Hamlet, You Crazy
The dead king has told Hamlet that Claudius killed him while he was asleep in the garden. Hamlet’s confusion and feeling of honor leads him to swear in behalf of his dead father to revenge on the present king. Shakespeare starts the play by bombarding Hamlet’s thinking process and leaving him with tons of weights on his shoulders. The whole aspect of the play revolves around character’s vows to fulfill their honor. The idea of honor in this play is portrayed far more advanced than any other Shakespearean play. Reta. A Terry is an author of “Vows to the Blackest Devil”: Hamlet and the Evolving code of honor in early modern England. She agrees that honor is substantial and goes another level with this idea. She diagrams in which Shakespeare used characters of Hamlet, Laertes, and Horatio to demonstrate the England’s notion of honor switching to the chivalric code of the medieval period’s idea of honor. She concludes that the shift of honor or the evolution of honor was visible in Hamlet. The early England’s notion of honor described by Terry is promise. Men were considered honorable simply by right of birth and involved forever loyalty to one’s lord. Honor simply gave its holder dignity and status of a true honorable man, and this was categorized as the most important feature in a man. However during the Renaissance period, there was a major shift in the beliefs of honor. Terry said, “One of the most complex changes in the code of honor was a move from an external code to an internalized concept of what it is to be an honorable man.” (Terry 1071) The involvement of blood and lineage stopped coming in to play and in every situation, men behaved to please both “their state and their god.” (1071) The modern code of honor is heavily affected by religious affair and needs to satisfy god and one’s loyalty. Hamlet, the protagonist of the play is caught in an ambiguous world, the pressure between the old and the new code of honor leads him to become mad and think of