Loyalty In Hamlet

At the heart of Shakespeare's polysemic tragedy Hamlet (1603) is the extent of Hamlet's loyalty towards his father. His shifting identity within his world of realpolitik, as he fluctuates between absolutist filial duty and morally relative humanism impedes his revenge to an almost permanent state of inaction. The universality of these moral concerns are specifically epitomized within this extract, as the turning point which Hamlet utilizes to catalyse his agency. It is through Shakespeare's incongruous depiction of Hamlet's dynamic identity within the incorrigible doctrines of the medieval world, which encapsulates the moral consequences of loyalty. The Ghost's external disruption of Elsinore's natural order personifies the internal destabilisation
This is expounded in his reverent elegy towards his father with his mythological allusion "but no more like my father than I to Hercules". While Freudian critics justify his fervent admiration as an oedipal attraction to his mother, I assert that this deification is solely based on his attempt to emulate his father's beacon of integrity. Thus, his duty to his father is not only redolent of absolutist principles, but also demarcates his purpose within life, whether to be conform to the medieval role of the dutiful avenger or to adhere to humanism. Indeed, in order to underscore the moral dilemma an individual would encounter in such a situation, Shakespeare couples the Chapel Scene peripeteia with the crux of Hamlet's indecision. His hyperbolic affirmation that he would "take the ghost's word for a thousand pound" counterpoises his inaction to take revenge, as his justification that Claudius would "so a goes to heaven" is a "mere pretext to hide his lack of resolve" (Alice 1890). In contrast to Hamlet's inaction is his foil Laertes whose audacious response to Polonius' death is delineated in "conscience…to the profoundest pit." The plosives evoke Laertes' anachronistic mindset of prioritising absolutist filial duty over moral quandaries. This contrast of character
Hamlet's fixation upon the inescapably mortal condition of human existence is expressed through his "unmanly grief" and existential angst in his metaphorical attribution of purgatory as "the undiscovered country" where "no traveller returns". This manifests into a contemplation of suicidal tendencies in which he rhetorically questions the "quintessence of dust" and "paragon of animals", invoking conflicting ideological tension regarding the noble act of suicide between Stoicism and medieval Absolutism. Ultimately, Hamlet’s anagnorisis of mortal "boundaries in which human action, human judgement, are enclosed" (Mack 1956) with his truncated verse “I’ve done you wrong” posits the transcendence of filial revenge to morally misguided justice lead on by the "divinity that shapes our ends." This solidifies his resignation to divine providence and Stoic acceptance of the inevitability of mortality, from which he can finally prioritize his innate loyalties, towards the tricolon of "nature, honor, and exception", which he perceives in Laertes. The realignment of his loyalties, as underpinned in this extract, hence serves as a means for action, ultimately alleviating his burden of obligation to his