Hamlet: A Tool of a Higher Power Essay -- Shakespeare Hamlet Essays

Hamlet: A Tool of a Higher Power Throughout Shakespeare's Hamlet, it seems that a higher spiritual power is influencing the events taking place in the state of Denmark. A ghost of the recently deceased King Hamlet appears to Young Hamlet telling him of his "most foul and most unnatural murder" (1.5.30). This begins a chain of events leading up to the martyrdom of Hamlet, and the spiritual cleansing of the throne of Denmark. Firstly, Hamlet sees the evil and contemptible state of life in Denmark. Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and the Queen of Denmark, marries his Uncle soon after the death of his father. ". . .The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (1.2.189-90). Depressed, and most likely confused, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy in the play, else named 'the dram of evil' speech, ". . . Frailty, thy name is woman!— A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father's body Like Niobe, all tears—why she, even she married with my uncle . . . With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not, nor it can not come to good." (1.2.152-158,163-4). In addition, Hamlet sees the corruption in Denmark when the ghost of his recently deceased father appears to him. The ghost claims that... ...een dies from drinking Hamlet's poisoned drink, and when Hamlet realized he is not going to live to see another day, he kills the King, thus taking his revenge. Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway, takes over the throne, while Horatio (Hamlet's one true friend) tells the story of the awful, evil deeds done in the state of Denmark. Furthermore, the deaths of the nobility of Denmark act as a sort of 'spiritual cleansing', meaning that all the wrong-doing had been revenged and paid for by the deeds at the end of the play. All the evil, and the foul doings of Denmark had been absolved by the deaths of the main characters. Hamlet is also considered a martyr because he was a good person who died, so that he could, in essence, cause the purification that returned the natural order of things in the state of Denmark.