How Does Hamlet Show Moral Integrity

The character Hamlet from Shakespeare’s text Hamlet shows a conflicted demonstration of moral integrity. To dissect the morals in question, they are compiled from religious rules, logic, common sense, conscience and the local laws of the Elizabethan era.

Religion plays a key role in dictating correct behaviour during the Elizabethan era; only part of which Hamlet follows. ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ was a well known and accepted concept; insinuating that kings had the support of God, and that to go against a king was to go against God himself. Though Claudius also upset this order (by murdering King Hamlet), for Hamlet to even consider killing Cladius, he crosses a moral taboo. Furthermore, when the ghost charges Hamlet to ‘Revenge his foul
and most unnatural murder’ and Hamlet accepts, replying ‘Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift/ As meditation or the thoughts of love/ May sweep to my revenge’, he once again disregards the Christian value system that asserts judgement and punishment to be only the right of God, and not of man. Hamlets only redeeming action, is that after contemplating ‘To be, or not to be’, he does not inevitably commit suicide: a death denied Christian burial.

Secondly a sense of right and wrong can be derived from common sense, logic and the conscience.
In this regard, Hamlet displays no moral integrity, as he firstly used Ophelia by displaying to her a faked ‘antic disposition’ (Act1, Sc5.) to which she was ‘so affrighted’ (Act2, S1) before allowing her to believe that her love had been betrayed when he stated ‘I love you not’ to her reply, ‘I was the more deceived’ (Act, S1). After this, when given the opportunity to kill Polonius, ‘Now I might do it pat’ he refrains because the victim ‘now a is a-praying’ and the murder then would send him ‘to heaven’. He shows no mercy, deciding to wait till later when he is behaving in a way ‘That has no relish of salvation in’t’ choosing then to ‘trip him that his heels may kick at heaven,/ And that his soul may be damned and black/ As hell whereto it goes...’ (Act3, S3). It is possible however, that this example of postponing the revenge is an indication that Hamlet was perhaps reluctant, and did not truly wish to kill him. This indication of repressed guilt is also shown in Act3 Scene1 where Hamlet states ‘... I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in’.

Finally, a judgement of moral integrity can take place when witnessing Hamlet’s response to local laws. In this he varied. By Hamlet deciding to take Claudius’ life in exchange for his fathers, he was following the pagan value systems of the era which accepted an ‘eye for an eye’. However, on discovering that Guildenstern and Rosencrantz were unknowingly delivering a letter commanding Hamlets’ ‘head should be struck off’ (Act5, S2), he stole the commission, and illegally replaced it with a copy charging that ‘Without debatement further, more, or less,/ He should those bearers put to sudden death,/ Not shriving time allowed’. Despite the action saving his life, Hamlet both broke a law, and ensured the death of those who once were his friends.

Therefore, though it appears Hamlet believed he must extract his revenge, and at times showed unwillingness to do so, by this action and the behaviour he used to carry it out Hamlet betrayed the religious rules, logic, common sense, conscience and law of the Elizabethan era, Hamlet displayed an at best conflicted, and at worst absent moral integrity.