Hamlet Act IV Literary Essay

William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, is thought by many readers to have the major theme of revenge. Although revenge is a significant part of the play, it is not the main theme. Throughout the play there are many ways Shakespeare uses dramatic irony and for each one there is always a cause and effect. He uses this Cause and effect to target the audience and to keep them engaged in the play. An example of cause and effect would be in Act IV, Scene IV (IV, iv, 35-70). In this scene it shows Hamlet and his liking of Fortinbras and how angry he is at himself. The cause is from the audience while the speech and other things are the effect. The cause and effect from this scene and the soliloquy is one of the ways Shakespeare connected with his audience, which was in his time the Elizabethan era.
Through this speech Shakespeare’s feelings are made by using Hamlet to portray his message into the Elizabethan audience. It is clear in this speech that Shakespeare thinks that killing and wasting the lives of man during war is unnecessary. In the scene one of Hamlets captain says, “we go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it” (IV, iv, 20), this was said before Hamlets speech and it describes the insanity of this war between Norway and the Poles lead by Fortinbras. The land they were fighting for had very little gain for both, but it meant victory to them and that is why they wanted it.
In many occasions the audience knows that Hamlet has been having a hard time of figuring out what to do with Claudius, where he should get his revenge and kill him or not, he truly does not know what to do yet. To predict or to figure what he will do Shakespeare makes the last soliloquy in the play critical for the audience because it is the only way of understanding the development of Hamlet as a character. Furthermore Hamlet also points out that he is not doing anything to avenge his father death. “How all