Hamlet Actions Speak Louder Than Words Essay

Do actions speak louder than words? While a cliché, this is the very question explored through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. At its very core, a play seeks to find a balance between pure speech and physical acting. Hamlet follows a young prince grappling with the idea of avenging his father’s death. However, the play more closely follows Hamlet’s quest for truth. A ghost, in the same form as Hamlet’s dead father, leads Hamlet to believe, his uncle, Claudius murdered his father and married his mother, Gertrude, for power. He must confirm this theory before he can go through with his revenge plot. Since the play follows Hamlet’s perspective, as Hamlet seeks for truth, the audience must seek truth. The play brings about the question of whether speech or action best reveals objective truth. The use of speech as a weapon, an object of destruction, versus action as a method of revealing

Hamlet tries to inform his mother of Claudius’s scheme, and how she disgraced the memory of his father. Instead of listening, she retorts, “O speak to me no more/ these words like daggers enter in my ears.” Rather than accepting the truth, she attacks Hamlet’s speech. She focuses on speech when she says, “speak to me no more,” thus plainly rejecting speech. The “O” suggests her angered mood, one that would be unwilling to accept truth contrary to her beliefs. The simile “words like daggers enter in my ears” demonstrate the destructiveness of speech. The simile comparing Hamlet’s spoken words to the violence of daggers establishes speech as a destructive medium, rather than a constructive or revealing one. Hamlet’s speech acts as a dagger that destroys the possibility of Gertrude seeing the truth. Speech as a weapon is seen in juxtaposition with the truth of action in the moment when Claudius murders his