These things are especially on Hamlet’s mind because of the task he must carry out. His other most famous line in the play is probably ‘ Alas, poor Yorick’: words delivered over the skull of the dead jester, beginning one of the most famous meditations on mortality in the English language. Hamlet’s most famous speech in the play, his ‘ To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, is one of the great meditations on what happens when we die. Was Hamlet deemed not fit to be king? Did Claudius insist? When King Hamlet died, why did Hamlet not become king? Why is Claudius on the throne at all? The play does not broach this issue, but it is one of many intriguing puzzles about it. After all, King Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras, prompting Prince Fortinbras, his son, to invade Denmark in revenge and we know (because he tells Hamlet this himself) that he was known to spend the afternoons asleep in his orchard (where he was murdered by Claudius) rather than attending to the affairs of state.Īnother question which we are invited to ponder is this: when a king dies, in most countries the crown automatically passes to his oldest son, if he has one. Of course, this wouldn’t make it right for him to have ousted his brother in order to seize the throne for himself, but it may nevertheless be the case that Denmark is better off with Claudius on the throne than King Hamlet. One of the uncomfortable truths about Hamlet is that Claudius may well be a better king than his predecessor. But as Hamlet will later confide in a soliloquy, he struggles to act and spends more time contemplating his revenge than he does actually carrying it out: Hamlet is told by the Ghost to ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.’ The Ghost identifies the King’s own brother, Claudius, as the murderer, and Hamlet Junior swears to avenge his father’s death. Only two words of dialogue of this Ur- Hamlet have survived: ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ Kyd’s other plays included The Spanish Tragedy, which, as we’ve discussed here, helped to make this kind of play popular on the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare’s own dramatising of the Hamlet story was itself a reworking of an earlier (sadly lost) play, probably by Thomas Kyd, which had been performed around a decade before. Indeed, Hamlet is not just a tragedy but an example of a ‘revenge tragedy’, a subgenre of play which was already established when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Revenge is obviously an important theme in Hamlet, if not the most important theme of all.

Hamlet theme