hamlet and the lion king essay

Compare and Contrast: Hamlet and the Lion King

This essay will compare and contrast Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and the Disney film “The Lion King.” It will explore the similarities in their themes, characters, and plot elements, as well as the differences in their presentation and audience. The piece will discuss how “The Lion King” adapts and reinterprets the classic story for a different medium and audience, examining the impact of these changes on the story’s meaning and reception. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of Hamlet.

How it works

The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it. Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. Set in Denmark, the play dramatises the revenge Prince Hamlet is called to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet. The Lion King is a Disney feature based on a young lion Simba the heir of his father the king Mufasa. Simba’s wicked uncle, Scar, plots to usurp Mufasa’s throne by luring father and son into a stampede of wildebeests.

But Simba escapes, and only Mufasa is killed. Simba returns as an adult to take back his homeland from Scar with the help of his friends Timon and Pumbaa.

• 1 Hamlet and Lion King Similarities
• 2 Hamlet and Lion King Differences

Hamlet and Lion King Similarities

Both The Lion King and Hamlet have many things in common. Such as the characters, themes, lessons, and social hierarchy. With all of the similarities there is obviously going to be some major differences.

We will be taking a look at the main characters in their particular stories. Prince Hamlet and Simba both lose their father’s that have been killed by their brothers. Both are deeply affected by the loss of their father’s, they lose their mentor figure and are left to be own their own, each of them run from their responsibility. Hamlet and Mufasa are both the kings of their kingdoms and meet an unfortunate fate when their brother leads them to their death. With their death it sends the princes to not deal with keeping their kingdoms intact. Scar and Claudius are the evil uncle of the family that no one likes. Both convince the princes to leave, Scar convinces Simba that he is responsible for his father’s death and advises him to run away.

Similarly, Claudius sends Prince Hamlet to London so that his evil plan of murdering him comes to play. However, both uncles fail as both the heirs return home with the knowledge of their uncles’ evil deeds. Sarabi and Gertrude are the queens of the kingdom they did not assist in the killing of the king. Timon, Pumba, and Horatio are the friends of the prince which help them come out of a depressed state to show that there is a bright side to everything. Zazu and Polonius are the royal advisors to the king. They both try to help the king to rule the kingdom and to give them advice. Nailia and Ophelia are the lovers of the prince. They just want to be with the prince, both were suppose to get married but due to the kings death that all changed.

There are three themes in The Lion king and Hamlet, they are greed is the root of all evil, the circle of life, and revenge. We can see this in both stories, for greed is the root of all evil we see how much the kingdoms change when the uncles take over as king. The circle of life is shown as an end to the old kings and to the rise of the new kings.Finally revenge this is expressed when Hamlet’s father talks to him as a ghost ad tells him to revenge me so in the end he ends up killing his uncle fulfilling his father’s wish. In The Lion King this is expressed when Simba gets a ghost of his father in the sky telling him to go back to pride rock and to be king which in the end lets him get revenge for his uncle pushing Mufasa into the stampede of wildebeest.

Hamlet and Lion King Differences

But as I said before there are some differences between theses two stories and we will see how this shaped into an overall story. Simba loses his father at a young age compared to Hamlet who lost his father at a much older age.Simba wanted to let Scar live and to never come back to pride rock but Scar being Scar used that opportunity to try and kill Simba once again but, Hamlet only seeked revenge for his father’s death making sure that Claudius suffers for the crimes that he has committed . Simba runs away from his problems when Mufasa is killed unlike Hamlet who pretends to be mad and set up cat and mouse traps to try to get Claudius to admit killing his brother. Hamlet senior we only know that he wanted Hamlet to avenge him compared to Mufasa who just wants Simba to have his part in the circle of life which means being king. Scar is that one uncle you hope that you never see at thanksgiving dinner just because everytime you see him he sets you up inn an elaborate plan to kill you as we see Scar attempt to do until he kills Mufasa and convinces Simba to flee. But Claudius is the uncle who always tries to sleep with your mom which once he kills the king that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore Gertrude remarried with Claudius which turns out not really working out for her as we see at the end of Hamlet.

