The Tragedy of Sexuality in Hamlet

A consistently progressive view of the complex determination of factors accounting for Hamlet’s overwhelming engagement in visionary destiny has been greatly undermined in the criticism of this play by a prominent opinion which has stressed Hamlet’s revulsion at his mother’s sexuality as the exclusive, fundamental motivation in Hamlet’s experience. Such an opinion rests strongly on a reading of Hamlet’s emotions about his mother’s marriage in his first soliloquy, which has been taken to express Hamlet’s fundamental melancholic disgust ,emotions before whose intensity, indeed, the revelation of the murder and the sense of horror it inspires have been felt to be secondary and superfluous. As a matter of fact, what is more properly described as Hamlet’s outraged despair over his mother’s marriage constitutes at the point of Hamlet’s first soliloquy an entirely new emphasis in Hamlet’s grief, for until then Hamlet’s grief over his father’s loss, and to the sorry state of affairs to which the ‘world’ has come since the death of his father. This paper tries to show the account of Hamlet’s feelings that pervade in the whole play.