LOVE, DEATH, FRIENDSHIP AND INCEST IN HAMLET

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LOVE, DEATH, FRIENDSHIP AND INCEST IN HAMLET
Love, death, friendship and even incest are all themes featured prominently in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Death is the most common theme in the play, followed closely by friendship and love. These are the emotions that Shakespeare uses throughout the play to prod the protagonist, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who is strangely inactive in the face of murder and mayhem. But most importantly, these emotions are usually not what they seem, in Hamlet’s world. Almost every one of these emotions is betrayed or made false.
Hamlet returns to Denmark from college because his father has died to find his mother, Queen Gertrude has remarried his uncle, Claudius in unseemly haste after his father’s death. In Elizabethan times, to marry the spouse of your sibling was considered incestuous. Gertrude and Claudius were behaving in a most unseemly way to the people of that time. Most of the action of the play takes place less than four months after the death of the old king, also Hamlet. Immediately he suspects that there was foul play involved, mostly due to the hasty marriage of his mother to his uncle. He also finds that the ghost of what may be his father has been seen around the castle.
Later, Hamlet talks to the ghost, who does claim to be his father, and finds out from the ghost that his father was murdered by having poison poured in his ear while he was asleep in the garden. The ghost tells him he must do nothing to harm his mother, that she is not guilty in this murder.
Hamlet is joined shortly thereafter by his true friend, Horatio, and is able to confide in him the plans that has made to determine whether his uncle is truly guilty of murdering his father. Hamlet decides that if he acts like he is crazy, he can find out the truth and get away with much more inexplicable behavior than he would normally be able to show.
The theme of love occurs next, Polonius, the king’s advisor, h...