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Comparing Death And Mortality In Branagh's Play

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Hamlet is a tragedy of extremes in both Branagh’s film version and Shakespeare’s play form. Death and mortality seem to be the driving forces behind all of the character’s motivations in the play, and deaths compound on other deaths. Without death, there would be no Hamlet as we know him. There is no question of to be or not to be because Hamlet must be what his dead father’s ghost asks him to be: a murderer. Before the play even begins, the audience is confronted by a Ghost that immediately shows the power that death holds over the minds of the living. Guards are scared to death of the ghost of recently deceased Old King Hamlet that they witness nightly. The dead king says he is “Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,/...Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/ Are burnt and purg’d away” (I.v.10-13). Here, it is guaranteed that neither Hamlet nor his father can rest until vengeance is served. Claudius pushes for the kingdom to move on from the death of the previous king, but they cannot. His son, Prince of Denmark, Hamlet is even more incapable of moving on than the rest of the kingdom and residents of the castle. This is why Branagh’s film displays Hamlet in black robes to juxtapose the bright colors and dressings of the other members of court. Once Hamlet starts down …show more content…

Plunging his sword into Ophelia’s father’s bowels gave him an unintentioned bloodlust that he could not keep at bay from that moment on. Once one man is dead, Hamlet sees that this is a way to stifle his enemies. So even though it takes him quite a bit of time to kill Claudius, he needed the time to grow into his role as a killer. He did not want to give away the location of Polonius’s body so it could have a proper burial. This seems to show that Hamlet is leaving the values of Christianity at the time completely. He appears to be a beast backed into a corner, so he lashes out by trying to protect himself by killing Ros and Guil as

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