Hamlet Themes

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Obfuscating insanity —uh, faking madness to throw people off—is one of the oldest tricks in the book. In Hamlet, Shakespeare takes it up a notch: do...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Ghosts, perverse family drama, and a vow of revenge: Hamlet is all geared up to be a traditional bloody revenge play… and then it grinds abruptly to a...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Hamlet may talk—and talk, and talk—about suicide, but what he's really concerned with is mortality, and the fact that the living world is made of de...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) For a play about incest and murder, Hamlet registers many of the sixteenth century's religious anxieties, like the effects of the Protestant Reformation...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) You know how all of Stephen King's books are about writers? Or how an unlikely number of movies have writer characters? Sometimes people take the advice...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) For someone who hates deception, Hamlet sure finds himself coming up with a lot of lies. Hamlet depicts a seamy political world, where deception is a ne...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Hamlet is a perv. Really. Oh, not the kind of perv who goes around doing gross stuff—as far as we can tell, Hamlet isn't actually interested in girls...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) "Frailty, thy name is woman" (1.2.6)—but Hamlet's men are pillars of stability and constancy, right? Right?? Well, maybe not. But Hamlet's attitude to...

(Click the themes infographic to download.) Blood is thicker than water, which is easy to see when it's spilled all over the floor at the end of the play. Hamlet dwells on issues of incest and rev...