Timon and Pumba just want Simba to be living life all hukana matta everythings all good just living life to the fullest. Horatio just wants Hamlet to be alive not wanting him to be completely overfilled with hatred for what Claudius has done. Zazu tries to give Simba guidance in his younger years in hope that it would lead him to be a good king one day. Polonius on the other hand tried to set up Hamlet in some traps to see how crazy he truly is. Also unlike Zazu Polonius is killed by Hamlet when he was hiding behind the curtains eavesdropping on him and Gertrude. Nala is a lioness and behaves like one defying others to save her love Simba. However Ophelia is a feeble minded young lady who is a blind follower to her father Polonius and follows his wishes to stay away from Hamlet. Sarabia does not remarry to Scar unlike how Gertrude did to Claudius. So in such Getrude remains a feeble queen doing to Claudius bidding. Sarabia is too a lioness in which she literally and figuratively doesn’t flinch from questioning Scar.

The difference in themes is that for the circle in life we see in Hamlet that almost everyone dies in the end which for them should really be called the circle of death. But in The Lion King we see Simba returning as king and now leading his kingdom at pride rock just like his father. Greed being the root of all evil is shown in Hamlet as Claudius being killed just like his brother being stabbed and poisoned for poisoning his brother. In The Lion King we see Scar being blinded by his greed and his morals to always be on top is what lead to his downfall he didn’t want to run away like a coward when Simba told him to run away and never to return but Scar being Scar does not leave and tries to kill Simba again which leads to him being killed and eaten by the hyenas. Finally revenge we see that Hamlet loses just about everything just to appease his father’s ghost only to be left to die slowly by being stabbed with a poisoned blade unlike Simba who now has a kingdom to rule,

So overall Hamlet and The Lion King are almost very much the same even though it obviously had to be changed since it is of course is a Disney film and kids seeing everyone die is probably not a good way to teach kids a lesson. But both stories show that there is a circle of life and that you should be humble.

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Hamlet / Lion King: Imitation or Inspired Creation?

Is The Lion King based on Hamlet ? To some extent, yes, though there are a number of differences too.

A word of caution, however. One cannot uproot a work of art from one place and plant it somewhere else. The creators of The Lion King might have taken the simple outline of the Hamlet plot as their inspiration to give their movie its embodiment. That said, let’s dive into an analysis of the plots to get a complete overview of the similarities – and also the key differences – between The Lion King and Hamlet .

10 Similarities Between The Lion King and Hamlet

1. a struggle for power.

In The Lion King , Simba’s father Mufasa struggles to hold his position strongly. He is intellectually disciplined and morally true. That’s why he has several enemies. The sad fact is, one of his enemies is his brother Scar.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Hamlet’s father also goes through the same political scenario in his country and gets killed by his brother.

2. Treacherous Brothers

In The Lion King , Mufasa’s brother Scar kills him by using treacherous means. In the story, he uses Mufasa’s son, Simba as a pawn to checkmate his honest brother. He succeeds.

In Hamlet , Claudius kills Hamlet’s father by using the same heinous means. In both of the cases, the action of the brothers heightens the dramatic tension and poses challenges to the rightful owner of the throne, the Prince.

3. Princely Issues

Simba and Hamlet – princes on a learning curve

A prince has to face the princely issues. In simple words, he has to learn the art of politics. Sooner is always better. In The Lion King, Simba has to leave his place. Why? He cannot deal with the heat of politics. When does he get his throne back? When he utilizes his senses and learns the art of politics.

In Hamlet too, the prince at first is innocent of all the incidents happening around him. When he starts to stand firmly on his ground, one by one his enemies perish.

4. The Jungle

The Jungle in The Lion King is a metaphor. It depicts the lawlessness and immorality of the place. When Scar overthrows his brother, the place turns into a real jungle. There are no rules, only lawlessness. Before that, it was a place where harmony reigned.

