Wednesday, January 22, 2020
The Role of Duty In William Shakespeares Hamlet Essays -- Shakespeare
The Role of Duty In William Shakespeare's Hamlet  Killing a person is not something that anyone can take lightly. In the story of Hamlet, the uncle of the play's focus character, Prince Hamlet of Denmark, has murdered the prince's father, stolen the crown, and weds his mother. The ghost of king Hamlet comes to the prince and tells him that he must avenge his murder. The play follows Hamlet's quest of revenge against his murdering incestuous uncle. The question that's left to the reader to answer is whether or not the final killing of Claudius was an act of duty or desire for young Hamlet. Some may suspect that the reason he went through with his act of revenge was because he wanted to, but the majority of readers seem to come to the conclusion that his final act was an act of duty.  Hamlet's first thoughts on the revenge he has to perform went as follows:         I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books,        all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation        copied there; and thy commandment all alone shall live.        (A1, S5,L99-103)  This statement makes it perfectly clear that Hamlet views what he has to do as a job that he has to do for his father.  In act 2, scene 2 Hamlet meets an actor who easily displays intense emotion and passion on matters that have just come to his head. Hamlet asks himself in the soliloquy that followed if he was a coward for not completing his task yet. This makes it obvious that killing Claudius isn't something that Haml... ...on has resulted with Leartes and his mother both dead, and himself mortally wounded. Had his quest of murder been for desire and not for duty, he wound have killed Claudius before any of this had happened. But since he had to first test the ghost, and then wait to kill Claudius when he wasn't praying, Hamlet ends up dying in this scene, along with a host of others. On the slightly brighter side, Hamlet finally gets the revenge his father needs.  The answer to the question of duty or desire arises another question. If we arrived at the same circumstances as Hamlet, could we have acted quicker? Although it seems like Hamlet went about this the wrong way because everyone ended up dead, I don't suspect that there are many of us that could have performed this still-villainous act at the drop of a hat.   Â
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