The Unjustness Of The Feudal System In Shakespeare's Hamlet

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was written almost two hundred years before the birth of Karl Marx, yet the work has a focus on acknowledging and criticizing the unjustness of the feudal system. The scope of socialist ideas in Hamlet is mostly seen in Act V, where the focus is put on the gravediggers. Socialist ideas challenging the state of Shakespeare's world are seen through commentary on the influence of wealth and status from life, to shortly after death and the equality of death and its distribution. However, the work also has ideas and conventions that align more to complacency with the feudal system. In the Elizabethan Age, in which Hamlet was written, society was focused on maximizing life for the rich and noble and disregard of the poor. Shakespeare

SECOND CLOWN. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants (V.I. 36-38) Shakespeare has the peasants speaking in riddles over the concept of death, who to the nobles of his era were just a means to an end. Equating the cleverness of the lowest strata of wealth to the highest, laborer to prince, shows the possible equality that could be shared by both men. Meanwhile, the incompetency of the nobles, such as the bumbling Polonius, emphasizes that wealthy nobles have no more inherent faculty than any other person. While the gravediggers speak in riddles and wit, their lower class causes Shakespeare to write their dialogue in a separate style than the noblemen and noblewomen. Shakespeare’s usual style is flowing and poetic, and Hamlet is written almost entirely in rhyming, iambic pentameter. It is the parts that are prose that are of interest. All of the prose spoken by characters in Hamlet is spoken by the peasantry and lower class. The difference in the sound of speech highlights the higher education that the nobles were able to attain:
HAMLET. They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that. / I will speak to this fellow. Whose grave‘s this, sirrah?
FIRST CLOWN. Mine, sir. (V.I.