In Hamlet , the condition of the country can be considered to be a jungle. After the killing of Hamlet’s father, everything starts to deteriorate. Even the actions of Hamlet accelerate the effect. If the makers of The Lion King tried to depict this metaphorical jungle, they did a great job!

5. The Love Angle

Like Ophelia in Hamlet , Nala plays a pivotal role in The Lion King . Nala acts like a bridge between Simba’s escape and activity. She brings her back again to his place and inspires him to firmly voice his birthright.

The story reaches its climax for the presence of the love angle. It acts as a catalyst to gear up the process of dramatic action. There is another reference to passion. In The Lion King , the passion in the heart of Simba is utilized by the main lady character, just as Ophelies does in Hamlet .

6. Hakuna Matata

In The Lion King , Timon and Pumba sing this song with Simba it means “live carefree”. It makes Simba think like Hamlet stopped to think about his future action. In Simba’s heart, there is a burning desire to do justice to himself as well as to the jungle. There is also a sense of fear and restlessness in his heart. The song, “Hakuna Matata” heightens this tension in Simba’s heart.

Hamlet faced a similar kind of dilemma before taking some major steps in his journey. Then the moment came when he uttered this famous “ To be or not to be ” soliloquy. Read more about Hakuna Matata meaning .

7. Use of the Supernatural

In both The Lion King and Hamlet , the use of the supernatural can be found. Simba in The Lion King confronts his father’s ghost who tries to guide him. In Hamlet , the father’s ghost appears to put light on the hidden chambers of Hamlet’s mind. These dramatic creations use supernatural agents for two purposes: heightening the dramatic tension and speeding up the play’s progress.

8. The Dilemma

In The Lion King , Simba faces a moral dilemma. When he grows up in Timon and Pumba’s carefree jungle, the dilemma comes to haunt him. He is not sure what he should do. It threatens him at the same makes his morale weak.

In Hamlet , the titular character also faces a moral dilemma. In both cases, the fight is more internal. Simba and Hamlet both won the battle with their mind first, thereafter they defeated their enemies in reality. This internal struggle is one of the major similarities between these two works.

9. The Graveyard and the Skull

Hamlet’s graveyard scene gets imitated in The Lion King’s plot. In The Lion King , the graveyard of the elephants poses a threat to the main character of the movie. The vivid description of the graveyard reminds us of Hamlet’s plot.

The importance of the grave scene is important as it appears in two major twists of the movie. In Hamlet too, the gravediggers appear when Hamlet is about to take an important decision in the play.

10. Mortality

The Lion King encompasses the theme of mortality to make it understandable to children. The theme may be depicted in a far more restricted manner, but it’s there.

In Hamlet , mortality, and life pose several philosophical questions to the readers as well as to Hamlet. He gets torn in between action and inaction for the presence of the theme of mortality. In this way, both of the plots are parallel.

3 Differences between The Lion King and Hamlet

1. a pure children’s story.

The Lion King is a children’s story (though enjoyed by many adults!). If the creators had adopted the plot in totality, the movie would not appeal to young audiences. That’s why it is safe to say that The Lion King is loosely based on the plot of Hamlet .

Hamlet does not belong to children’s literature. Several issues need a critical mind to analyze and understand. A child cannot decode the complex world of Hamlet.

2. Father-Son Relationship

Simba’s relationship with his father is a lovely one to watch. Mufasa acts like a moral teacher who has no lust for power or position. They stay together in the plot. When Mufasa dies, Simba is also there.

In Hamlet , Shakespeare doesn’t project the father-son relationship in a similar way. In the story of Hamlet, his father was killed when he was not with him. There is an implied distance between their relationship.

3. Morality and Politics

In The Lion King , morality plays a major role in respect to the politics of the jungle. Simba also uses a trap to kill Scar but it is looked at as “poetic justice”. As it is a children’s story, the major component of the movie provides moral lessons.

