Thinking so much about his father’s death has given Hamlet’s thoughts an existential bent, but there is a deeper, darker pessimism that has overtaken his mind, as well-one which manifests as a preoccupation with disease and foulness.

In Act 2, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees the beauty of the world around him as nothing but a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapors,” demonstrating his inability to look past the nasty, foul truths which have recently been exposed to him. Throughout the play, Hamlet’s fixation with rot and corruption-both of the body and of the soul-reflects his (and his society’s) conflation of the spoilage of the outside with the deterioration of the inside. The political corruption which has overtaken Denmark so disturbs Hamlet that he develops, as the play goes on, an obsession with physical corruption-with rot, decay, and the disgusting nature of death. The ghost can hardly portend anything good, and as Hamlet and Horatio decide to investigate the apparition and its purpose, they learn that there is indeed a deep corruption at the heart of Denmark’s throne: Claudius, King Hamlet’s brother, murdered him and took his throne. Marcellus, Barnardo, and Francisco-three watchmen at Elsinore-greet one another as they arrive for their nightly watch with hesitation, suspicion, and even skittishness, and soon the source of their anxiety becomes clear: an apparition of the recently-deceased King Hamlet has appeared on the castle walls several times in the last week. The citizens of Denmark-both within the castle of Elsinore and beyond its walls-know that there is something “rotten” in their state. Ultimately, Shakespeare suggests a connection between external rot and internal, systemic rot, arguing that physical corruption portends and even predicts the poisoning of spiritual, political, and social affairs.Īn atmosphere of poison, corruption, and death lingers over Hamlet from the play’s very first moments. As Hamlet endeavors to discover-and root out-the “rotten” core of Denmark, he grows increasingly disgusted and perturbed by literal manifestations of death as well as “deaths” of other kinds: those of honor, decency, and indeed the state of Denmark as he once knew it. In medieval times and the Middle Ages-the era in which Hamlet is set-the majority of people believed that the health of a nation was connected to the legitimacy of its king. When the sentinel Marcellus speaks the line “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” after seeing the ghost of the former King Hamlet, he is speaking to a broadly-held societal superstition.

Infinite jest hamlet