Hamlet: Understanding and Duty

Hamlet: Understanding & Duty

In an effort to determine how Hamlet seeks to understand his world and his duty, we must closely examine several lines from this Shakespearean masterpiece. While the mystery and significance of Hamlet lies in part from an inability to make definitive statements about Hamlet's motives and understanding, we can get a deeper look into his character from such a dialogue interpretation.

We might say that one of the ways in which Hamlet tries to understand the world is through academic endeavors. After all, he is a scholar who has recently returned from his studies. However, upon returning from college, Hamlet finds Denmark to be in a rotten state. His father is dead, and his mother has married her brother-in-law before the funeral meats are cleared. Thus, Hamlet begins to understand the world through a depression regarding his mother's seemingly insensitive actions "How weary, flat, unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world" (Shakespeare I.ii.1074).

Hamlet's depression is assuaged by the vision of his father's ghost. After explaining he was murdered, Hamlet's depression is replaced by pain, anger, and the contemplation of the metaphysical. When Horatio tells him the vision of his fath...

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...l desires second. He explains this fully to Horatio "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all" (Shakespeare V.ii.1110). Thus, Hamlet tries to understand his world through ration, logic, academic study, contemplation, and metaphysical speculations. In the end, he appears to believe that whatever one's duties are, those are what one must accept to fulfill one's purpose - despite the limited ability to control destiny or the outcomes of accepting such duties.

WORKS CITED

Shakespeare, W. The Complete Works. New York: Gramercy, 1975.