While Hamlet is also a morally guiding tragedy, the depiction of politics in the play is both severe and shocking. If you are new in Shakespeare’s world, a quick fact for you. Hamlet belongs to the genre called Revenge Tragedy or the tragedy of blood, popularized by Seneca .

It’s a jungle out there…

After this thorough analysis, it becomes clear that both Hamlet and The Lion King are inspired creations. The Lion King is not an imitation of art, rather its creators took the story, grasped its elements, and rethought it in their own way.

So which one is better, ‘Hakuna Matata’ or ‘to be or not to be’? According to us, both are winners!

Frequently asked questions about The Lion King and Hamlet

Is the lion king based on hamlet.

Yes, The Lion King is loosely based on the plot of Hamlet. But, it doesn’t imitate the overall structure, themes, and tone of Hamlet.

How are Hamlet and The Lion King different?

The Lion King is a children’s movie whereas Hamlet is a “Revenge Tragedy”. It is also called the “tragedy of blood”. The Lion King doesn’t contain such sensational plots as Hamlet.

What is the story of Lion King?

The Lion King presents the struggle of Simba, son of previous king Mufasa, to get his authority back in the jungle. His uncle treacherously killed his father and obtained the throne. Simba wants to displace him and be a ruler like his father.

What movies are based on Hamlet?

Several movies are based on Hamlet , like The Lion King (2019), Haider (2014),  The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Strange Brew  (1983)

What do you think of our take on The Lion King and Hamlet   – anything to add? Join in, and let us know in the comments section below!

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Deceiving Appearances in “Hamlet” and “The Lion King” Essay

Some people are two-faced and hide their vicious motives behind a mask of kindness. The deceitfulness of appearances is reflected in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and an animated movie, The Lion King . These two works have many parallels in their depiction of deceiving appearances. In particular, Claudius and Scar represent villains under the guise of well-wishers, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet and hyenas from The Lion King appear worse than they seem.

Claudius and Scar seem caring and virtuous, but in reality, they wish to usurp power. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet shifts from being to seeming to make Claudius reveal his true essence (Wilson 5). When Hamlet learns from the ghost that Claudius killed his father, he exclaims: “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!” (Shakespeare 1.5.106). This quote exposes Claudius’s nature as a person who smiles while contriving murders. In The Lion King , Scar is depicted as an antagonist of Mufasa and Simba since his ill-looking appearance conveys his malicious nature (Dores 4). When Scar tells Simba about the lands beyond the border, he asserts that he cares about Simba’s well-being ( The Lion King ). This scene reveals his two facades because, in fact, his words are aimed at inciting Simba’s interest in visiting the dangerous land.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and hyenas also have deceiving appearances and seem better than they really are. In the play, Hamlet chastises Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me” (Shakespeare 3.2.399-402). Hamlet considered these two men to be his friends, but they spied on him for Claudius, thus revealing that their friendship was fake. In The Lion King , hyenas grin and laugh when faced with Simba in order to scare him, but when they stand in front of Scar, they quiver, disclosing their weak and cowardly nature. Therefore, hyenas’ appearance is also deceptive because they attempt to look stronger and more fearsome than they really are.

In conclusion, both Hamlet and The Lion King represent the idea of the deceitfulness of appearances. At least some characters in these creative works are two-faced and hide their true motives, thus creating conflicts and putting others in danger. It seems that the authors of these works tried to show the consequences of adopting dishonest behaviors to the audience and warn people against being excessively credulous.

Dores, Henrique. “Ego, Discourse and Power: The Lion King Through the Eyes of Metz, Foucault and Bettelheim.” Rhetoric and Communications , no. 39, 2019, pp. 1-5.

The Lion King . Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 1994.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . Edited by Philip Edwards, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Wilson, Jeffrey R. “‘To Be, or not to Be’: Shakespeare Against Philosophy.” Shakespeare , vol. 14, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1-19.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Deceiving Appearances in "Hamlet" and "The Lion King"." October 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/deceiving-appearances-in-hamlet-and-the-lion-king/.

