He is always on top of everyone's motives, everyone's doings and goings. It's worth noting that there is one extremely capable politician in the play - Hamlet himself. He has somehow done away with much the better ruler, the Hyperion to his satyr (as Hamlet puts it). This is partly why his one successful political move, the murder of his brother, is so ironic and foul. He is not a natural king, to be sure he is more interested in drinking and sex than in war, reconnaissance, or political plotting.
This political ineptitude goes a long way toward revealing how weak Denmark has become under Claudius' rule.
#Hamlet characters full#
He naively invites Fortinbras to march across his country with a full army he stupidly enlists Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his chief spies his attempt to poison Hamlet ends in total tragedy. First, he instructs Reynaldo in the most incredibly convoluted espionage methods second, he hatches and pursues his misguided theory that Hamlet is mad because his heart has been broken by Ophelia.Ĭlaudius, too, is quite the inept Machiavellian. This is never clearer than in his appearances in Act Two. He is the parody of a politician, convinced that the truth can only be known through the most roundabout and sneaking ways. Polonius, especially, spends nearly every waking moment (it seems) spying on this or that person, checking up on his son in Paris, instructing Ophelia in every detail of her behavior, hiding behind tapestries to eavesdrop. The murder of Old Hamlet, of course, is the primary instance of such sinister workings, but it is hardly the only one. IntrigueĮlsinore is full of political intrigue. As with most things, we can expect to find very difficult and stimulating questions in Hamlet, but very few satisfying answers. Not that the play resolves anything, or settles any of our species-old doubts and anxieties. Mortality is the shadow that darkens every scene of the play. Hamlet is unprecedented for the depth and variety of its meditations on death. How can Yorick's skull be Yorick's skull? Does a piece of dead earth, a skull, really have a connection to a person, a personality? In the graveyard scene, especially, we can see Hamlet's fascination with dead bodies. This strange intellectual being, which Hamlet values so highly and possesses so mightily, is but tenuously connected to an unruly and decomposing machine. We are, in the end, so much meat and bone. One of the aspects of death which Hamlet finds most fascinating is its bodily facticity. He is in the strange position of both wishing for death and fearing it intensely, and this double pressure gives the play much of its drama. Bradley has pointed out, in his very first long speech of the play, "Oh that this too solid flesh," Hamlet seems on the verge of total despair, kept from suicide by the simple fact of spiritual awe. The play is really death-obsessed, as is Hamlet himself. The plot is set in motion by the murder of Hamlet's father, and the play opens with the apparition of the Ghost." And so on and so forth. Hamlet arranges the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Polonius and Ophelia die during the action, and Ophelia is buried before our eyes. Wilson Knight, for instance, writes at length about death in the play: "Death is over the whole play. Death has been considered the primary theme of Hamlet by many eminent critics through the years.