Themes of HamletThe themes within the Shakespearean play Hamlet are diverse. We talk in this essay about some of the most commonly recognized themes. In the essay "Hamlet: His Falstaff", Harold Goddard makes a statement of the two main themes of the play, namely war and revenge, connecting them to the final scene. :The dead Hamlet is carried out “like a soldier” and the last rites on his body will be the war rites. The last word of the text is “shoot”. The last sounds we hear are a dead march and the reverberation of artillery fire. The end crowns it all. The sarcasm of fate could not go further. Hamlet, who aspired to nobler things, is treated upon death as if he were the mere image of his father: a warrior. Shakespeare knew what he intended to make the conclusion of his play martial. Its theme was war as well as revenge. (23)The interpretation of the main theme of the play as revenge is stated by Phyllis Abrahms and Alan Brody in “Hamlet and the Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy Formula”:There are ten deaths in Hamlet, if we include the death of Hamlet's father and that “Fake” death of the Player King. The cause of each can be directly attributed to another character's action or lack thereof. But for a play to be a coherent work of art, there must be a central action around which all the other parts revolve. What is Hamlet's central and unifying action? Vendetta. (43-44) R. A. Foakes continues the theme of revenge in “The Play's Courtly Setting”: And where there is no legal punishment for his father's death, he must stoop, driven by the universal wrong, and “being thus entangled with the wicked ”, to take revenge. He mu......middle of paper......about Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of “Hamlet and the Court of Elsinore”. Shakespeare Survey: An annual survey of Shakespearean scholarship and production. No. 9. Ed. Allardyce Nicoll. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. P., 1956. Levin, Harry. General introduction. The bank of the Shakespeare River. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Neill, Michael. "No one can escape death, the 'Undiscovered Country'." Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. of “Hamlet: A Modern Perspective.” The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. NP: Folger Shakespeare Lib., 1992.Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nn.