Hamlet and His War Against Corruption, The Endless Battle of Humankind Corruption plays a vital role in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For example, there are many references to a growing sickness such as the appearance of King Hamlet’s ghost, the ailment of time, and Hamlet’s view of Claudius and Gertrude’s incestual relationship. The source of this corruption is Claudius, King Hamlet, and even Hamlet. At the surface Hamlet has a unique and commendable characteristic to resist corruption and disease; however, due to Hamlet’s intent to commit revenge for his father, the play suggests that corruption is an inevitable consequence of human existence that we cannot avoid in the real world. In the first scene, the characters Barnardo, Marcellus, …show more content…
Hamlet, son of King Hamlet, presents his state of mind of his relationship to Claudius by making a cleaver remark to him. After Claudius marries the queen, Gertrude, shortly after King Hamlet’s death, Claudius makes graces to the dead King Hamlet when announcing, “And thy best graces spend it at they will But now my cousin Hamlet, and my son (1.2.63-64).” When Claudius declares Hamlet his son, Hamlet responds in an aside muttering, “A little more than kin, and less than kind (1.2.65).” As Hamlet’s first line in the play, this aside line brilliantly shows that Hamlet’s disgust of the image of Claudius being a father to Hamlet, and while also shedding light on the incest in Claudius’s marriage. More significantly, Hamlet’s aside might be a demonstration of him speaking directly to the audience to help the audience sympathize with him. Since the audience is listening to the characters just as much as Hamlet, Shakespeare might be presenting that Hamlet exists in a world between the audience and the play and that his role is to help direct the audience’s perspective to the many examples of corruption that personally trouble him. This is one of the many examples of corruption in the royal family itself, where Hamlet shares his perspective with the audience to find the source of this growing