THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET PRINCE OF DENMARK

Hamlet is considered one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, together with Macbeth and the Tempest.
A tragedy is a narrative form of literature, where there is normally a tragic hero: there must be somebody dieing for ideals. The Kingdom where the tragedy is set creates a dark atmosphere symbol of the instability of the country. In
Denmark something is rotten, because the passing of the crown did not follow the natural order. The old king was murdered
and his brother took his place. The King was still the micro-rapresentation of the God on earth.
In the case of Hamlet the full title is "The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark". The tragedy was written beetween 1599
and 1602. The language od the tragedy is unrhymed, this is calles blank verse with iambic pentamenter.

The protagonist is the adulescent son of the King of Denmark. Once more the contest is the Kingdom. Hamlet has got a
natural father whose name is Hamlet. Hamlet's father died and he begins to suspect that he has been murdered by his uncle,
Claudius. The uncle has now married Hamlet's mother, Gertrude; it follows that he wants to take a revenge for his father.
The context is developed on different levels of meaning: political level, family level and generation level. Indeed Hamlet
is an adulescent, the youth generation is the reason why for Hamlet matters are right or wrong.
He does not know how to face the situation, which is made more complex by Ophelia. She is a younh woman, who is in love
with Hamlet, but he is only apparently in love with her. The thing that mostly conditions Hamlet is his mother. The woman
in the charachter who creates the tragedy: she conditioned the father, the stepfather and the son.
Hamlet does not know if Claudius, brother of his father, has murdered Hamlet, but he is not sure of the contrary too.
Since when one night, he hears the voice of his father's ghost talking to him and asking for revenge. The setting of the
scene is created by the obscurity of the night. Hamlet is scared because he can not control the situation. But the idea of
his father's ghost gives him torment. The ghost becomes the symbol of the doubts of Hamlet's mind.
In the Middle Ages people believed in magic, so they were able to imagine what Hamlet's disturbed mind could see. To
rapresent Hamlet's doubts Shakespeare invents the ghost. For the end of univerity, Hamlet calls dome actors to rapresent a
show similar to his concerns of his father's murder. Hamlet needs this to convince himself of his uncle's guilt.

In front of such a problem, Hamlet wants to uderstand. To adopt to reality he uses creativity: he decides to pretend to be
mad, crazy and he behaves accordingly. He acts with riddle, provoking people to understand him.
Shakespeare may have used Hamlet story to reflect the concerns oh his own time.