LOVE,_DEATH,_FRIENDSHIP_AND_INCEST_IN_HAMLET

LOVE, DEATH, FRIENDSHIP AND INCEST IN HAMLET 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 hamlet, claudius, death, polonius, ophelia, hamlet’s, father, play, love, laertes, murder, mother, king, uncle, poison, out, horatio, friendship, father’s, been, scene, killed, ghost, gertrude, friend, england, denmark, betrayed, true, theme, tells, strangely, rosencrantz, returns, request