924 shakespeare, William
experiences for man’s soul will come soon enough
without being accelerated through suicide.
The play’s last words tie up the theme of death.
Fortinbras has entered the castle and effectively
asks what “feast of death” has occurred. Horatio
tells Hamlet’s story, and the last scene of the last act
ends with a “dead march” in which Hamlet’s body is
borne off by Fortinbras’s men to the sounds of can-
non in a military cortege.
Ellen Rosenberg
JuStIce in Hamlet
“Revenge should have no bounds” (4.7.123), Claudius
tells Laertes, and Hamlet is indeed a revenge tragedy,
a genre that was especially popular in Renaissance
England. The focus of this genre is personal justice:
A crime or evil is committed against a person or
family, usually involving someone’s murder; for vari-
ous reasons, the institutions dedicated to moral, civil,
and social justice—the church, the government and
society at large, the courts—are not able to mete out
justice for the act of wrongdoing, yet retaliation for
the injustice must be achieved in order to slake the
hero’s (and the audience’s) moral thirst. The revenge
tragedy positions the protagonist to achieve this per-
sonal form of justice, even if it means the hero’s own
death or the death of those near and dear to him.
In Hamlet, there are multiple manifestations
of the revenge theme. A little-discussed aspect of
revenge that is antecedent to the play, but which is
resolved in the action, is the war that Fortinbras, the
elder king of Norway, had waged against Hamlet’s
father, the king of Denmark. In seeking to annex
portions of Poland, the elder Fortinbras had brought
his army through and against Denmark. The elder
King Hamlet slew King Fortinbras and took land
from him; it was on that day that young Hamlet
was born. Throughout Hamlet, references are made
to the young Fortinbras, who is on his way, through
Denmark, to Poland, to reclaim the territories his
father had lost. The threat of Fortinbras turning
his army against Denmark is noted in the play, but
Fortinbras is restrained in act 4 and simply asks
for passage across the land. The threat that runs
throughout Hamlet is that Fortinbras will turn his
military might against Hamlet and Denmark to
avenge the death of the elder Fortinbras. The turn
of events at the end of Hamlet makes Fortinbras’s act
of vengeance unnecessary: The royal Danish fam-
ily has destroyed itself, and Hamlet’s dying wish is
for Horatio to give Denmark to Fortinbras to rule.
Justice on a political level is served, and in a fashion
resembling ancient Greek drama, the “curse” on the
house of Hamlet is resolved.
The play’s primary call for justice is to avenge the
murder of King Hamlet, and it is organized around
this main narrative theme and its corollary issues.
This demand for justice and, therefore, the objective
of the play, comes from the ghost of Hamlet’s father,
who appears to Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio
in act 1, scene 1. He reappears in scene 4 to reveal
Claudius’s secret crime to Hamlet and the audience
and to set Hamlet into action. The ghost will visit
Hamlet again later in the play when Hamlet loses
control in questioning his mother.
The king was asleep in the garden when
Claudius poured poison into his ear, and Ham-
let must avenge his murder. On a narrative level,
Hamlet now must find out whether the ghost
has told the truth. There are numerous corollary
issues of justice surrounding this theme. Gertrude,
for example, must redeem herself for rushing into
marriage with her brother-in-law so close upon her
husband’s death. This matter becomes Hamlet’s
obsession: Did his mother collude with Claudius
to kill the king? Does she simply have poor judg-
ment, or is she weak or trying to garner security
for herself, a woman, in a man’s world? Moreover,
even before Hamlet is informed of the murder, he
finds himself put out of the natural order of suc-
cession to the throne since Claudius has seized it.
Claudius’s marriage to Gertrude may be a strategy
to align himself with his late brother’s power and
attract the people’s goodwill. Or, perhaps, he loves
Gertrude and killed to have her.
Most centrally, if Hamlet feels sure that Claudius
has indeed committed the murder, then he must
bring his uncle to justice, because Claudius is the
law of the land, and Hamlet will not be able to have
formal retribution put into place by the very man
who has committed the crime. As the play develops,
Claudius’s continuing villainy will finally convince
Hamlet that the ghost has told the truth. In terms
of the plot, then, both Claudius and Gertrude must