Often children respect and honor their parents even after they have passed. In many movies, for instance, Disney movies, a child’s motivation is a result of their parent(s) passing and that becomes their new reason to keep them going. Another example of this is when a child grows up with a parent or even a sibling in the military, and they die on duty or get injured, which then serves as a further drive to go into the military to honor them, like the plot of hamlet. One of the major themes that are discussed in hamlet is related to honor and loyalty. As a result of this reoccurring theme, one of the questions we should be asking ourselves is how the loyalty and father-son relationship directly affects the plot of the play.
Primarily, Hamlet’s revenge mission aims at protecting his father’s position within the family hierarchy. The Ghost insists that Hamlet must revenge for the death of his father and it is seen to be a great solution to the three main crises of the play’s opening, that is, the crisis in Hamlet’s family, crises in his mind, and the kingdom (Richards 742). He understands that he must revenge for the death of his father to prove his love relationship with the father. In his mind, he suffers internal pain arising from his inability to pay vengeance on his father’s killers and the sharing of this pain shows us the magnitude of his relationship with the father. Essentially, his late father continues to relate with him through the Ghost, who helps manifest the father’s intentions on him as a show of unity.
He struggles to rescue his mother from what he sees as a bad marriage which is a fight that purely would have belonged to his father. He fights the war of rescuing his mother on behalf of the father and this shows the strong bond that still exists between him and the father. Hamlet is seen to lose the taste of life when he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he has already lost all the gaiety in life (Terry 1079). Concurrently, the situation implies that the death of his father leaves nothing for him to enjoy in life. In essence, all that remains is now the fight to finish what his father would have intended which includes making himself the king of Denmark by killing Claudius and taking the throne. As a result, his decisions seemingly help the kingdom by removing the immoral king to accomplish what would have been the desires of his father. He puts his intentions into action when he kills Polonius mistaking him for Claudius.
Progressively, Hamlet’s attempts seemingly tend to bear fruits as he pretends to run mad to reach his target. Superficially, his actions would portray those of a mad man, yet he clearly understood his path on the mission of taking revenge for his father’s death. Strategically, he includes his mother in the list of his father’s killers which truly upsets his mother who defends herself claiming his son is only mad. However, his focus majorly lies on Claudius, who apart from the accusation of killing his father has also taken away the mother against both the father’s and his wish. As well, he even thinks of taking his life away thinking of the possibility of not being successful on the vengeance mission. The spirit of his struggle to represent his father lived and died with him. His revenge mission was too great that even after the death of Claudius, his internal struggles continue. He asks Horatio to continue telling his story after he is dead. The fight he stood for in his life truly continued even after his death as the new king agrees to continue the search for the truth about Hamlet and his life.
Conclusively, Hamlet’s struggle emanates from the death of his father. Although he becomes a villain at some point, he remained steadfast and committed to accomplishing the quest for revenge against the killers of his father. Essentially, his honor and loyalty manifest in the desire to replicate the duties of his father, protecting family lineage and ties in honor of the father. He took all his father’s battles including fighting to protect her mother from what he felt was a bad marriage. In struggling to achieve this objective, he devoted his life fully up to the point he acts mad and is ready to take away his life.
References
Richards, Irving T. “The Meaning of Hamlet’s Soliloquy.” PMLA, vol. 48, no. 3, 1933, pp. 741–766. JSTOR. Web.
Terry, Reta A. “Vows to the Blackest Devil: Hamlet and the Evolving Code of Honor in Early Modern England.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 4, 1999, pp. 1070–1086. JSTOR. Web.