High Treason

William Shakespeare is an author that reflects in his works human emotion in a master way. His characters show internal conflicts about issues of live in that period. Hamlet is a play that is full of betrayals, but the most important is the death of the King, father of Hamlet. Even though he is sad because his father died, Hamlet is depressed because his mother has an incestuous relationship because the Queen gets married with the brother of the king Hamlet: “She married. O most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets: It is not, nor it cannot come to good, but creak my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (p. 1019).  He knows how hard is to believe that treason, so he plays his father murder and his mother fidelity to see reaction and corroborating what the ghost said. Moreover, when he discovers that his uncle killed his father, that fact bears on him an existentialism issue.  In the middle of his mental illness, he asks himself about death importance:

To be, or not to be, that is the question (…) And by opposing, en them: to die, to sleep, no more; and by sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; (…) To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause—there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life” (p. 1052).

Hamlet shows his fear about what could be after death. He believes in the possibility of a painful dream, or maybe he believes that death is not enough to relieve that kind of treason: murder and incestuous relationship.