I began working on the third play in my Covenantal Shakespeare e-course this week: Hamlet. The play is primarily about ethics, namely the law regarding revenge.
Here’s the plot.
- The ghost of Hamlet’s father charges Prince Hamlet to revenge his murder by killing Claudius, Hamlet Sr.’s brother and the current king.
- Hamlet feigns madness causing various stand-ins for Claudius–including Polonius, Ophelia, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–to try and find out what’s wrong with the prince.
- Hamlet confirms Claudius’s guilt but errantly kills Polonius instead of the king.
- While Hamlet goes into exile in England, Polonius’s son Laertes returns to avenge his father’s death. In contrast, his sister Ophelia goes mad and commits suicide.
- Under Claudius’s instruction, Laertes fences against Hamlet with a poison dagger. By the match’s end, the following people are dead: Laertes (poison), Hamlet (poison), Claudius (sword), and Gertrude (poison). Fortinbras, the son of an old opponent of Hamlet Sr., takes over Denmark.
Hamlet says in his first soliloquy that he wishes “the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!” The Everlasting has also fixed his canon against revenge, the preoccupation of three different sons in the play: Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Vengeance pays in death and more death.
Experiments in Criticism 