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Screen Rant

The lion king: 5 ways it's exactly like hamlet (& 5 how it's different).

The Lion King is an adaptation of Hamlet. In many ways, it's identical but it also has several intriguing differences.

• The Lion King draws from Shakespeare's Hamlet, with themes of betrayal and revenge woven into a children's film.
• Both stories feature a prince seeking justice for their father's murder, but The Lion King has a happier ending.
• Female characters in The Lion King, like Nala and Sarabi, exhibit agency and strength, unlike Shakespeare's female archetypes.

Disney is not a stranger to mature themes, and The Lion King was no different, taking inspiration from a classic Shakespearean tale. Animated Disney movies are known for teaching children lessons in morality, and The Lion King does that, just with darker themes. Murder, betrayal, and revenge are all featured in the 1994 film as Simba's father is killed by his uncle and finds himself banished from his home. If the story of a young prince who was banished and returns to avenge his father sounds familiar, it is.

Hamlet was by far one of William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies and The Lion King seemed to take some inspiration from it. The story withstood the test of time for a reason. Both tales were classics in their own way. The Lion King drew inspiration while becoming its own story. It's best remembered for the tale of Simba triumphing over Scar and some amazing music, but it still has quite a bit in common with Shakespeare's tragic tale.

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How the lion king is like hamlet, the prince has a traitorous uncle.

King Claudius has been portrayed from stage to film by many different actors, but the results are always the same. Claudius is the instigator of the plot to take over the throne of Denmark. He orchestrates his brother’s death to gain the throne for himself. All the prince's uncle wants in Hamlet and The Lion King is power .

Though his methods differed from The Lion King to Hamlet , the seated king eventually met his untimely end. Whether it was Scar creating a stampede or Claudius pouring poison in his brother’s ear, the king dies. And Claudius became one step closer to the throne. The only one in his way in either story when the king dies is the prince.

The Prince Sees His Father's Ghost

In many Hamlet productions, the appearance of the prince’s father is taken more literally than others. In Hamlet , the 2000 film starring Ethan Hawke, Hamlet's father speaks to him through videos. In some productions, Hamlet’s father appears as an actual ghost, which is what The Lion King does as well.

Simba encounters Mufasa’s spirit more literally, and it has a heavy, meaningful presence. In both iterations, the deceased king must remind his son not to forget the crime that has been committed. Mufasa is there to remind Simba that he is the prince and that Scar is in the wrong.

The 2000 version of Hamlet is available to stream on Paramount+.

The Prince Is Exiled

Whether it be Pride Rock or Denmark, the prince has a rocky relationship with his home . After Mufasa is killed in one of the most memorable death scenes in an animated film , Scar convinces Simba that it was his fault and that he should be banished. Scar hopes that Simba would, at the very least, never come back to threaten his rule.

King Claudius is more forthright about it, instructing Hamlet’s school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to kill his nephew. In both these stories, the new king is intent on his nephew never returning. Claudius and Scar don't really see anyone else as a threat to their power since the prince, in both stories, is the rightful heir to the throne.

The Prince Has Friends In Exile

Comedic relief is something required in tragedies, especially plays as tragic as Hamlet . Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are college friends of Hamlet who take some edge off of the heavier topics in the play. They've been used very effectively in both stage and screen adaptations, and The Lion King has its own version of the duo, though they aren't college friends to a young lion cub.

Like Hamlet, Simba finds himself in exile, though he is not alone. Timon and Pumbaa become his cohorts in banishment, and ultimately they all find themselves back at Pride Rock for the final confrontation. Timon and Pumbaa become his allies, not just fun comic relief for the audience.

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There is a love story.

Love is the connecting factor between The Lion King and Hamlet . Nothing makes a story more tragic than losing love and nothing makes a children’s movie better than these resonant themes. Both Hamlet and The Lion King have their own sonnets, so to speak.

