Hamlet Is Dead Essay

King Hamlet is Dead. This isn’t a startling fact, nor is it hidden in any way throughout William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, a play which conveys through its 29,551 words a tale rife with murder and the conspiracy to commit it. From its very beginning, at a wedding which feasts off a funeral’s leftovers, we’re confronted with Death’s damoclean sword hanging over the show and its characters. How appropriate, then, to the tale of Damocles that this classic story of murder begins in the wake of a king’s death? To say that King Hamlet was murdered is only half true; he’s dead before the beginning of the show, and when lights come up it’s his ghost rather than him we must confront the existence of. One could argue that, in the nature of tragedy and tragic plays, the characters are dead from the moment of it being written, and we are only watching in the waiting for it to happen.

The entirety of Hamlet as a story is initiated by a murder which has taken place before the audience has yet to even see the woes of Denmark and its royal court. Still, much like his own ghost, it’s this death that haunts every action that is to come. Death seeps through every niche and crevice of Hamlet’s pages, even before the string of the play’s events winds itself into a noose. Claudius begins this chain with the poisoning of King Hamlet, a vie for the throne made manifest venomously, but it doesn't stop there. By the end of the show, less than a handful of our original characters are breathing. Instead, characters find themselves wrapped up in Hamlet the Younger’s plot for revenge, whether intentionally or not, destined to be killed in this web of deceit and despair. But what does that say about King Hamlet’s role in all these horrible things that come to pass? There’s two answers to this question: His actions mean nothing, he’s already