Theme Of Grief In Hamlet

People mature and change over their lifetimes. They have their own views of the world that shift as their minds adapt to new stimuli. A person’s character can be seen through the way his or her mind changes when suffering misfortunes and how he or she resolves it. William Shakespeare portrays this concept in his play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Hamlet undergoes great pain after the death of his father and the hasty remarriage of his mother to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet suffers several misfortunes while in grief and is left to find meaning in his life. But when ghost of Hamlet’s father reveals the nature of his death, Hamlet finds a new purpose: avenging the late King. Over the course of the play, several aspects of Hamlet’s character

George Brandes, from his essay “The Psychology of Hamlet,” asserts that Hamlet’s “whole inner man is in wild revolt” (Brandes 170). His mind is struggling to accept all the sudden changes to his world and he suffers as a result. Unable to deal with the causes of his suffering, Hamlet traps himself in his grief without a solution. He is a “tormented soul struggling to survive in a world that has lost its meaning for him, and he scarcely cares if he survives or not” (Lidz 133). Inevitably he finds himself constantly lamenting over his misfortunes. In his first soliloquy Hamlet uses diction conveying decay, such as the opening line “this too, too sullied flesh would melt,” to express how corrosive Gertrude’s hasty marriage to Claudius is to his mentality and to the state of Denmark (Ham. 1.1.129). Without a real cure for this decay, Hamlet is left in a state of despair and hopelessness. Once the ghost appears and gives him an objective to remedy his pain, Hamlet still feels hopeless and finds himself “too weak or rather wholly unsuited for his task” (Brandes 117). When Hamlet compares himself to the player, he calls his lack of an action “a damn’d defeat” and asks himself, “Am I a coward?” (Ham. 2.2.551). Both the alliteration, sounding as if he is gritting his teeth, and the rhetorical question convey Hamlet’s frustration and despair. He sees his need to avenge his father as more pressing than the player’s motives for acting yet unlike the player, Hamlet still cannot complete his task. Because he has not exacted revenge for his father, Hamlet is discouraged in his abilities. Yet Hamlet is not “devoid” of the “power of action” (Brandes 117) as he believes himself to be. By the end of this monologue, Hamlet devises a plan to reveal Claudius’ guilt for the murder. From