Betrayal & the Pitfalls of Human Desire

Kendall Pipes

Steven Keeton

English 2323

31 October 2016

Betrayal & The Pitfalls of Human Desire

Hamlet, which likely stands as the most well-known of William Shakespeare’s tragic works, is a tale of dysfunctional family relationships, murder, revenge, and most notably…betrayal. It’s a familiar theme, one that every person unfortunately encounters at one point or another along this journey called life. A trusted friend shares a deep dark secret with the world. A seemingly loving and committed husband one day wakes up and decides that he would rather make love to another, younger more attractive woman than his wife. This is the portrait of betrayal. The playwright’s characters, every one of them, face this reality head on. Some of them are victims; most are culprits. In exploring this theme of betrayal, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet exposes the doggedness of man to fulfill his deepest desire to the detriment of his loyalty and holiness while building upon other themes of broken families, incest, lust, and revenge.

In Act I, readers are greeted by Shakespeare’s primary theme of betrayal as Hamlet learns from the ghost of his late father, the details of his demise. The ghost of King Hamlet informs his only son, the young Hamlet, that Claudius, the king’s brother, had poisoned him in his sleep. The king inspires Hamlet to “revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (Shakespeare 1381). King Hamlet exposes Claudius’s betrayal and sets the major conflict of the drama into motion. By tying an act of betrayal so closely to the inaugural conflict of the story, Shakespeare establishes it as the primary theme. For the next four acts, we see Hamlet struggling to fulfill the request of his father’s ghost as, one betrayal after the next, the plot is moved forward.

In the second act of Hamlet, we find the off-putting, notorious meddler, Polonius conspiring with Reynaldo to go to France and spy on his son, Laertes. More than spy on him, Polonius urges his messenger to “[lay] these slight sullies on [his] son, as ‘twere a thing a little soiled wi’ th’ working” (Shakespeare 1386). Now, in the previous act, Polonius manipulates his daughter into forsaking the love and affection of Hamlet. It’s easy to gloss over it as normal since in that time period, women were subject to the rule of their fathers and husbands. However, we see Polonius here willing to ruin his son’s reputation just to keep him under his thumb. Polonius’s treatment of Ophelia and his defamation of Laertes’s character can be viewed much differently seeing Polonius’s pattern of duplicity. Shakespeare introduces us to a different mode of betrayal. It does not incite the shock and awe of Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet; that’s not its purpose here. Here the playwright uses betrayal, in a lesser sense of the word, to highlight broken trust between intimate family members. Laertes and Ophelia should have been able to depend on their father to look out for their well-being, including both their social and emotional well-being. Instead, he’s more interested in being in control of his children.

Although Polonius’s family has it issues, they cannot hold a candle to the soaring levels of backstabbing, lying, and manipulation of the royal family- Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet. Again Shakespeare uses the betrayal of family bonds to shine light on the play’s theme of the dysfunctional family. Claudius was so desperate to become king that he betrayed the trust and the bond of his brother by poisoning him in order to acquire his throne. But his sins did not stop there. His only way to the crown was through Queen Gertrude, so he marries her and seems to actually really care for her. However, he does not care for Hamlet. Claudius openly proclaims to love Hamlet as his own son, but he secretly fears his ability to take the throne, stating, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go” (Shakespeare 1407). In fear of being overthrown, he arranges a plan to Have Hamlet shipped to England without ever consulting his wife Gertrude. Claudius commits treason against his wife, making his love for her is questionable due his inability to truly accept or even tolerate Hamlet. Before the audience can feel too sorry the queen and her sham of a marriage, Gertrude too becomes guilty of betraying Hamlet in the wake of Polonius’s murder. She tells the king all that Hamlet has done and conspires with him a plan to ship Hamlet away and dishonorably bury Polonius to “both countenance and excuse…[their] vile deeds” and cover up their own shame (Shakespeare 1425). Shakespeare has his characters literally digging their own graves through continued acts of betrayal for the sake a personal gain and self-preservation. The nasty tug-of-war that Gertrude finds herself caught in between highlights the brokenness of the family unit. It’s all about appearance and power. No act of betrayal is off the table if it means saving face and staying in control.

Everyone in the play seems to have a character flaw in the area of disloyalty, and the star of the show, the young Price Hamlet, is no different. At first he appears to be a sympathetic character, but soon we see that he is willing to lay aside important relationships to keep his “plot” for revenge moving forward. After winning the affections of Ophelia, against his better judgment and the objection of her family, he retracts his feelings, quipping, “I did not love you once” (Shakespeare 1405). He mercilessly rips Ophelia’s heart from her chest to keep up his masquerade as a crazed lunatic. She trusted Hamlet with her emotions and likely had hopes of a future with him, and he in turn questions her purity and denies any feeling he ever felt for her. He even denied the existence of relationship at all. Through Hamlet’s betrayal of Ophelia, Shakespeare is showing us the cost of vengeance. This quest to avenge his father has not only hurt Hamlet; the collateral damage is just as great.

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