Hamlet and Ophelia are consumed with angst throughout the play. However, Hamlet sends her a letter professing his feelings with the famous line “ doubt though the stars are fire .” This is recreated in The Lion King through its best-known song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”

The Lion King is available to stream on Disney+.

How The Lion King Is Different From Hamlet

The prince is sane in the lion king.

William Shakespeare penned a five-act play demonstrating a young prince teetering on the edge of sanity. In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film, Hamlet spans to a cool four hours. The Lion King, not quite as ambitious, comes to about an hour and a half in the animated version. The prince’s portrayal was toned down for the children’s film and did not explore Simba's mental status.

In one of the most famous scenes of the Bard's play, Hamlet goes to a graveyard and speaks to Yorrick, a skull. It is debatable whether Hamlet is truly going mad or not and spends a good amount of time debating the topic. Simba may have gone to an elephant graveyard, but he did not spend his time speaking to the bones .

The 1996 version of Hamlet is available to stream on Tubi.

Nala Is Stronger Than Ophelia

There is not a clear translation for Ophelia in The Lion King , but Nala comes the closest . She is the prince’s intended, but that is where the resemblance stops. Ophelia is crushed by the weight of her experiences. She endures Hamlet’s mood swings and has to choose between her love and her family.

Nala is strengthened by her difficulties. She persevered and pushed Simba into returning to the kingdom to take his rightful place after being banished by Scar herself. In Hamlet , the kingdom collapses under its own tragedy. And most importantly, Nala is not a tragic figure . She overcomes her circumstances while Ophelia is destroyed by them.

The Queen Is A Good Mother In The Lion King

There are many readings of Queen Gertrude. Many interpretations suggest that she never knew Claudius killed her first husband. However, Gertrude is not blameless in her treatment of her son . Hamlet is exiled and Gertrude sides with her husband Claudius, whether she is aware he is a murderer or not.

Simba’s mother Sarabi is free from this morally gray area. She survives the story, never siding with Scar, and supports her son’s claim to the throne. She isn't banished from the Pride Lands like Nala is, and she doesn't go looking for Simba, believing him lost initially. It is made clear, however, that there is no allegiance to Scar, and she is immediately ready for Simba to take over despite the time that has passed since she's seen her son.

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Female agency is portrayed differently.

Hamlet is full of some of the most notable female archetypes known to drama. Queen Gertrude is the precursor to characters like Cersei Lannister and Gemma Teller. Ophelia is one of the most tragic love interests known in literature. But these women are archetypes for a reason. They provide a blueprint for a character type without having much agency of their own .

Nala and Sarabi both love their king but are not swayed in one direction or another. They are steadfast, making up their own minds and making their own decisions. The Lion King also has another steadfast female character. Shenzi is the leader of the hyena faction that follows Scar. She is the other side of the coin. Shenzi supports Scar, not for any obligation or love, but because it is what she believes.

The Lion King Is Not A Tragedy

Throughout Simba watching his father’s death, being ousted by his uncle, and losing his entire childhood, The Lion King has the makings of a great story. It creates its own classic after drawing inspiration from one of the most famous tragedies ever penned.

One of the most important of its messages is that all is not lost. Simba seemingly lost his entire life at a young age, but he comes out of it. He takes his home back and, most unlike Hamlet of all, loses no additional life in the process. The Lion King is a story of triumph, not tragedy , a stark contrast to Hamlet .

Disney's The Lion King (1994)

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Entertainism

Similarities and Differences Between The Lion King and Hamlet

We are sure most of you will be quick like bunnies to point out the 'duh-uh' difference between The Lion King and Hamlet. The former involves lions, whereas the latter involves humans. But, dear ones, there are quite a few similitudes in these two stories that struck us, and we thought we ought to reveal them to you. Learn the similarities and differences between The Lion King and Hamlet in this Entertainism article.

We are sure most of you will be quick like bunnies to point out the ‘duh-uh’ difference between The Lion King and Hamlet. The former involves lions, whereas the latter involves humans. But, dear ones, there are quite a few similitudes in these two stories that struck us, and we thought we ought to reveal them to you. Learn the similarities and differences between The Lion King and Hamlet in this Entertainism article.

