Hamlet: AS & A2 York Notes

Hamlet’s soliloquies reveal a vibrant inner life. They detail his struggles with the burden of revenge and questions about life, death and morality.

The most important images in the play are of disease, corruption and pollution. They can all be linked to Claudius’s fratricide and its consequences.

Key scenes and events mirror each other. The nunnery scene is mirrored by the closet scene and together they could be said to reveal Hamlet’s discomfort with female sexuality.

'The Mousetrap' serves several dramatic functions. It mirrors and foreshadows deaths that occur and highlights the themes of appearance and reality, and revenge.

Laertes’s and Hamlet’s revenge plots are resolved in the final scene, and their deaths are framed by Fortinbras’s ‘revenge’: the capture of lands lost by his father.