In an effort to determine how Hamlet seeks to understand his world and his duty, we must closely examine several lines from this Shakespearean masterpiece. While the mystery and significance of Hamlet lies in part from an inability to make definitive statements about Hamlet’s motives and understanding, we can get a deeper look into his character from such a dialogue interpretation.
We might say that one of the ways in which Hamlet tries to understand the world is through academic endeavors. After all, he is a scholar who has recently returned from his studies. However, upon returning from college, Hamlet finds Denmark to be in a rotten state. His father is dead, and his mother has married her brother-in-law before the funeral meats are cleared. Thus, Hamlet begins to understand the world through a depression regarding his mother’s seemingly insensitive actions “How weary, flat, unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world” (Shakespeare I.ii.1074).
Hamlet’s depression is assuaged by the vision of his father’s ghost. After explaining he was murdered, Hamlet’s depression is replaced by pain, anger, and the contemplation of the metaphysical. When Horatio tells him the vision of his father is a strange thing, Hamlet says to then welcome it like a stranger “Horatio, / There are more things in heaven and earth, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare II.i.1080).
Hamlet from this point on in the play is filled with anxiety, remorse, depression, and uncertainty about how to take action to set things right again in Denmark. Hamlet is considered to be out of his sphere by Polonius and others in the play because of his strange broodings and actions after discovering the truth about his uncle. To Hamlet, Denmark now seems nothing so much as a prison, just one more cell in a world that appears prison-like in nature to him. When Rosencrantz asks him if the world
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