“The saga of Simba, which in its deeply buried origins owes something to Greek tragedy and certainly to Hamlet, is a learning experience as well as an entertainment.” ― Roger Ebert, Film Critic

The Lion King is certainly one of the most loved Disney movies; however, it is does not exactly paint with the ‘fairy tale’ leitmotif that all Disney movies are world-famous for. The Lion King, in fact, draws inspiration (ample of it) from William Shakespeare’s creation, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, popularly known as Hamlet.

Some of you would find it incredibly bizarre to accept the similarities between the two, but trust us when we say that there is always a usurpatory, low-life malefactor with a faulty moral compass, driven only by the urge to rule. This urge in discussion is the same for humans and animals, and both Shakespeare and Walt Disney were smart people who built stories around this primal urge of ruling, and translated the same in different media. However, there are palpable dissimilarities between the two storylines; the one with humans is a bit more convoluted, and the one with animals is a more simplified one as we feel animals like keeping things uncomplicated. Yeah, and it’s a little easy on our brains too.

We are now going to mount a full-scale examination on both the stories, so here’s coming The Lion King Vs. Hamlet analysis in terms of their themes and characters.

SIMILARITIES

Both Simba and Hamlet Jr. hail from royal families. Simba is the son of Mufasa, the King of the Pride Lands, and Hamlet Jr. is the son of the late King of Denmark. The regal blood that courses in the veins of both Simba and Prince Hamlet makes them the rightful heir to the throne.

Simba’s uncle Scar, does not exhibit the kind-hearted avuncular feelings toward Simba, and all that candied talk with Simba is just a ruse and to mask his ulterior motives. Likewise, Claudius makes an evil uncle who is vehemently devoted to his interests and plays it unobtrusively by keeping a family-friendly face only to strike those who pose a threat to his power and life. Both Scar and Claudius killed their brothers in enviousness, and thought they would make better Kings instead of their brothers. Ah and yes, both of them believe in dropping subtle hints at people who are on their hit list―quite fair we say.

Both Simba and Prince Hamlet have love interests; while Simba and Nala were kid cub chums, Prince Hamlet and Ophelia’s case was somewhat like star crossed lovers. Many also controvert that Hamlet Jr. was using Ophelia as a pawn, but whatever that be, there were suppressed feelings between the two and anything that is tantalizingly undisclosed is by default love. We are good at this.

Yes, Simba’s ‘off-their-trolley’ friends Timon and Pumbaa are true friends indeed, who with their comically raw nature pull Simba from the melancholic and depressing state. Prince Hamlet too, has a friend in Horatio who keeps Hamlet’s charade of madness under his hat as well as promises not to reveal anything about the ghost to anyone. There’s always a bright side to an otherwise murky premise.

Every villain must have unscrupulous and reckless subordinates who will sycophantly serve to their antagonist masters, and this part is satisfied by Barochio and Conrad, Claudius’ henchmen in Hamlet, while in The Lion King, Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed offered similar services to Scar.

Mufasa makes an apparition appearance in the clouds and tells him to take his place as a King. King Hamlet too meets Prince Hamlet as a wraith and instructs him to exact revenge of his death.

After the stampede, Scar convinces Simba that he is responsible for his father’s death and advises him to run away. Similarly, Claudius sends Prince Hamlet to London so that his evil plan of murdering him comes to fruition. However, both uncles fail as both the heirs return home with the knowledge of their uncles’ evil deeds.

Simba easily believes Scar and pins himself for his father’s death. He slips into depression and even tries to kill himself (poor thing). Prince Hamlet is greatly aggrieved and goes mad with his father’s demise. Nonetheless, both the characters ultimately realize their uncles’ machinations and turn their woeful depression into active retaliation.

