Laertes And Hamlet Comparison

Comparison between Laertes and Hamlet:

The Reaction to their Father’s Deaths

The comparison between Laertes and Hamlet is quite extensive and while both are unquestionably similar they are also complete opposites in the way they handle their father’s deaths. When both are faced with the reality that their fathers have been murdered each forms his own unique path of revenge, which eventually leads to both men’s fated death.

At the beginning of the play Hamlet is melancholy and still mourning the death of his father who died two months past. He is distraught and confused over his mother’s “o’erhasty marriage” (Act 2, Scene 2, Line 1145) to his uncle and why she did not mourn longer herself if she loved her first husband as she should. Hamlet considered his mother’s actions an act of incest to lie with his father’s own brother Claudius and knew that nothing good would come of their union.

When Hamlet is lured to the ghost suspected to be the late King Hamlet by Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo, Hamlet is wary of his existence. He is unsure if the apparition is a “spirit of health or goblin damn’d” (Act 1, Scene 4, Line 669) and begs

After thoroughly examining his uncle’s guilt during the play Hamlet is convinced that the man who married his mother, his own uncle and newly appointed step-father, has murdered his father and finally Hamlets thirst for revenge spurs him to accidentally kill Laertes father Polonius. Even though he let Claudius live while thinking that he prayed for redemption. Hamlet refused to kill him because then he “goes to heaven” (Act 3, Scene 3, Line 2357) if he should die while praying or in any other way that can give him a kind of redemption and decides to do it while he is “drunk asleep, or in his rage, or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed” (Act 3, Scene 3, Line