The Tragedy of Hamlet

The Tragedy Of Hamlet

GREG CLARKE

Hardship, unfortunately, is a part of everyone's life. It is unavoidable, and in
Hamlets case he found out that bad luck comes in colossal amounts at a time.
Most people see bad luck as getting splashed by a car in the rain, or finding out that the idiots at McDonald's forgot the fries in your order. But Hamlet got a quadruple dose of bad luck. First his father was unjustly murdered. Then the ghost of his father comes back and tells him that he is to avenge his death. To top it all off Hamlet finds out that his mother has just married his late fathers assassin. When Hamlet tries to expose the new king of killing his father, he is exiled to England because the other people thought that he was mentally ill. When Hamlet returns to Denmark he finds his secret love Ophelia being buried. Hamlet feels that he is living in a world of horror, and by the end of this miserably disheartening play, his fathers death is avenged, but at quite a cost. Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Laertes, and Polonius are all dead. I would have to say that all of the adversity in hamlets life had to have a great affect on his spirit. One can not go through life, and Hamlet had a short one, lose all of the people that you love and expect it to not dishearten you a little. And in Hamlets case it pretty much drove him insane.

The human spirit is a very fragile thing, and something as tragic as the death of a loved one can damage it greatly. As in Hamlets case, when his father was murdered, this started a sort of devastating chain reaction of the psyche. He started to "go nuts", and it showed. The people around him started noticing this drastic change in his personality. But his insanity was most evident during the play which he set up and called "The Mousetrap". Hamlet sat fidgeting in his chair, staring at Caudius with accusing eyes. When his little trap had run it's course, Claudius had just about been broken. Hamlet watched as Claudius sweat and chewed his nails. When Claudius could take no more he stumbled out of the room and into the streets where hamlet proceeded to follow, dancing and screaming like a mad man. Hamlet could take no more of this torturous life, watching his mother hang off of the man who murdered his father. His spirit had been irreversibly damaged, and insanity was the price.

This play is a classic example of one of the greatest, if not the greatest tragedies of all time. But even though most of the main characters are dead by the conclusion of the play, including Hamlet, this is also a sort of relief.
Most of the characters had severely burdensome lives, and also probably had damaged human spirits. So death is also a release, a release of the spirit. I'm sure that Hamlet is much happier to be with his father again, and the others have had the heavy burden of guilt lifted from their chests when they died. All in all it is very sad that they had to die, instead of just working it out like normal people, but at least their spirits have been freed.