DISSIMILARITIES

In this, we would also like to mention feminine traits of these two women in discussion. Nala is a lioness and behaves like one by defying others to save her love interest. However, Ophelia is a compliant woman who abides her elders and even gives up on her love because her father instructed her to do so. Not an exemplary lover, we say.

Despite both the mothers―Sarabi (Simba’s mother) and Gertrude (Prince Hamlet’s mother)―being non-primary characters, their portrayal in Hamlet and The Lion King is pretty different. While Gertrude remains the feeble Queen acting meekly as Claudius bids her to, Sarabi is a lioness, both literally and figuratively, and doesn’t flinch from questioning her evil brother-in-law, who almost kills her for the same.

Another important dissimilarity is that Gertrude marries Claudius for which she invites her own son’s vitriolic criticism, while Sarabi chooses to remain faithful to her deceased husband (she took her wedding vows too seriously!).

The only two people to die in the Lion King are Mufasa and Scar, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet nearly kills all the protagonists we know of―Hamlet Jr, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius , and Laertes; in short, it’s not a hakuna matata ending for Hamlet after all.

While Simba receives moral guidance from Zazu and Rafiki that help him make sound and right decisions for himself, Hamlet Jr. is only motivated by revenge. We believe someone should have given him a good dose of morality and taught him that vengeance shouldn’t be the only driving force in life (this would have gained him the throne and the woman as well).

The Lion King can be reckoned as the modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic literary work, but there’s no denying that it offers a more fulfilling ending, whereas Hamlet is purely a filial tragedy.

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Hamlet and Lion King Comparison Essay

William Shakespeare’s play hamlet is one of the best and top plays that was ever written. Hamlet is a play about how a character whose father dies because his own brother kills the king and threw the whole play hamlet struggles with a decision that he has to make. He either can decide to avenge his father’s death by killing his uncle then becoming king, or just letting his uncle stay king even though hamlet should be the king.

The Lion king is a movie that is about a young lion cub named Simba and he struggles throughout the whole movie facing the past and accepting the reality. The movie the lion king and the play hamlet are similar in many ways. For example in the Lion king and in hamlet Both kings were both killed by there brother. And then both hamlet and Simba both had a decision to make was there going to avenge their father or not.

In both of the plays there were many examples that were to prove how the plays are similar. One of the first examples is when both sons had an opinion to avenge their father’s death. And in Both stories both kings were killed by their brother because there brothers were jealous and both of them wanted to be king so bad they killed their brother. In hamlet it’s is claudius that murders king Hamlet. And in the Lion king it was his own brother scar who killed the king Mufasa. Then sadly after both Claudius and scar both took over the kingDom’s.

For Thur more another example is how both sons did not like the villains even though the villains were there uncles . Also in both plays throughout the whole movie neither hamlet or Simba did not know about who killed their father until towards the end of the movie . And then in both movies some had to convince both princes that they had to avenge their father’s death. And those who convinced the princes were. In hamlet it was the ghost and in the Lion king it was scar . Also another similar is that both villains wanted the kings wife but couldn’t get her.

Also in the Lion king and hamlet the differences were that when Simba lost his father he was young . But when hamlet lost his father he was already an adult. And in hamlet the Queen got married to Claudius the murder. But in the Lion king the queen Sarabi Simba’s mom she did remarry after the king died. And both kings died into different ways king Hamlet died because his brother was jealous of him so he killed him. But in the Lion king even though scar organized the whole thing Mufasa dies trying to protect his son because scar put Simba in danger.

In conclusion the movie the lion king and hamlet are similar in many ways. For example in the Lion king and in hamlet Both kings were both killed by there brother. And then both hamlet and Simba both had a decision to make was there going to avenge their father or not. And both plays also have differences like how both kings died. And how only one queen remarried when the other queen did not. Also how when the kings were murdered Simba was young but hamlet was already an adult. And one of the biggest differences is how both plays ends in hamlet everybody dies and it isn’t a happy ending but in the lion king everyone doesn’t not die and it is a happy ending.

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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