Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Study of Societal Collapse

In every society throughout history, there has been a common fear of the disastrous collapse of the world around them, resulting. This “fear” has resulted in numerous stories and religious beliefs surrounding the apocalyptic fall of man’s corrupted society, including the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian Bible. William Shakespeare’s tragedies, especially the tragedies written in the early 1600s, all display this collapse of authority in one way or another. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the classic example of this prevalent break down of society. Prince Hamlet learns that his uncle-father King Claudius murdered his father and, thus, assumed the throne and gained his mother’s hand in marriage. The revelation is then followed by even more treacherous acts of hatred, vengeance, conspiracy, and murder,

According to New Historicism, there is a connection between the trend of rising and falling empires to the Catholic and the Protestant belief in the Second Coming of Christ. Also, New Historicism has asserted that Shakespeare had a degree of association with the Catholic resistance, leading to the conclusion that there is importance to the Catholicism references in Hamlet. Nancy Armstrong quotes a famous New Historicist, Michel Foucault, in “Some Call It Fiction: On Politics Of Domesticity”, who asserted that "repressive hypothesis" is the assumption that culture either "suppresses" or "imposes itself" (Armstrong 570). As proof, Stephen Greenblatt brings up the point that, in early-1600 England, the Church of England had dismissed the Roman Catholic concept of Purgatory and it 's practiced as false and unnecessary (Greenblatt 235). So the play in itself was controversial, grabbing the attention of Protestants and Catholics across Great