Hamlet Reflection Essay

Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” is a subtle reflection on the political and religious atmosphere of the early 1600’s and late 1500’s, that was dominated with conversation of the successor to the throne of England, and their religious denomination. Hamlet was written with the intention of mimicking the political world and all its machinations from treachery, duties to family, religion and country. Hamlet, begins with armies being mobilized to the threat of an invasion from Norway, helmed by Fortinbras, like the rumors that the eventual successor James VI would need to take the throne by force. Soon after, this we have Hamlet and his father’s ghost, they converse on the details of his untimely death at the hands of his brother Claudius. In this

Hamlet isn’t a play that ends the conversation of death, but to contemplate it with a greater audience. Hamlet is so multi-faceted that it would be selling it short to call it a specific kind of play that only revolves around the tragedies that unfold throughout the play. The conversations of death go far beyond that of the deaths of individual’s such as King Hamlet, in his death we the audience gets to explore the broader conversation that Shakespeare starts in relation to death. He breaks the barriers that confined the conversation of death to the Church and gives reason to the general populace to explore death in an introspective way. In Hamlet’s hope to find reason in his world full of greed and treachery, we find ourselves on a path to understand, but also to contemplate alongside Hamlet what truly is death and how it does not discriminate. In reading Hamlet with respect to the historical backdrop of Shakespeare’s life we can without stretching the interpretations of the text to our advantages can say Shakespeare drew inspiration by the inherently deceitful practices that the church and state participated in during the renaissance. Shakespeare’s story isn’t setting out to teach a life lesson, or a universal truth, but rather through the addition of his voice on the matters of death and kingship, he subverts the monopoly that the church and those who have royal blood hold on that