Finding the Voice of Reason in Hamlet

Whenever a person in power passes away, all parties associated with that leader go through a period of disarray.  The process of deciding who will next lead the entity creates difficulty, as sometimes the decision contains many disagreements between those involved.   This, along with the grief associated with death, creates an extremely arduous phase.

We find Hamlet in a similar period of transition after the death of his father, except a whole other layer gets added on top of this.  Along with the anguish of losing his father, he finds out Claudius, his uncle, murdered his father, and betrayed his father’s memory by marrying his mother.   So because of these circumstances, Hamlet receives a task that quickly becomes the motivation for all of his action in the play.  Hamlet must revenge his father’s death by killing Claudius.

The motivation behind this at first seems simple, and Hamlet even states to the ghost of his father in scene five of act one that he will follow through with this action without hesitation, even mentioning in line 188 that “…I was born to set it right.”  As these first instances of revenge appear in the play, Shakespeare makes the characters seem, on the surface, to not feel remorse with the idea of taking away another person’s life.  In fact, it implies that the anger and sorrow felt in the midst of loss control actions more so than a rational decision making process

However, Hamlet’s character contrasts this idea presented in the first act.  Rather than just deciding to avenge this murder, Hamlet embarks on a journey to find undeniable proof that Claudius was the murderer in an effort to avoid following through with this extreme action.  Among this search for evidence, Hamlet also has ample opportunity to question the consequences of death, and what that means for both Claudius and himself.  Hamlet even considers suicide multiple times because the stresses of the circumstances are too great.  At the conclusion of this period of self-discovery, Hamlet lets the audience know the results of his journey in one of the most famous soliloquies in the English language and says in lines 77-88 of Scene 1 of Act 3:

“To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,—

The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns,—puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;

And enterprises of great pith and moment,

With this regard, their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.”

These words show exactly the struggles that Hamlet deals with because of his wrestling with the idea of murder.  His life is weary and he wishes to end the weariness but can’t because he fears the consequences of his actions.  After much deliberation, Hamlet ultimately doesn’t commit suicide and that shows that he thinks through what he’s doing rather than acting rashly like his commitment to his father in the first act suggests.  This contrast shows the importance of uncertainty, as it creates dilemmas that we must work through in order to feel at ease with life decisions. The ability of the “conscience to make cowards of us all” shows that impulsive desires aren’t conducive for influencing action, and that we should instead think through the consequences of our actions, especially when contemplating a serious action like murder.