Hamlet

	Hamlet

	Summary: Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, but entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness. Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s mad behavior and attempt to discover its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet when he is in conversation with the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia. He orders her to enter a nunnery and declares that he wishes to ban marriage.
	A group of traveling actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s guilt. He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet imagines his uncle to have murdered his father so that if Claudius is guilty, he will surely react. When the moment of the murder arrives in the theater, Claudius leaps up and leaves the room. Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer would send Claudius’s soul to heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate revenge and decides to wait. Claudius now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his own safety orders that Hamlet be sent to England at once.
	Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He draws his sword and stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime, he is immediately dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death.
	After her father’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the river. Polonius’s son, Laertes, who has been staying in France, returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. When Horatio and the king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the prince has returned to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship en route to England, Claudius makes a plan to use Laertes’ desire for revenge to secure Hamlet’s death. Laertes will fence with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will poison Laertes’ blade so that if he draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a backup plan, the king decides to poison a goblet, which he will give Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or send hits of the match. Hamlet returns to Elsionore just as Ophelia’s funeral is taking place. Stricken with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had in fact always loved Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio that he believes one must be prepared to die since death can come at any moment. A foolish courtier arrives on Claudius’s orders to arrange fencing match between the two.
	The sword-fighting begins. Hamlet scores the first hit, but declines to drink from the king’s proposed goblet. Instead, Gertrude takes a drink from it and is swiftly killed by the poison. Laertes succeeds in wounding Hamlet, though Hamlet does not die of the poison immediately. On the other hand, Laertes is cut by his own sword’s blade, and after revealing to Hamlet that Claudius is responsible for the queen’s death, he dies from the blade’s poison. Hamlet then stabs Claudius through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his revenge.
	At this moment, a Norwegian prince Fortinbras, who had led an army to Denmark and attacked Poland earlier in the play, enters with ambassadors from England, who report that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Fortinbras is stunned by the horrible sight of the entire royal family lying sprawled on the floor dead. He moves to take power of the kingdom. Horatio, fulfilling Hamlet’s last request, tells him Hamlet’s tragic story. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be carried away in a manner honoring a fallen soldier.
	Response: After watching this film, I don’t doubt William Shakespeare as a great playwright. He had deeply described the dark side of human nature and the cruelty of society. Especially this famous play bases its discussion on love and revenge.
	One thing that impressed me most is the lyric lines in the play are formed in poetic rhythms which make the play full of melody when words are read by actors on stage. The famous quotation of Hamlet, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” does not superficially show his indecisiveness in taking important action when he was suffered by the dilemma whether or not to revenge for his father’s death. The spiritual struggle also indicates the traditional Christian moral values which consider suicide is against God’s will. Life or death is under God’s power, not human’s. Shakespeare also deals with basic human nature like love, revenge, conspiracy, and power play. They are presented in dramatic and astonishing ways by murder, mania, and incest.
	As for this play as a whole, the scene while Hamlet was struggled with his own different wills to live or to end his life is heart touching to many audience. The young prince clashed between his moral sense and his desire for revenge against the murderer who was his uncle at the same time his own mother’s newly wed husband. His heart was in such a chaos, but his thought remained sober and thoughtful. Hamlet was a person who was not satisfied with what he had seen; he was a skeptic. He held suspect on the delusion of his father’s ghost. He determined to find out the truth before he could trust the ghost’s accusation of his brother’s betrayal. His mind still worked well when he planned schemes to uncover the dirty tricks to cause his father’s death. His plan succeeded and urged the king to get rid of his nephew if he still owned the chance to protect his throne. For Hamlet to carry on his plan of revenge, it seemed not in accordance with his will this time. On the contrary, the arrangement of revenge was the king’s plan to kill the heir to the throne. However, the king himself died in the hand of his enemy, the prince. It’s God’s law that no one should kill. So if one kills, he must die either the king or Hamlet.
	Let’s reflect those plots and scenes in the royal court. It is an imperfect world full of lies, greed, lustful desires, and corruption. Righteousness is hard to exist in such a fallen world. Any one could be as evil as the king, as flattering as the chancellor, but for truth and justice, would we dare to choose to be Hamlet?