouble.   But if it was the devil it is not succeeding in causing trouble.  There is no evidence for the audience to see that Claudius had killed Old Hamlet at this part of the play.  And as Hamlet hated Claudius even before he found out that he had killed his father, did he want to think that ...

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